Women in STEM - who is at fault?

[EBearhug]

I was reading Computer Weekly's Focus paper on Men for women in tech.

It says it mentions parents heavily, which it does - and this is no bad thing, because I do think parents have quite some influence on what their children may decide to do for a career - I know quite a few people who went into the same or similar careers as their parents, and we all know of acting dynasties and so on. (And I suspect that me ending up in IT has quite a bit to do with it being something my parents knew nothing about.)

However...

"Industry experts suggest that dads rarely stand in the way of their daughters pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) as they want to believe their daughters can go on to achieve any desired career." (p5)

"But mothers are often cited as one of the reasons girls choose not to go into technology, as they often dissuade their daughters from pursuing a job in the technology industry, fearing it would not suit them." (p15)

So yay, mothers to blame again. But - do women have a clearer idea of how hostile an environment it can be? I think a lot of men just don't see any sexism. My manager has said there is no sexism, in response to me giving examples of minor sexist things which happen every day. I've had a few colleagues over the years who've outright said that they don't think that women can think logically or always react emotionally (I usually respond with examples of men who always react emotionally.) Plus of course, those who respond to surveys and give interviews to CW on diversity are probably pretty much self-selecting and are more likely to be the type who do recognise the issues and are aware of the various barriers.

I've spoken to male colleagues (most of my colleagues are male - I work as a unix sys admin,) about why they think there are so few women in IT - mostly, the response has been along the lines of, "well, it's IT, women don't want to do it." They don't see the problem, and they think it's a choice that's freely made. They've never been asked to think about why women make that choice, or if it's even a truly free choice - nor about how they might contribute to reasons why women choose not to enter tech careers.

I am all for getting more men involved in diversity - too often it's all about women in tech (or wider STEM) and the majority of men, who create the culture we work in simply by being the majority, aren't involved at all. I'm just feeling uncomfortable about it implying (or maybe I'm just being paranoid and inferring things which aren't there,) that men never stand in the way of girls entering IT, but women do.

And then I worry about whether I am doing enough to promote STEM; I know I do sometimes have doubts about it, because of the constant low-level sexism. I've never actively suggested anyone shouldn't suggest it, but equally, I have stepped back a bit from actively promoting it. I bet none of my male colleagues has the slightest worry about this...

I wondered what others thought.

I know other regions did get female applicants, and a few have joined so it's not all grim news.

But I do know female applicants for apprenticeships this year have been well down.

I could just be old fashioned and biased but don't girls like to gossip and chat and boys less so, so that a girl in a male dominated workplace has no one to chat to, unless the subject is football and cars. In the long run this is a minor detail but could it put girls off male environments?

Girls (and boys) should probably be in school rather than the workplace.

There is so much sexist claptrap in your post I can barely summon the will to respond.

No, women do not like to gossip/chat more than boys. Football and cars are not topics just for men to be interested in. There may well be issues with being the only woman in a male dominated environment but the things you've described aren't it.

Aha, that must be why I'm happy in STEM environments - I like football . (Funnily enough, I'd say the majority of my male colleagues don't - they were the geeky kids at school who spent their time trying to get out of football).

Deborah Cameron's Myth of Mars and Venus has an excellent chapter debunking the idea that women talk and gossip more than men.

Of course Babs. You nailed it!

I worked in the NHS and the women chatted whilst men read the paper. I am not chatty so didn't fit in particularly. Recently attended hosp and staff chatted a lot (unprofessional imv) so doesn't seem to have changed.

I was thinking of teenagers choosing careers which is why I said girls and boys.

Yeah, must be the football for me too. I did come in the top 10 of our office fantasy football league last year.

I'd rather spend all my time chatting about soaps and slebs and the like but the lads don't get it.

I couldn't be less interested in gossip. We talk about all kinds of things, like most people do.

Was this in the 1950s?

Mind you, I wear my geek credentials with pride. My birth partner was a friend who I first met at footie training, then discovered was a colleague (big organisation). As we waited... and waited... and waited for my ELCS (surgery was busy with a lot of emergencies that day) one of the midwives very kindly brought us a stack of old Hello magazines. We thumbed through them for all of about 30 seconds, then decided we'd rather talk about fluid dynamics.

1850s, I'd say, Assassinated. My mum, who'd be nearly 90 if she was still alive, didn't hold attitudes like that (mind you, I cut my feminist teeth on her copies of the Female Eunuch and A Room of One's Own).

Sounds like all you scientists are above sleb and soaps gossip - maybe the worlds made up of men and common women and superior nongossipping scientific women like you all!

Christ on a bike. I don't even know where to start with that.

Fyi. Men are fully capable of having discussions outside of sports and cars, and shocker, often do. (Lots of F1 fans in our office so we handily combine the two)

If people genuinely have that view you can guarantee that will be either consciously or unconsciously passed onto their kids.

Spaghetti this is so true: "You will have to deal with the environment, but if you can get through it, it's good pay, the hours can be good, and you can travel the world doing it" - plus the wankers are unevenly distributed. Some companies locally I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, others are much more welcoming to women.

Plus, tech really is shaping the future. Machine learning is becoming ubiquitous for anything from selling shoes to identifying faces to detecting spam - and w/o a diverse group of people building this shit, bias will be trained in.

Why, yes, yes I am above the common fray, thank you. (Twirls in a cloud of intellectual superiority). (end sarcasm).

Christ, it's like being back at school. "Oooh, you use long words and read difficult books for fun, get you, you show off, you". A bit tiresome really.

don't girls like to gossip and chat and boys less so, so that a girl in a male dominated workplace has no one to chat to, unless the subject is football and cars.

Women gossip, men network... no, men gossip at least as much as women, but people assume they are more likely to be talking about work. And I suppose technically, discussing Rob in ops who''s having an affair with Kelly on the help desk is about work...

I am rubbish at most sleb gossip, because I simply don't know who most of the people are. One if my male colleagues will know all the details of Love Island, though. I can talk a lot about the Archers. I'm more likely to talk about books or history or wildlife on site or bicycles with the people I work with. And builders (colleague has been having an extension done. I can tell you all about the lightingredients or plumbing or the leaky roof...) Like any group of people, there's a whole range of different interests, because everyone is different.

I love the scenes in the IT Crowd where they pretend to know about football. 'Did you see that ludicrous display last night?'

I was put off stem because oh the geeks.. It's not very cool when your subject colleagues are people you basically have to nudge through every social interaction, who have to pretend it's because their knowledgable rather than socially inept. Weirdos, don't wash, sometimes can hardly talk. With some geeky types is like being a ghost, wandering amongst what look like humans, but none of them can interact with you..

And the fakery! The techniques of pretending you know something that someone else is pretending to know because your ego can't handle thinking things like 'oh that's interesting tell me more' without collapsing.

It's weird that they are dominant (in the sense of numbers,) because meeting passionate communicative scientists is amazing, and the 'artsy' scientists are the ones that actually grow the subject.

The curious thing that always hangs around these topics is that there are easily enough women in technical roles to have a completely opposite organisational culture, so why isn't there an astray zeneca or whatever known for being girly and sparkly.. There's science in make up you know... Lalala...

@scary is that your assumption or your experience? Because that's a long long way from mine.

'Fing about Arsenal is they always try an' walk it in.'

The curious thing that always hangs around these topics is that there are easily enough women in technical roles to have a completely opposite organisational culture, so why isn't there an astray zeneca or whatever known for being girly and sparkly.. There's science in make up you know...

Are you seriously trying to say that the way to encourage more women into STEM is to make it more "girly"? If all us women scientist stopped being geeks, socialised properly, brought in proper girl stuff like pink sparkles, maybe focussed our attention more on the girl related science like that of make up, then we could change the organisational structure that way?

Is your theory about science being driven by "artsy" scientists based in experience? Same with all these "geeks". I can't imagine you've ever been to a scientific conference because i certainly don't have to nudge my colleagues into social interaction...

Women gossip, men network SO true.

@scaryclown You mean stuff like running a conference called Dazzlecon www.zebrasunite.com/dazzlecon/ or maybe a hugely successful company to rent designer clothes (Rent the Runway employees are 72% minority and 61% women.) or a company that hired female programmers working from home around children and got contracts like writing Concorde's black box software? (Dame Steve Shirley's company)

So, this thread is full of feminists, geeks and fem geeks. How do we make changes? Parents? Schools? Organisations? All 3?

For those women working in STEM industries what worked for you and could that be replicated?

I'm hoping scaryclowns post wasn't meant to be taken too seriously because I can't

The 'artsy scientist' comment does bring up the fact that actually, many people who are good at STEM are also good at arts, languages etc. There will be a subset of people who think in maths and write in code more fluently than in English - enormously valuable in the right role. (And there's a lot of subset of people in non stem fields you wish would STFU because of their ability to dominate a conversation with no grasp of logic, evidence, statistics...)

Anyhow...so, if you can do both, you can choose, and stereotypes and 'people like me' have traction. And the notion of the 'arts' side being more 'creative' comes up, whereas the bulk of important creativity is done by scientists, engineers, software designers. Many non stem fields aren't (or shouldn't be) creative at all.... lawyers, journalists (beyond the ability to string words together), historians.

Would emphasising the creativity of science and technology encourage more girls to think positively about careers in them?

Good question, manclife

For me, so far, my contribution has largely been as a parent. Apart from DD, I may have been a positive role model for one of her friends who's now doing a science degree - I don't think she would have got to do kitchen chemistry or bug hunting (followed by internet research of what they'd found) at home.

Thats not much, and with DD about to go off to uni I'm feeling I should try to overcome my RL shyness and do something in schools but I'm not sure where best to start. So I'd like to see other answers!