Women in Science and Engineering Fields
Who can forget former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ remarks from 2005, about how the gender imbalance in the sciences might be due to innate differences in women’s abilities? Summers’ remarks drew the ire of many, and for good reason; take a look at the many institutional and social barriers keeping women from entering those fields, and you’ll agree that it makes more sense to focus on remedying the many environmental obstacles holding women back, before resorting to theories of evolutionary psychology.
A Discouraging Feedback Loop
The recruiting effort to get young girls interested in science, math, and engineering is a pretty pitiful one. Parents’ and teachers’ expectations from girls in those fields is low, and science curricula and textbooks can be surprisingly gender-biased. While a girl might have a dozen highly visible role models for becoming say, a pop singer or reality TV starlet, she has few obvious role models to look for when it comes to a career in science. The lack of women in the natural sciences creates a discouraging feedback loop, making the field unappetizing for young girls who may otherwise be drawn to it.
The Old Boy’s Club
Imagine now a perseverant young woman who does decide to pursue natural science, math, or engineering on the undergraduate level. While she may find the course work easy, it will be much harder to find a female mentor to give relevant career or life advice during this formative period. Professors and lecturers and likely to be male as well. And, while women hold fewer science jobs than men overall, they also hold fewer tenured positions; the “star” professors at any institution are much more likely to be males.
If our fearless young lady makes it through undergrad and begins her studies at a graduate institution, she is even less likely to find a female faculty advisor in her field to guide her academic path; according to the National Institutes of Health, only 11% of women graduate students in the sciences had a female advisor.
Institutional Obstacles
Zoom ahead five years: our Sally Science has made it successfully through graduate school, to find herself in a post-doctoral position at a university. She’s married now, and has just found out that she’s pregnant. Sally was going to apply to an assistant professor position once her post-doc was finished, but she now realizes that nearly all professorships don’t offer maternity leave or a part-time option, and most schools don’t offer child care. Sally’s husband, Ernie Engineer, works full-time as an assistant professor, and won't have much time to help her rear the child, either.
Now Sally finds herself at a very troubling crossroads: a career in science is nearly logistically impossible for a young, cash-strapped woman, due to these institutional obstacles. She can choose one or the other, but doing both is incredibly hard, due to a lack of support from the science field itself. Unfortunately, this is a reality that many potential women scientists, not just Sally, find themselves in.
For More Information:
Source:
Barriers to Biomedical Careers for Women. (2011) National Institutes of Health.