Girls who DON’T study STEM

[Ippagoggy]

As a woman in STEM (I work as a quant for a hedge fund and I studied maths for my undergrad and computer science for my phd), I am often dragged into discussions at work about “why there aren’t there more women in our field?”

while there are a number of hypotheses put forward (I won’t bother repeating them), one thing that is generally acknowledged that the phenomenon starts early, with fewer girls taking these subjects at school (at least in the west) and this then leads to a “pipeline problem”.

I therefore would love to ask the women on here — both of their own experiences from
their school days and what they might observe of their daughters. Why have you or your daughter NOT chosen a study path or career in STEM? Was it simply that there was never any interest (and fair enough! Different people like different things)? Was there a lack of exposure in some way? Or maybe their interest in your part was but you felt discouraged from pursuing that interest for one reason or another? And what would those reasons have been?

By the way, to be clear, I am not passing any judgement on the value of STEM subjects versus non-STEM. We need both. I am just genuinely curious to understand how people are wired.

for me, when I was about 11 years old and has access to a computer that I was allowed to play with — I could not believe my eyes. This box was basically like magic and the thought that I could actually learn to make it do things was intoxicating. I became a nerd overnight.

@TeknoPhobe no I am not expecting that 🙄
This is however a conversation with people who apparently work in that field but don’t actually want to explain what they do.

And people who work in engineering generally say they are a chemical engineer, or a structural engineer or a design engineer or a quality engineer

By asking about engineering as a whole you are simplifying a huge varying industry and wanting a really detailed answer

Honestly there could be an encyclopaedia written on what engineers do

That’s could be the answer to why girls(and boys) don’t do STEM subjects - it doesn’t actually give an idea of what studying a specific subject can lead to.
Better careers advice is needed.

That's the whole purpose of things like I'm An Engineer. It's a really good initiative to connect engineers (or scientists) with schools. And the competition element is good fun and makes it more engaging.

(Sorry, going off topic a bit.)

I totally agree

I didn't go into IT at university because I thought that means being a programmer and I didn't think I could do that.

A decade later I ended up with a masters in IT and ironically ended up as a programmer but the reality was there are loads on none programmer jobs in IT that I had absolutely no idea about because no one ever told me

I wonder if more boys end up in these roles due to the same attitude men have where they apply for jobs even if they don't have all the qualifications where as women don't. So boys go into engineering even if they have no clue what it is and if they can do it because they don't worry about that, where as girls want to know exactly what it is to work out if they can do it before they apply

I was in a a very academic environment and lots of girls studied stem. I guess I found it boring and didn’t come naturally to me. I don’t regret it. There is more to life than stem subjects.

I have participated in some coding events for children over the years

At primary age everyone is keen and digs in

As they get older you see fewer girls and they show much less confidence

I really hate it when the teachers pair girls with boys when resources are shared because the boys just elbow the girls off the computers

I’m a software engineer. I work on the front end of a website (the bit you see and interact with). Today I have spent lots of time in meetings going over technical requirements for future projects, helping a tester test a new piece of a webpage I have written before it goes live in front of users, and helping other engineers troubleshoot some problems with the changes to webpages they are trying to do. I work in a team and I rarely spend a day typing code into a computer on my own, it’s actually discouraged where I work as you do better work when you collaborate with colleagues.

I disagree that stem isn’t creative, I make things everyday and I make things for people to use, and although it’s not real what I do, it’s not totally abstract either. Also the hay is being made whilst the sun is shining in tech at the moment, low paid academic work in the humanities will still be there when tech dries up 😁

There are fewer women in software engineering than there should be because mediocre middle class men currently rule the roost and hire in their own image. They talk about the pipeline a lot and then sideline any woman who comes through the door - the sponsoring always goes to young men. Maybe AI will change things because interaction with machines will become more conversational and then having great language and communication skills will be more useful in developing tools for customers 😊

I think boys, particularly non academic boys, tend to think engineering will save the day. I've lost count of the times a disengaged boy will tell me they want to leave school so they can do engineering. Not sure they know themselves what they actually want to do.

Correct, a 14-16 year old wouldn’t necessarily view either food technology or fabrics technology as viable STEM career pathways, I think for two reasons.

1. The value of the subjects as actual technical subjects was not really discussed in my school, and certainly not linked back to any kind of career information.
2. Both subjects were taught by the teachers who had previously been called “home economics” teachers and had been teaching it that way for 20+ years, and so I suspect they didn’t really know how to update their curriculum into any real depth of discussion about the technological and STEM slant of it. They were essentially teaching us cooking and clothes making and calling it a technology subject.

I also think both were any easy way to push those pupils (predominantly girls) with no knowledge or interest in STEM, as it essentially fulfilled the “engineering” and STEM part of the school’s principles without trying too hard.

Ended up in STEM totally by accident. I loved humanities and found STEM soul-less. I now happen to story tell what our data scientists have done to get business buy-in and user adoption because the data scientists I work with are too nerdy to be able to summarise/ package up and sell 🤷🏻‍♀️

Personal experience: Great teachers in primary, dire teaching in secondary. US university had to do maths and STEM electives…marvellous teaching so better in Maths etc.
DC, primary teachers dire, lots of outside school Maths input to improve, secondary school Maths and STEMs really good and it is coed school. I noticed some high performing girls-only schools track great students and give advice like do PPE and apply to Oxford rather than try for Physics because better chance to get in. It seems it is all about leavers destination for some schools, instead of STEM subjects but maybe not Oxbridge. Also, some girls schools insist doing only 8 GCSEs to get top marks, less subjects, higher percentage on league tables.

I crochet and knit. I saw something that knitting is just coding. It’s interesting because one is seen as a female pursuit and the other male. I did a bit of coding in my masters but I wouldn’t say I was good at it (before I learnt to knit and crochet). My brain is clearly capable of understanding that way of working but has coding being dumped in with maths and something that is a block to me?

Ha - I knit and crochet, but I really don't have the brain of a coder. I suspect that the similarity might exist between coders and people who design knitting patterns, rather than people like me who just follow them! Knitting patterns are a kind of baffling magic to me - I don't fully understand the way their structures function and I can't imagine designing one from scratch. I have a very non-visual , non-spatial imagination, but I'm quite good at following instructions!

What kind of engineering? Engineering really isn’t for the non-academic.

It’s far more than because of career breaks. It’s because society tells women that they should be carers, teachers, cleaners, nurses. Basically all of the critical but very poorly paid careers. If we encouraged women into engineering and software development instead they would earn more (regardless of careers breaks and part time working).

What a complete nonsense this is. Society does not “tell” women anything about what jobs they can do. Every well-paid profession is open to women and women are entering the well-paid professions in greater and greater numbers, now outnumbering men on graduate schemes in Law, Accountancy, Medicine, Dentistry. The numbers speak for themselves.

The gender pay gap is absolutely driven by taking more time off when having and raising children. Women take far longer parental leave than men (agree with PP that men should be encouraged to take longer parental leave) and are far more likely to go part-time as parents. To claim that this is not the primary factor is completely disingenuous.

I didn't my first year at uni doing animal sciences but hated it and left. Then went back to my original one dea and did graphic design - I went to school in America and we did a wide variety of subjects til the end.
My daughter loved science. But also art. And the ridiculous system in this country that you have to narrow your choices to three subjects meant she had to choose between one of the other. So Art it was, History snd considered Biology but went for Psychology. She would have liked to continue Physics but did not want to do math so that was out.
Change the system and open up some options.

If you can't see how society tells women to be the primary carer

The role models all around them
The way questions are asked to the mother but not the father
The way stories and tv and movies treat men and women different

Take blue lights - where so much is made of the single mum relationship with bringing up her child and the difficulties that causes

Find me a male detective main character with that problem as a key story line

You just walk around with your eyes closed if you think girls are not influenced by the society around them. How many female role models do they have in well paid jobs? How many of the richest people in the world are female? How many girls are persuaded by parents/teachers/peers not to study the subjects that we know tend to lead to well paid jobs? (Just read this thread if you don’t believe it - for example, girls in all girl schools not being influenced in the same way). We are surrounded by female care workers, nurses, cleaners, shop assistants. Do you really think none of this rubs off on girls?

Yet more and more women are ignoring these “messages” from society and are entering the well-paid professions. Funny that.

If you look at men and women in the same career, without a doubt the biggest factor in what holds a woman back from progressing as quickly as her male counterpart is her (sometimes numerous) career breaks to have children and/or going part time after having children.

It’s ludicrous that people think increasing the number of female engineers is going to do anything to the gender gap.

As long as women continue taking longer parental leave than men and going part time in greater numbers, there will be always, always be a gender pay gap.

They never actually know. It's always 'I'm going to get an engineering apprenticeship', because they're sick of school.

Yes sone women ignore them
Because we are given more messages that we are allowed to

But it still takes a strong woman to go against convention

Because you know damn well what that convention is

Of course career breaks and working part time will always have an impact (until the government sufficiently compensates mothers, as governments in other countries do) but if women had better paid jobs in the first place it would be a big help.

I think it was mainly about not knowing how/where to take the relevant aptitude tests. That was before I had Internet access, and BMat and everything else was an enigma. I literally had no idea where to do them, or how to prepare. I went to Oxford to read an art subject, as all I needed was to go to interview and write and post an essay in advance. I was originally thinking about medicine or biochemistry.

Knitting patterns absolutely have the same dsta structures as computer programmes - arrays, conditions, loops. Never crocheted from a pattern, so can't be sure about them, but I assume they probably work similarly.

(Loads of fishermen used to knit.)