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.

In hindsight, every single STEM teacher I had in my several secondary schools plus college were pretty awful. Either a nasty attitude towards me (undiagnosed ASD) or girls in general, or a lack of English (most of the class failed), or just generally a poor teacher who didn't cover the syllabus or keep order.

My humanities teachers were all very good, as were my language teachers.

I went into humanities with a science bent (BA but an MSc), then left it all to do marketing because... well, money.

If I had my time over again I'd get a p/t job ad a teen and use it to pay for tutoring so I could stick the A Levels, and do medicine or science.

Well, it does reinforce stereotypes if the better communicators at school are the teachers of humanities, arts subjects and languages.

An increase in reliance on technology hasn’t, imvho, gone hand in hand with improving people skills, or more effective human interactions in the world of business. We may be able to create and mine more data than ever before, but this seems to have been massively misused and abused. I have never felt so far removed from the organisations directly affecting my quality of life as I do now, and they all achieve this by hiding behind their technology and avoiding human interaction.

It’s almost as though more technology is now being created for the benefit of technology and the increase of corporate profit, without due regard for the humans affected by it, or the consequences of caring so little about the people being fed off. Maybe STEM degrees and employers should be spending a bit more of their time considering ethics and not just pure science and economics - that might also make them more attractive to a wider range of people.

@Walkaround depending what you study ethics is a part of it just like you have to learn some history of the subject.

The problem is those parts often aren't examined though you may include a small bit of either of them in your dissertation.

Most STEM courses have ethical components.
It's the other humanities that don't actually and other courses like business, politics, these are the people making decisions. So what you're saying makes no sense.

EVERYONE should be considering ethics, but this doesn't extend to tech and since the dawn of time those in positions of power got there by screwing everyone else over. That's not STEM's fault.

Also @Walkaround again, speaking from my personal experience even when people on the floor raise concerns they are often not listened to. Even the removal of ticket machines in railways for example ... most IT types are against it because we know, better than others only too well how unreliable technology is.

But do decision makers care? Absolutely not.

Saying that ethics make a subject more attractive is just silly really!

I went to a girls grammar school so everything was on the table. Liked biology and physics and maths, but english and history were just more interesting to me.

Which is why I think it’s important we encourage breadth of learning rather than specialising too early. I got a fair amount of resistance to doing A-levels in chemistry, biology and English but I’d like to think that being reasonably articulate makes me a better science teacher.

To add to the above: there was a thread a while back about needing “the best quality” graduates to teach science and a lot of people pointed out that having a good degree in science didn’t necessarily make you a great teacher. Compared to my peers at university I was not that great at chemistry but I’m pretty sure I can explain it a whole lot better than my genius classmate who understood everything instantly but could barely string a sentence together. Maybe more thought needs to be put into the way science teachers are recruited…?

(Sorry, double posted - we need a delete option as well as an edit one…!)

I wasn’t really interested. Hated physics. Didn’t mind maths and quite enjoyed biology. Chemistry was hit and miss depending on the subject. I was much better at humanities subjects, especially languages, and achieved better grades in them with much less effort.

I think it's also hard to rationalise a teenager's thought process around choosing subjects. Mine were certainly not rational. I could have gone either way, but I didn't fancy the idea of wearing a lab coat because I was an individual and didn't want to have my creativity stifled. Apologies if your eyes hurt with rolling so hard at that. I was a twat at 16. Which is perhaps why we shouldn't be allowed to reduce our choices so early.

At uni, however, all the alternative kids were the science ones.

One of the things that convinced me to do A level chemistry was the prospect of getting my very own lab coat and safety specs. You’re absolutely right, 16-year-olds aren’t rational at all!

Not silly, though, @OleMioSole . The businesses wanting ticket machines in stations want them to be “unreliable,” because they are unreliable in the way gambling machines are - skewed in favour of the people who put them there. It’s not because the people making the decisions do not have enough technical expertise to understand how unreliable the machines are, they just benefit from the machines’ natural propensity to be unhelpful. Most people pay more than necessary at the station ticket machines because they give up trying to work out how to get the cheapest ticket and just opt for the one that’s easy to find which will work before their train leaves, which is generally the most expensive ticket. These businesses don’t want more STEM graduates to improve the reliability of machines in ways that help the consumer, they just want them to do the technical bits for them in so far as it is immediately profitable for them and no further. The result is technology increasingly working against most people’s interests for the benefit of the few who have every understanding of what they are doing and don’t care, because nobody stands up to them anyway - the technical people are just dismissed as techies and the rest as technophobes.

Imo, thinking beyond the technicalities makes all subjects more interesting and worthwhile. If you are interested in the academic, it is genuinely interesting to spend more time thinking about the implications of what you do, rather than stopping tour thinking at working out how to do something that someone unethical is paying you for. If you want universities to produce the people who are making the decisions about how and when to use technology, then you should be wanting more time to be spent on why and not just how, and also questioning the dichotomy between academic endeavour and employability. Free thinkers are not always good employees. People who toe the line, however much they disagree with it, make good employees.

I wanted to mix chemicals....

I always loved and had a natural affinity for any creative subjects and languages. The opposite was true with maths and sciences. Just not interested and dropped them like hot bricks as soon as possible. I don't really care how things work but I'm glad other people do! The closest I got to loving maths and a science was Psychology A-level - loved that.

Programs absolutely do not have a 'natural propensity' to be unhelpful they can be designed such that they aren't. If everyone thought that payment systems had a 'natural propensity' to be unhelpful then surely they'd all stick to cash instead? No business would choose something that fails the majority of the time.
It's the business that doesn't want to invest in making them reliable. Unlike a gambling machine where the objective is to get as much money out of the customer a ticket machine is meant to dispense tickets. They're not comparable.
While all of this is great it still doesn't prove your initial argument which was 'STEM should be thinking more about ethics' when you have admitted it makes no difference anyway. The business don't want to and and the 'technical people' are just dismissed as techies.

As you said there's a dichotomy between academic endeavour and employability. There's also a dichotomy between what is taught as 'academic' and what people actually think about. Having sat in quite a few ethics classes in my undergraduate there is no way you can make people care simply by teaching it. Everybody just gives the correct answers, writes their essays and carries on with their lives.

I see what you're saying, but there's no 'soft' solution to your problem. Until social, political and financial frameworks incentivise taking responsibility then nobody is going to care. The ones that make it to the top, and hance have the power are by definition the ones who will do whatever it takes. They are not the sort to care about ethics.

How to solve this? Don't know. Maybe a random experiment in which people are plucked off the street to be politicians, like a jury, instead of those with considerable capital making it and stacking the deck even further.

In any case, those who don't want to do STEM are not magically going to find it 'more interesting' by adding ethics. Equally, those who do it aren't completely devoid of any thought as to how their work affects others, solely because ethics isn't a major focus of their degree. Generally intelligent people think about the world around them in a systemic way and so have opinions. Just like how... people in any other job, not just STEM, have an opinion on their work. It's these assumptions of yours that I found somewhat reductive.

@Walkaround a couple of years ago I was working in a project that was to use AI components.

The people in the team I was working in had degrees in a wide range of subjects including pure computer science, but everyone in the team had concerns around those components. So much so we put those concerns in the documentation and backed them up with academic references.

Now every one in the team apart from one person has a degree from a UK university.

Point is ethics are taught. It depends on the project whether you get to mention your own ethical concerns.

However it always someone's job to mention other issues which include ethical concerns. Higher management may dismiss them because the "customer", whether they are internal or external, doesn't care. Often the customer only cares if they can get sued over it.

@OleMioSole - you are ignoring the fact that I have argued most people do not need to go to university.

When I was choosing my A-levels, I was very much thinking about them as academic subjects and chose them accordingly. You may scoff all you like about people’s choices, but if I had not felt that choosing all science subjects would be dull because they did not consider the whys or human impact sufficiently, I might not have limited myself to maths as my only STEM A-level.

If you can’t teach people to think more deeply and even if you can it makes no difference to the power dynamics in the workplace, then why pretend there is any use in university for so many people? Get them into the workplace sooner, so that they can learn to do as they are told. They will have the same end result with less debt that way.

In other words, going back to my first point several pages ago, I would have continued with more STEM subjects for longer if such early specialisation had not been required. I had not taken any of my subjects as far as I wanted to or was capable of, but I knew I was more interested in why than how at the time.

The problem with your argument here is that 'university teaches people to think'. And that the 'workplace makes them good employees'.
That's wrong.
FWIW I agree that so many do not need to go away to university. However. that is different from getting a 'university education'. There are many ways from day release, Open university, etc etc.
Or even 'higher education', there are many degree equivalent quals that don't come from universities.

Everyone should have access to higher education, regardless of whether it's full-time university or not. But you're quite arrogant to presume that only 'academic institutions' are capable of teaching people to think deeply. All the people who fought for unions and worker's rights. Did any of them go to university? Did going straight to work make them shut up and do as they were told?

The initial discussion was about STEM vs humanities, now this is jumping to a different topic but you haven't disproved the initial point. just because you need to academically 'study a subject' and be taught to think, doesn't mean that other people need such spoon feeding

My DD had the same teacher for all sciences in year 7. He clicked better with the boys. He put DD off science - she had him for 8 lessons over two weeks and it was too much. I can see that too many science lessons with a unmotivating teacher has completely turned her off science.

I thought it was telling that all science awards in year 7 and year 8 were given to boys, even the effort award. Other subjects had a mix of boys and girls.

I have wondered if I should suggest boy and girl awards for science to school, but suspect it will be received as gender nonsense.

Programs do not have a natural propensity to be unhelpful, I agree - they are as helpful as the program allows. Ticket machines can be and are programmed to be unhelpful in ways that benefit the machine owner, however, who has created a system that is too opaque for the consumer to understand, but which the consumer has been informed is a better system than one that is comprehensible to them, or a person who can talk to them. 😂 Then more people can make profit out of creating programs which comprehend the programs which are incomprehensible to the consumer, for a fee, even though there are free programs which can do the same thing for them with very little effort on the consumer’s part. So far as the consumer is concerned, they just want to go from A to B and do not want to waste their lives away trying to work out which program is most helpful and ripping them off the least, so they unwittingly encourage unhelpful programs to proliferate. Then the consumer gets blamed for the unethical behaviour, not the companies selling the consumer products the consumer doesn’t even understand.

But that just takes us full circle back to my point that you should do a degree in a subject you enjoy and find interesting, not try to tell more people to do STEM rather than making the mistake of pursuing what they enjoy. 😂

Programs do not have a natural propensity to be unhelpful, I agree - they are as helpful as the program allows.

Another reason for encouraging more girls into STEM, and particularly IT is because, as Karen Spärck-Jones said, "Computing is too important to be left to men."

Computers affect almost every areas of our lives these days, and there have been many examples of things like fitness trackers not including menstrual cycle info, or a recruitment application to make things more equitable actually filtering out women, because it was trained on existing employees - who were mostly men. Computing is developed by humans and thus our biases get built into them, and can bring compounded. Having a more diverse workforce should mitigate some of that and make things better for all of us.