This article is a weird mixture of “hear me roar” and “the boys aren’t playing fair!!!!!” An article about women actually trying to accomplish something in IT is a lot better than stuff like this suggesting that they are cause they have awesome MySpace pages and rocking emoticons, but it still strikes the same chord with me as this article and the general tone of media coverage, wherein male success in a particular area (such a technology) is a sign of failure whereas increasing female dominance (in, say, the number of college degrees awarded) is a sign of progress even when men are falling behind.
What got my attention is this:
Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to “act like a man” in order to succeed.
I ran across this article because that 56% statistic was cited in another article. That stat sounded so far out of left field that I had to follow the link. And I am rather dumbfounded as to where that statistic comes from. Actually, I suspect I know where that statistic comes from. 56% is about (or just below) the percentage of overall (and not just science and engineering) graduates are women. There’s just no way that science and engineering mirror that statistic so closely. Look at any school known largely for its science and engineering programs and you’re likely to find a skew towards men (and I doubt it’s because men are making up for their minority-status in science by taking liberal arts coursework).
I could say that this is deliberate misinformation, but I don’t think it is. Pointing out that only about a third or two-fifths of S&E graduates are women is often used to make the argument that there is discrimination at the university level. In fact, the notion that 56% of S&E graduates are women undermines a number of the points the author was trying to make.
In any event, the great thing about statistics like this is that they get forwarded, accepted as true, and really hard to subdue.
Remember:
Womynz nevr bee rong…
Comment by Mike Hunt — November 30, 2010 @ 7:36 pm
I agree that it is time to quit obsessing about male-female wage disparities and the like. It’s not a national security issue, for chrissake, and women as individuals are protected from wage discrimination by law. The same with obsessions about “minority” wage gaps or participation gaps. As long as individuals are protected, the focus on collective performance is creepy and unneeded.
What we should really be obsessing about is whether or not our IT and engineering sectors are competitive with the rest of the world. Because if they are not, everyone suffers.
Comment by Maria — November 30, 2010 @ 7:36 pm
What we should really be obsessing about is whether or not our IT and engineering sectors are competitive with the rest of the world. Because if they are not, everyone suffers.
This actually leads into something I have been meaning to post, but to date haven’t been able to put the words together. Even setting race and gender aside, there is the line of thought in some circles that we need to focus more on bringing the low-performers up to speed even if that means holding the high-performers back.
The thing is… we need high-performers. Consolidating classrooms and having the high-performers bide their time tutoring the low-performers is not just preventing high-performers from reaching their potential, it’s depriving our society of its competitive edge by slowing them down.
Comment by trumwill — November 30, 2010 @ 7:42 pm
Anyone with eyes who has set foot in a high-level STEM class will know that 56% cannot possibly be true.
As someone who recently obtained a science degree and was often the only female in the class, it’s laughable to me.
Comment by Nanani — November 30, 2010 @ 9:24 pm
And yet it never crossed anyone’s mind at Newsweek that the number might be worth checking up on. Whenever I run across a statistic that doesn’t make sense to me, I try to follow up. And I’m not a paid writer/editor.
Comment by trumwill — November 30, 2010 @ 9:31 pm
The thing is… we need high-performers. Consolidating classrooms and having the high-performers bide their time tutoring the low-performers is not just preventing high-performers from reaching their potential, it’s depriving our society of its competitive edge by slowing them down.
Oh you bet! We put up someone against their counterpart in China, and theirs is the best they’ve got, and ours is a diversity hire, or maybe someone who’s spent all their lives being pampered by “self-esteem” programs. Who’s gonna win?
We are ALL going to lose in the long run. Of course, being the kind of person I am, I tend to think, that’s been the intention all along. But that’s a subject for a post on my own blog, not here
5.And yet it never crossed anyone’s mind at Newsweek that the number might be worth checking up on.
They are heavily ideological these days, plus they are being run on a skeleton staff like most newspapers and magazines in the Internet age.
Magazines like TIME and Newsweek used to have staffs with dozens of fact checkers and sub-editors. Not anymore.
Comment by Maria — November 30, 2010 @ 9:52 pm
Rich girls. All rich girls at fancy colleges. Not regular people at all.
There are lots of women in sciences such as “earth science.” Maybe the definition of science and engineering degrees is broader than we would expect.
Comment by stone — November 30, 2010 @ 9:56 pm
We put up someone against their counterpart in China, and theirs is the best they’ve got, and ours is a diversity hire, or maybe someone who’s spent all their lives being pampered by “self-esteem” programs. Who’s gonna win?
Or someone stuck in a class of half-wits in a classroom moving only as fast as the slowest students can handle.
They are heavily ideological these days, plus they are being run on a skeleton staff like most newspapers and magazines in the Internet age.
Even from an ideological standpoint, it’s pretty dumb. The case (such as it is) is made stronger if society is steering away women from tech/science at young ages (which it might well be) than if women get the degrees and not the jobs.
But then I also know, and I guess they don’t, that being a female is helpful to getting hired. At least if you’re in IT. Not as sure about actual science and engineering jobs, but I would expect that the same would be true.
Comment by trumwill — November 30, 2010 @ 10:05 pm
Rich girls. All rich girls at fancy colleges. Not regular people at all.
Majoring in science? Most of the fancy colleges tend to focus on liberal arts, don’t they?
There are lots of women in sciences such as “earth science.” Maybe the definition of science and engineering degrees is broader than we would expect.
I’m still skeptical. Even if you include Human Development Sciences and the like. The College of Industrial Technology at Southern Tech actually had HDS on its roster. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but the CIT still lacked gender diversity (though, interestingly enough, had racial diversity in spades if you separate out East Asians and South Asians). HDS is now in a different college (the one Web works for, if I recall).
Comment by trumwill — November 30, 2010 @ 10:10 pm
9.Rich girls. All rich girls at fancy colleges. Not regular people at all.
These days, regular people don’t become engineers. The education is intense. People have to be either extremely intelligent or intelligent and concientious to make it through. Fourier optics and partial differential equations ain’t for everyone. The meritocracy, even inefficient as it is, is concentrating alleles for intelligence and attractiveness in the upper-middle and higher classes. The effect is even beyond the correlation we expect from a general fitness factor and the better lifestyles they can afford.
At a private HS I went to for a year the girls were mostly beautiful and mostly smart. Their mothers were very pretty. The fathers, they looked like me, poor bastards. Right now, there some stunningly attractive women in BME, mostly undergrads, though Biomechanics Girl is going for a PhD and is maybe the hottest girl I’ve seen. Certainly the hottest one that’s ever talked to me.
Comment by rob — November 30, 2010 @ 11:52 pm
Or someone stuck in a class of half-wits in a classroom moving only as fast as the slowest students can handle.
It’s might be hard for you to recognize this, but there actually was a time in the U.S. when people were encouraged to do their best, and when being smart, productive and accomplished was something to be admired, not something to be hated and ridiculed. Around the time that Neil Armstrong played golf on the moon; I’m just barely old enough to remember it, but remember it, I do.
Today the essential value is equality of outcome for “groups”, not for individuals, and the country is much poorer for it. And everything’s politicized, you can’t escape it even when selling Girl Scout cookies. Which to me is the very definition of totalitarianism.
Comment by Maria — December 1, 2010 @ 10:07 am
There was an article in 2008 about that : http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/the_freedom_to_say_no/?page=full and what it says is that math-precocious men are much more likely to go into engineering or physical sciences than women, while math-precocious women, are more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The percentage of women in medicine and biological science is bigger than the percentage of men.
Comment by no more mr nice guy — December 1, 2010 @ 5:11 pm
That’s a great link. Thank you for sharing it.
Comment by trumwill — December 1, 2010 @ 5:18 pm
medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
Nothing wrong with medicine and biological sciences; humanities and social sciences — we already have too much of.
Since trumwill posted about the dearth of US-educated industrial engineers, I’m thinking of steering my girl in that direction. My mathematically inclined son chose accounting.
Comment by Maria — December 2, 2010 @ 12:45 pm
Maria, it’s definitely good to try to put ideas in their head that might not appear there anyway. I remember in sociology class, our teacher asked everyone to raise their hand who wanted to be a doctor or vet (a few hands up), a lawyer (a few hands up), or an engineer (half the class raises their hands). The teacher’s point - an outstanding one - is that we should think about a lot more than the high-status jobs we hear about (the first two) or what our parents did (a huge portion of my classmates were engineers’ children).
Had I not gone into the College of Industrial Tech, I never would have heard about degrees in production management, industrial distribution, and so on. Fields that fly under the radar are often good fields to get into. The industrial distribution people I knew got their job to choose from. This was the late 90’s and a lot of the jobs required relocation, but still.
Comment by trumwill — December 2, 2010 @ 1:36 pm
ITA trumwill. My degree is in advertising illustration of all things. I don’t regret it, because it was the only chance I had for college, but I never used it because I disliked the cut-throat, deadline-oriented advertising business. I ended up in a totally different profession.
If I’d known about the very lucrative field of medical illustration while I was young, I would have specialized in that. I excelled at rendering and I was interested in forensics–it would have been a good fit, and as I said, it’s so specialized that the pay is very lucrative.
Today’s kids have the Internet to help them out–an advantage I didn’t have.
Comment by Maria — December 2, 2010 @ 2:04 pm