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.

Shout out to the early 80's kids

Same here. My maths was awful, and anything STEM at school always seemed to connect to or require maths, so that was the barrier for me.

I didn’t find it interesting at all - dropped maths for 5th form (I think that’s Year 11 / O Level equivalent), and went down the arts route very (too) early - English, History, French, Music and Geography.

I really enjoyed those subjects - but - I really wish I could have had a teacher bring science and maths alive for me - someone who truly loved the subjects, and whose enthusiasm for them was infectious.

I feel like I have missed out on so much.

DD is 13 and loves science - it’s her favourite subject. She’s not as keen on maths, although has been streamed (don’t get me started on that - streaming is responsible for so many kids needlessly disengaging in learning and does untold damage) into the top maths class for her year.

I really, really encourage her love of science. I truly hope she continues to genuinely enjoy it, and wants to learn it.

LOL!

I think you may have answered your own question in your last few sentences where you described your joy in playing around with a computer.

I think the majority of girls are discouraged from risk-taking amdnI suspect most girls when handed a piece of tech in their early teens would use it as a functional tool with well-defined methods of using it that they will not stray from, instead of being excited about its potential and exploring that.

The discoursgement of risk-taking in girls throughout school translates into various fears when faced with a subject where you get answers right or wrong in the current math teaching regime.

Girls are rewarded in the earliest school years for being quiet and 'nice' and doing what they're told. They're rewarded for following the rules at an age when they're forming an idea of who they are and how the world works. In some classrooms, girls are seated beside boys in order to keep the boys from messing about, to be a 'good influence' on their less inhibited peers.

There is a fear among girls of being the person who 'gets it wrong' that is associated with the self-image of 'well behaved nice girl' that so many schools end up instilling in girls. Since maths is a subject where the right/ wrong binary is strongly emphasised, girls feel a good deal of anxiety around it - it's a subject that is taught in a way that emphasises the answer, the point where the girl stands to risk the public shame of being wrong.

Maybe if mathematics teaching in the early years presented the subject as an open-ended exploration and focused less on rote learning and succeeding in problems, students with a strong level of risk aversion would feel more comfortable with it.

My DDs were lucky enough to go through school in the US where students hoping to go to highly selective universities need to be excellent all rounders, studying mathematics and sciences as well as humanities, English, and MFL to a high level in high school, with no option to coast along in less demanding math courses (or drop maths) if they wanted to get into their universities of choice. So far, two have read Economics, and one has done Psych plus another major followed by a masters degree in a heavily mathematical (statistics and programming) social science in the health field.

Agree with @CrazyArmadilloLady wrt streaming, especially streaming in primary school. It destroys confidence.

I did alright in the STEM subjects at GCSE level but just found other subjects more interesting. But now I'm back at school (aircraft maintenance) and I'm really quite enjoying the maths (while everyone else in the class is groaning), remembering how satisfying it is to know the answer is right and doesn't depend on someone else's opinion or interpretation.

Agree with @jurassictart wrt the toxic environment women face in many STEM fields.

Parents have been raising a very toxic kind of boy for the last few decades.

I have a stem degree and have had a really varied career.

My DD does not excel or enjoy STEM subjects at all. Humanities make her light up.

Her school has a much higher percentage of girls going on to study STEM than the national average but it was never going to be her choice.

Really interesting question. I remember having to decide whether to do arts or sciences for a level - the reality being you have to choose then because if it's a mix you will struggle to get onto a good uni course. for some reason my school stupidly had separate sciences but didn't make you take them all. i did biology and chemistry but not physics. also did maths. a* in all of them but didn't want to do maths alevel. it was my least favourite but i think largely due to poor teaching. i remember sitting there wanting to qualify as a maths teacher because i felt the right teacher could have made such a difference and brought the subject to life. anyway, with just bio and chem i wasn't going to get onto a science degree course so went with essay bases subjects. If we didn't have to choose so early on and had a wider curriculum then i could easily made a different decision and gone down the STEM route. i don't know if it's changed these days but i always thought it was a terrible system that choices made at 13 years old would basically set you on a path of arts or sciences which would later be difficult to change.

My DDs stubbornly resisted my attempts to indoctrinate them into the joy's of STEM. They (literally) don't have my genetics and both have dyspraxia and one has dyslexia too.

I do think that early experiences can impact too. I'm thinking of the studies that show that on seeing rabbits parents will say to girls - look at the cute bunnies, whereas to boys they are more likely to say - look at the bunnies, let's count them. Repeat times 1000 and you are building different skills and interests.

I went to school in the 90s so IT was mainly moving a green and black 'turtle' around the screen. I genuinely don't remember anything useful being discussed, so again, it just didn't pique my interest.

You were actually writing code to move that turtle, and if you were also drawing patterns you were applying maths.

You could download 'small basic' and see if you can still do it.

I wanted a job where I would deal with people & I couldn't see how I could do that with STEM subjects plus I found languages easier.

Now obv I realise there are many great STEM jobs where you do talk to people and earn lots of £

DP keeps explaining maths things to DS10 and lightbulbs keep going on for me too so I wonder if maths was just taught in a really obscure way at a level rather than explaining what we were doing/why & I'm quite practical so that just didn't work for me

Same for me except for the bsc part!

Some people just find maths and science more difficult or less interesting at school and prefer other things. A big generalisation but I do see that boys are more likely to excel at these subjects than more essay based or creative subjects. Is it something to do with how their brains function? The school my DDs went to very much encouraged STEM for girls which is great but you have to like it and have the right mindset and ability to learn these subjects and not everyone does.

I found STEM subjects boring at school in comparison to languages and humanities. And I was very, very good at languages and literatures and history in a way that I wasn't at STEM subjects, because those were the subjects that fired me up and filled me with passion.

To a certain extent, it was also the environment I grew up in. My family members and their friends were mostly artists, writers, journalists, teachers and academics in arts and humanities subjects. I met a lot of very interesting people who talked to me and taught me a lot about their areas of expertise, but I didn't know many adults in STEM jobs, and the ones I did know tended to quite boring.

As an adult, it's the other way around and a lot of my friends work in STEM..But I still have no desire whatsoever to do their jobs.

Totally agree with this. Not wanting to detail but I also genuinely believe that encouraging “equality for women” is only tackling one half of the kind of issues. IMVHO it’s about leveling the playing field and that means equal opportunities in all areas for both décès, not just increasing some opportunities for females.

Then, to answer the op. I think it will depend on sooooo many factors - age/generation, sociodemographics, education format etc etc.

Eg my mother always worked and had a career as a journalist and my aspirations were very different from my many friends whose mums didn’t work. The aspirations and opportunities for me and my peers at grammar school were and still are very different from rebake friends who attended our local comp. STEM wasn’t a “thing” i was aware of in the 1990s but I felt aware that in a girls’ grammar school we had no reason to feel we couldn’t do those kind of subjects. However I don’t think I fully understood what career proms I had generally, let alone from a STEM perspective. I think I was recommended to anthropology at uni, but had no idea what that might lead to.

I felt totally lost and overwhelmed about making decisions for my future - going to uni and picking a career. That may be due to my school having shit careers advice, my very feminist but narcissistic mother, my own lack of confidence, they type of friends I had, possible undiagnosed ADHD…. Who knows.

Ultimately I’ve landed in a career that I’m happy enough in. I earn more than my male, slightly older, Cambridge and Oxford educated doctor friend (if you take salary as an indicator for success, which I only do to a small extent); but it’s not in STEM.

I've always hated STEM subjects at school, although I was a straight A student and come from a family of very successful STEM academics. I hated physics, chemistry, biology and just about liked some aspects of Maths. However, my strengths were always humanitarian subjects and I went into a career in Law. It would have been torture for me to go into a career in STEM.

Always struggled with maths but I wanted to work in the sciences (optometry) when I was in school. I did physics, biology and chemistry gcse and passed all b / c grades not the best but ok, so I went on to do biology a level. The AS level was ok, I struggled a little but passed. Then all but 8 of us dropped biology going into second year. The other 7 students all also did chemistry so the biology teacher refused to go through some important things as “you’ll know this anyway”. When I pointed out I didn’t, she just shrugged and said well, you’re never going to do well anyway so does it matter? Instantly lost interest, stopped turning up, stopped handing in coursework and failed the a level. I didn’t have a great relationship with my parents at the time so I didn’t tell them or anyone else who could have helped.

Been put off stem since tbh. I’m a volunteer manager for a large charity who work in the education sector.

Back when I was 16 I had a choice.
Stay at my mixed Secondary school, do some of the subjects I was good at, and put up with the male idiots in half my lessons and avoid them for a few...
Or go to the Girls school and do all of the subjects I liked.

I definitely made the right choice going to the Girls school. I did Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology to A level plus Geography to GCSE.
Physics soon became my favourite... I hadn't liked it as much at GCSE. Its definitely the driest of all the STEM subjects at lower levels. But then when we started learning about Quantum Mechanics etc it was fascinating.

Talking to my friends, a common theme is that their Maths teaching in Primary school was very poor. They felt they weren't good at it at an early age.

Interestingly there is a girls grammar near me and it is totally stem focused. When we went to open day in y7 it was made clear there were no 'girls / boys' subjects.

Uni destinations are pretty much medicine (in many forms) , vet school and engineering.

It's one of the things that put my DD for 6th form off as she is not that interested.

He sounds like an idiot, or you’ve misinterpreted what he meant.

It’s got nothing to do with gender ratio, the more women going into IT, the more people working in IT. Less scarcity of workers = lower wages. Basic supply and demand.

I'm of South Asian ethnicity but British born. When I was growing up in the 80s, my parents (factory workers) saved for us to have a computer at home (quite a novelty in those days) and we had educational games as well as the usual games. We were taught our timetables at home at a young age and had a bookshelf teeming with both fiction and non-fiction books.
In general, my non-Asian friends were into different things than me or into them at a much earlier age e.g. wearing make-up and fashion. So they were bought make-up and clothes/accessories to wear to primary school (at the time there was no uniform). Some of them were enrolled in ballet/ acting/ tap dancing/ swimming classes. So no real encouragement for those girls to have a STEM interest but even things like literacy were not a priority.
This is decades ago though and obviously attitudes have changed considerably. There's so many women of my generation from every background changing careers now, getting into STEM and inspiring the younger generation so I feel the gender imbalance won't be as pronounced in the near future.

DD is at an all girls grammar, stem subjects VERY much pushed, she enjoys every subject and is good at them all too, we have also always had subscriptions to science magazines, stuff available at home etc, for all subjects. There is definitely not a lack of exposure or encouragement for stem subjects, however, she adores English, MFL and the arts. She wants to be an author. I'm a musician, father is an engineer so she's had both sides from us. For my part I could, and did, run rings round the boys in all subjects in my crappy state school, but I'd wanted to be a musician from the age of 3 and never swerved. My parents have no clue where I got the idea from, my family were farmers.