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.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true - you can do plenty of “design an experiment to find out…” stuff at primary school even. And while it’s true you don’t have different possible answers, you can still get that “flash” in science too when something suddenly makes sense (and seeing that happen to a pupil is one of the best things about teaching science). You also get moments of genuine awe, when you think about things like how tiny an atom is or how big space is. Science really isn’t just a load of boring facts!

There was not much wonder in my school science lessons! My English teacher was awesome though.

Some of it is the British - particularly English and Welsh - education system. We specialise far too early, particularly for those of us who are all-rounders. I would have happily taken more subjects, but I was only allowed to take 8 GCSEs (including English, English and maths) and only 3 A-levels.

I was determined from about age 12 that I was going to be an industrial archaeologist, and one of the qualifying undergraduate degrees for that was history, so that helped shape my A-level and degree choices. I was at a single sex school, so quite a few friends did do maths and sciences, and having had a grandmother who took maths at Cambridge in the days before women were allowed to have degrees, and later taught maths and physics in a girls' grammar, I never knew anything of rubbish ideas that boys are better at sciences. But I just didn't have room in my timetable. Also, chem seemed to have lots of organic chemistry at A-level, and I was more interested in the inorganic side, though I don't know if that was a fair representation.

On graduating from my first degree, I ended up realising I needed a roof over my head, so had to work, rather than fo a masters. From there, I ended up with a boyfriend in IT, and also my first use of email (it was 1993) - I'd never really used computers, because the one BBC micro at school was for the sole use of those doing A-level maths. And from that, I ended up doing an MSc conversion in Computer Science, and have worked in IT ever since till being made redundant in January.

I don't really want to work in tech again. It gets tiring being criticised for the exact same things your male peers are praised for, for having to fight for equal pay over 50 years since it became law. Assumptions I must be the secretary, not a Unix sys admin, being cheered when I went on a computer storage course, because women never do, vendor field engineers commenting on how unusual it is to see a woman in the datacentre... all well-intentioned (except the secretary thing,) but still othering. Colleagues who insist women are too emotional and can't think logically, despite having it pointed out that it was a man who burst out swearing in a meeting and the only temper tantrums I've seen in the office have been from men.

I've done a lot of work on women in tech (including pointing out we don't need to encourage women into STEM, we need to get all the men working in it to understand how they shape and affect the culture and fix that - the women are okay,) but if anyone has decided to go into a tech career because of what I've said, I doubt I did them any favours. Though if a teenager came to me and asked about working in tech, I would talk about the wide range of opportunities and different careers and how interesting it can be, and work on the assumption that it's going to get better as all the middle-aged managers reach retirement, so anyone starting now will be fine.

Men are right to worry having more women in an industry tends to push salaries down, because there's plenty of evidence that is what happens - but keeping women out isn't the solution. Just pay women fairly in the first place. Tech salaries started to go up from the late '60s once men realised there was money in it and started pushing women out. We hear of Turing, Gates, Jobs and so on, but most of the early computing pioneers were women. The fact that that history has been (partly deliberately) suppressed feeds into the issue of why people think women mostly don't do tech. (And thus I combine my two degrees.)

I just loved History and English - the complexities of people and feelings, I guess.

My husband and I used to have a light-hearted competition about which was 'best' as he was a mathematician and one of his points was that being good at maths is seen as a proxy for being clever in a way that it just isn't for the arts, probably because of accessibility to a layperson.

It does grate a little that following the arts is seen as failure though because I was 'clever' and in top sets for science so could have theoretically followed a stem career. I think we need more men to feel confident to follow arts and 'caring' careers. I wonder what the question would be to why boys good at the humanities didn't pursue them?

There was not much wonder in my school science lessons!

Oh, there was in ours! I remember our chemistry teacher holding up a test-bed of copper sulphate solution and exclaiming about the beautiful colour. He clearly had a passion for his subject. I remember learning about number patterns and other things with Mr M in maths. I remember how we could use mirrors and prisms to bend light in physics, and you could explain it with maths. And our biology teacher heating a glass tube to stretch it thin and then demonstrating capillary action, as ink moved upwards in it. But I suspect there were others in all those classes who missed out on that, too, and thought it dull.

I found all subjects hard (since been diagnosed with adhd) but loved programming the BBC computer at home, building things including electric circuits, going on the cb radio etc. I have always assumed I am terrible at maths as I can't remember calculations or numbers but have since learned I am not too bad at all but I just don't respond to traditional teaching. I have ended up working in finance where I can use excel, write down calculations and use models. I still love making things and am doing up my house learning how to make shelves, building bespoke wardrobes from scratch and changing lights etc.

The problem I have with the arts is that your enjoyment of them is conditional on who you are: I remember finding A Level English a real slog, despite it being my best subject, because the texts I studied just didn’t resonate with me. By contrast as long as I could understand the stuff I learned in Chemistry it fascinated me.

Surely that applies on some level to all subjects though? People must have areas of sciences, and certainly maths, which appeal to them and ones which don't. Ditto geography, history (different periods) etc.

I just wasn't very good at them and honestly didn't find them very interesting (maybe that was the dry way the subjects were taught). But I wouldn't say girls were discouraged from doing it.

@EBearhug I’ve always thought the opposite - in English education we specialise far to late. So many subjects are compulsory for GCSE. Choosing “options” is getting to choose hardly anything. Even in my day (30 years ago) our actual free choice subjects was about 3. You HAD to do science. You couldn’t drop it. You HAD to do a least one humanities subject and at least one art subject
(but could only do one in each - so no History and Geography or no Dance and Drama). Maths and English were compulsory which makes sense but I found at GCSE level it was still “a bit of this, a bit of that” - half of which I had little or no interest in and subjects I would have liked to have done I couldn’t (like more variety of arts/creative subjects).
I was mostly bored at GCSE level and would have preferred a more specialised education.

@EBearhug I think 'tech' is so broad that experiences of women are very different. I also started as a sysadmin (only in the last decade) and people were fine however I worked for a very supportive place. Was the only woman, and still - as an engineer, one of few. I encountered a lot of sexism outside though.
Project management, business analysis, UI/UX etc are all chock full of women in fact it's actually more than 50% IME.

I think in terms of 'salaries' tech is a hard one because it's never been steady unlike say, law and accounting. There are boom bust cycles (when I started offshoring had started to come around again and many programmers lost their jobs). Now with AI we will see another wave. Even for men once you get to a certain age the jobs dry up unless you've pivoted into being a 'leader'. Also... skillsets are so variable and some niches are more male-dominated it's really difficult to compare sex-based salaries.

People make a big song and dance about how tech = high salaries but those of us who have been here a while know it's not true. You need to be constantly learning, constantly shaping your career in a way that can get quite tiring, although it gets easier with experience. That is not how it's marketed, everyone thinks they do a boot camp, then put their feet up and get the big bucks while working only 9-5.

I trained in Accounting and sometimes wish I'd stuck to it. Pass the exams, become chartered. Qualifications done, most of the knowledge I'd ever need. Much easier to earn well with less effort.

Sadly I was rubbish at science and maths and had little confidence in these areas, despite my best efforts. Arts, languages and humanities subjects came relatively easily to me, so it was a natural progression to do these at A level and then for my degree. This was back in the mid 80s, before there was really a push to encourage girls to study STEM subjects.

I'm the Mum of two sons, both of whom are arts / humanities leaning. Their Dad is very much a techy / science type and I'm surprised my sons haven't developed those interests. However my niece is a fantastic example of women in STEM - she's studying for a degree in geophysics and I think she'll excel in her field.

@AllProperTeaIsTheft I explained it badly but let me give you an example: we did King Lear in A Level English which most of the class hated, and my English teacher assured us it would all make sense to us when we had children. You may be able to appreciate a work from the point of view of how it’s written, but whether it will “speak” to you will depend on who you are.

With the sciences I’d argue as long as you understand it you’re probably going to be able to appreciate it. And I do tend to find I get similar reactions to the same topics every time I teach them - no-one likes electrolysis, most people enjoy the lesson about the size of the atom, my A level classes always enjoy chirality. It’s not just the way I teach it either - I know from talking to teacher friends that it’s similar for them.

I totally agree about different periods in history but then I’d count history as an art rather than a science…?

Ooh @ZebraDanios that's giving me major flashblacks to Historical Argument and Practice at uni arguing about whether not History was a science!

Just less interest for me. I was always more interested in languages and books at school although I am interested in logic. I did consider becoming a doctor but getting all the work experience at sixth form seemed like a lot of hassle to a lazy teenage me 😅 never had any interest in tech/computers, hated the ‘decision’ modules of maths A-Level!

It's worth noting that there are more graduates in some STEM subjects. The women drop out as some of the careers (particularly in academia) just require so much time and attention just at the time women might like to have children. It's much easier to do this if you have a wife at home having the children etc like most men do. There are some opportunities for returning women but they are extremely limited.

@Ippagoggy thank you so much for your suggestions. Off to look into them now. That's Xmas sorted.

@EBearhug What a lovely post. I never get bored of copper sulphate - it’s one of my absolute favourite chemicals and I like to get it out and marvel at it at every possible opportunity 😁

I guess it is a science in a sense (it contains facts, you have to evaluate sources), isn’t it…? I hadn’t really thought about that before!

@ZebraDanios I don't remember much but I have a memory of writing an essay about Von Ranke and the idea of objectivity and how much history is or should be/how even possible it is to be "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" or how this related to history as science rather than history as subjective art.

I think a lot of girls/women lean in to this idea that studying "the arts" makes them kind of free thinking bohemian artists who really get people and have creative souls. Not being mean here but that's what comes across a lot. But in truth, a lot of humanities studying is studying things other people have created, and then taking in other people's ideas on that, and then coming up with a vague perspective of your own - it really isn't that creative and many creative are self taught. How many writers really went to university to study creative writing?

Also, the sciences themselves are often creative in the true sense of the word. There's a trope that scientists are these logical minded robots but many scientists have had artistic souls. Many mathematically minded people can also be dreamers.

To me the reason girls/woman have traditionally shied away from STEM is because it doesn't fit the image of the romantic, emotionful, creative creature that many women still want to identify with.

"How it actually was", I realise I should have added! Can we actually ever get there given how we construct history?

If we're looking at A-level choices and why there's a lower % of girls taking maths/FM and physics, it's true that girls are more likely to take these subjects at single-sex schools so there is an impact of having boys in the classroom that puts them off.

However, what hasn't been discussed on this thread so far as I can see, is that one of the reasons that more boys take maths A-level, is because of lack of choice for them due to performance at GCSE.

Girls massively outperform boys at GCSEs. If we go back to 2019 pre-covid exams, 62.9% of boys passed GCSE English, compared to 78.2% of girls. If your humanities A-levels require a pass in English, you're already excluding nearly a third of the boys from even getting in the door.

Boys outperform girls at the top grades in maths (and Physics) which means more of them are eligible to take those subjects (if they require 7+ which is fairly standard). They're also likely to be the subjects they got the best grades in. This funnels more of them into those subjects.

Girls who get top grades in maths are more likely than boys to have a choice of other subjects.

It's not so much that girls are under-represented in maths, more that boys are over-represented.

@Loulou599 I think there may be some truth in that - I think a not-insignificant number of girls don’t choose the sciences purely because that’s not how they see themselves.

Interestingly I’ve known a few dramatic bohemian types say they enjoy science because it keeps them sane - I can totally understand this too.

Yep. Chemistry PhD here, and that's exactly why I moved to industry.

I don't have children yet, but I really wanted to have an established job, and buy a house before getting married and having children.

I also couldn't drag my DP around the world on a series of one-to-two year postdoc contracts, just to have the chance of getting a permanent position at a University that could be anywhere in the UK. We're both from a similar area so it would be nice to live near parents/siblings etc.

But that makes you unambitious apparently.

It’s one reason I will send my dd to an all girls high school. And I think I will ask about thre class sizes for final year (not uk) in the higher maths and physics- maths is often pushed for university entry reasons I but the number doing physics should show how genuinely stem supportive the school is.
I have realised reading this thread that I expect all my children ( 2x ds + dd) to do final year subjects in maths and science. I don’t know how I will adjust if they refuse! I just see maths as essential. And totally not gender specific aptitude wise. (My degree was maths)