To be a bit cynical about the girls in STEM push?

[StormBringers]

It feels a bit like the ‘you can have it all!’ That my mum heard, wow you can do work! When the reality meant burnout for many women, still doing the housework and kids in most families/ culturally being expected to on top of ft work. Girls with good grades are being directed to STEM, riding on the guilt of all those tragedies of women who gave up on maths and science despite their capabilities.

I see lots of girls excelling in STEM, but I’m not hearing about the family friendly work environment that awaits them. It still seems to be a male advantage in the work place (well unless you make the perfectly valid choice to focus on career instead of children). Surely if we want women in STEM it’s not about targeting kS2 with clubs, it’s about changing the work place and legislating and supporting women to work and excel in STEM in a way that allows them realistic chances to also chose children?

It feels like we’re currently evangelising STEM to girls, telling them they can do anything and pouring them into a broken receptacle they’ll probably leave. Do we have too few women because they don’t follow the academic paths? Or because the workplace presents barriers. I’m dwelling from watching my eldest flounder post Maths phd ... something that I’ve never seen her do before.

Also, we seem to be forgetting debate, creativity etc in schools and the place for philosophy.

Aibu to be getting sick of it lately?

I don’t understand the thing about women ‘having it all’. Truth is - men cannot ‘have it all’ either. No one can have it all.

The difference is that many men don’t care about spending a lot of time with children OR they don’t see it as an option that they can do.

Tax system favours 2 parents working part time. I do agree with @choli that sometimes women do more child caring because they prefer that (because I am one of them - DH would do shared parental leave/PT but let me have my choice - which was lovely). I’m v lucky that DH does all the life admin and ‘wife work’ too (but he can because he works in a good STEM job and I work in a bad one).

In my experience STEM jobs can be very family friendly. Every time there is a thread on MN asking "if you earn 50k+ WFH, what do you do" then a huge number of replies are saying software development or similar.

There is a push for women in STEM because there are skill shortages. It's seen as a positive thing, because the jobs tend to be quite well paid and it's often a clear career path from degree to job, unlike more arts based qualifications.

So if I had a daughter, I would be pleased if she was into STEM. I would want her to have an interesting job, in a well paid industry with low unemployment. There are a lot of STEM jobs that fit the bill.

I actually have sons, and want exactly the same for them. Of course, it will be up to them what they chose, and I try to encourage all their interests. But I do think they will have an easier life as a data scientist than as a nurse.

NotMeNoNo - that’s the essence of our plan. To start with, if we can get just a couple of girls, who wouldn’t have thought about it otherwise, to consider a career in Tech, then we’ve achieved something.

Interesting comment above though about hitting 30% female workforce to make women feel comfortable and then it’s relatively easy to get to 50% - we’ll have to give that a good 10 plus years at this rate though!

NoCryingInEngineering

I know that its not exclusive to STEM but on here we have a lot of posters saying family friendly etc. etc.

But it doesn't just depend on type IT, Engineering etc but the sector and can be very different even in the same company depending upon your role.

Is there a lack of women in STEM now that well over half of all medical and veterinary students are women (who must all have some combination of science and maths Alevels) ?

Is there a lack of women in STEM now that well over half of all medical and veterinary students are women (who must all have some combination of science and maths Alevels) ?

There's a lack in some of the other S, and in all of T E and M

Andromeda

Yes. Desperately

www.wes.org.uk/content/wesstatistics

In Engineering 11% of the workforce is female, the lowest percentage in Europe.

Here’s the current UK shortage occupations list (for immigration visas) that is a good steer on skills shortages.
link

My own very pedestrian profession of geotechnical engineering has been on it for years, the majority of our recruits are from overseas.

Sorry. I mean my own ground breaking sparklingly successful career in geotechnical engineering. I love it, honestly. On a good day when there are not too many management meetings.

If girls (and boys too) aren’t allowed to believe that they can have STEM careers and families, then it’ll never happen. I’m in a STEM job, and we ever do manage to have kids it’ll be my husband reducing his hours to be at home with the child, not me. The option is there for me if I need to though, and I have several colleagues who work part time for child care reasons. Maybe it’s harder in more academic careers, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t aim for what they want.

What a depressing discussion so full of prejudice

Why would a STEM career be less suitable for women than teaching or nursing?? It's absurd! In Portugal where I'm from and where I did my undergrad there are more women than men in many of the classic STEM degrees - maths, chemistry, chemical engineering. No girl would ever think to avoid them because of family...This sounds like the 1950s here . It's truly bizarre in such a developed country like the UK...

For what it's worth I did a chemistry degree then a PhD, 5 years of academic research and now work in pharma. It would never have crossed my mind to have chosen a different career because of my family. I've never worked part time either and I'm not a big apologist of it, mostly because of equality and not missing out on opportunities. In my opinion it's 10x more important to give my dc an example of equality and to show my daughter that she can be and do whatever she wants than it is to be home for them while they're little, something they'll hardly remember.

I find the UK decades behind in this respect and I think the cost of childcare (or the fact that it's not heavily subsidised by the state) has a lot to answer for. Not only for the lack of equality but also for how it cruely removes women from work and perpetuates the benefits trap.

somewhere in this thread there's been the ridiculous implication that STEM careers aren't creative

That is a good point! The work I did involved a high degree of creativity. I know there is this stereotype that it is all incredibly logical and there is no room for creativity and imagination but that's really not the case. I would guess that even in the 'logical' subjects like maths, working on a problem involves a great deal of creative thinking in order to reach a solution.

The problem is that if you do get women to make up the magic 50% in STEM careers, the average pay will drop dramatically. This happened with medicine in Soviet Russia: women entered the medical profession in large numbers and status and pay went through the floor. You can see it happening now with GPs here (general practice being the nearest thing to family friendly that currently exists in a medical career). It all rather suggests that women are not paid less because they go for less lucrative careers; they end up with less lucrative careers because they are women. Not sure what the answer to that is, TBH.

The only answer to that (other than simply an end to women's work being systematically undervalued) would be for women to be spread across all sectors and functions so that societies would have to figure out some way other than sex ratios to determine value and status.

DH and I both work in STEM, he in IT which is crying out for women (he is involved in recruitment and is fed up with poor and mediocre men bigging themselves up and seeing good women not selling themselves enough), me in Pharma where we have a 50:50 split in staff. Both of us have "family friendly" careers, both work PT and have flexibility to WFH and pop out to school for sports day etc. Most importantly weboth have good salaries and that is why I encourage my daughters to do STEM, there's no other job that balances pay, interesting creative work and good working conditions as well. Law or teaching or medicine (admittedly quite STEM) all are far less flexible.

OP if your DD has a maths PhD has she considered being an actuary? Well paid and very flexible.

My kid wants to work in stem (we didn't know til recently that it comes under that). She's not into having a family but she may flange her mind one day.

Flange?

We need to expect more from our men. Childcare, domestic chores, the family administration tasks.

I know successful mother’s whose husbands earn less and have the family friendly roles.

And yes the women entering STEM will face challenges and glass ceilings in some sectors and we have to be honest about that to our young women.

This thread is so depressing! I have an undergrad in chem and a postgrad in an unrelated field. I also have a teaching qualification. I worked in STEM/research for 8 years within a university. Honestly, that was a much more family friendly field than teaching which I do now. I now teach chem and I also teach politics in high school. My "brightest" girls are actually mostly going to liberal arts colleges etc. I have some girls who are going into medicine and science and lots of boys going into liberal arts.

I agree that creativity is undersold these days but as a STEM major and huge advocate I keep trying to explain to people that STEM is all about creativity. It's about thinking outside the box and problem solving and and and. I am a very artistic/creative individual but you don't have to be traditionally creative (good at theatre, art, etc) to be good at STEM. Similarly, you can be artistic and good at science. We need young people to understand that problem solving and lateral thinking are key to success in the future.

Some of my best chemists have gone off to do film and chemistry or visual arts and chemistry at college. Some are pure chemists and others have gone off to do an arts subject. How they fare will depend on their employers not just their field of choice. The reality is though that we desperately need STEM graduates to help dig us out of the mess we have got ourselves in to in terms of sustainability etc. The more the merrier I say.

Having been in engineering most of my career I've found most large companies offering good flexibility for employees. I'd have thought stem to be a better option than some other areas with less security or a more corporate attitude.

The push for women in STEM is a very good thing.

In my experience, STEM jobs are likely to be family friendly (not always, obviously - but compared to many other careers) and they are usually well paid.

Yes, of course it's true that women in STEM still have decisions to make about the balance between career and family - but at least they are well paid while making the decision!

I work part time in a STEM career. I have a great work-life balance, see my kids a lot, and have an interesting and rewarding job which is paid reasonably well. I may never reach the top of my profession, due to working part time, but that is my decision and I'm very happy with it.

Andromeda sadly there is still a shortage of women in most STEM careers. According to a recent study by PwC, only 15% of employees working in STEM roles in the UK are female.

We need to expect more from our men. Childcare, domestic chores, the family administration tasks.

Were it that simple. We can raise our expectations all we like.

Have been reading this thread with interest. My dd is very good at maths and science and wants to take them for A levels. She has thought about engineering to study at uni but not sure.
Can anyone tell me what sort of courses/careers come under STEM as it is something I am very unfamiliar with but am keen to encourage her with.

endofacentury have a look at this website:

www.gradcracker.com/