The actual title is 'A gender equality paradox': Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads.
The findings only present a paradox if you believe that gender equality requires equal representation in all fields.
Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
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Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#52"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.
Often the reason motivating people to make statements like this is that they assume a systemic reason as to why a given group are not choosing a particular choice. An illustrative example would be asking why fewer men participate in cheer squad. The answer is derivative of the context - maybe football recruits more vigorously and has masculine traits which appeal more to young men. The follow-up question, if we were looking to have more boys in cheer, would be to ask what can we do to appeal more to those traits or appeal to things which no other activity satisfies.
The quote proposes looking at the context within which girls who show aptitude choose not to pursue STEM and see if there is anything the government, who wants more women in STEM, can do to facilitate this. It isn’t about removing the choice, it is about making a particular choice more appealing by better understanding the fundamental drivers behind particular choices.
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#53However you feel about Jordan Peterson, he brings up this fact all the time, esp w/ regards to Scandinavia, would define this phenomenon as the difference between equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, and that the genders, when provided the option, tend towards different preferences (e.g. bricklayers vs nurses), and that environment factors can skew these natural preferences in either direction. raises the…
I realize this is an anecdote, but one of my long-term clients is a tax/accounting office run and staffed almost entirely by women. When I started working there, I fully expected to find it tedious and drab. It turns out that it is surprisingly fun- they get clients that run all kinds of small businesses, we meet, talk about things, see what we can do to help them... Knowing the tax code & GAAP is important, but they turn out to be only the means to a far more social end. Really changed my mind in a positive way.
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.
He said worse than that, IIRC. But his lawsuit will maybe bring more clarity on what he really thinks vs. what might have been mis-written or mis-read in various versions of 'the memo'.
what did he say worse than that?
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#55In those countries which lack gender equality, in many cases people do not choose STEM because it's really difficult to find a job otherwise.
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#56I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.
As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument.
It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand.
Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts. As a whole, they have recognized that this is not the fault of individuals in their workplaces. It's "natural" to be more critical of the few women in your workplace because as a human, that's how your brain is built to work. Correcting that requires conscious effort on your part, and most are unwilling to correct themselves.
Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.
Women are interested. Women want to do the work. Many that do are forced out for one reason or another, and this makes many not want to do it any longer.
Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#57For those of you who have some form of access, this appears to be the actual research paper:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719
> The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects.
Their definition of "gender equality" is this:
> The World Economic Forum publishes The Global Gender Gap Report annually. We used the 2015 data (World Economic Forum, 2015). For each nation, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) assesses the degree to which girls and women fall behind boys and men on 14 key indicators (e.g., earnings, tertiary enrollment ratio, life expectancy, seats in parliament) on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 representing complete parity (or men falling behind). For the countries participating in the 2015 PISA, GGGI scores ranged from 0.593 for the United Arab Emirates to 0.881 for Iceland.
(One of the things I'd be curious about is whether that's just a proxy for Western cultural norms; the more commonly cited reasons for a gender gap in STEM fields in the US are things like harassment and misogyny, and it's certainly possible that those are correlated more strongly with Western culture than with cross-cultural structural inequality.)
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#58The defensive tone of this article is alarming. If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now with illiterate folks of today. Disparity in computer science education in Western countries puts women at a massive economic disadvantage and is a major geopolitical risk. Arguing that women naturally prefer non-STEM fields is sexist and dangerous. Helping drive up the numbers…
If women do actually naturally prefer non-STEM fields on average then is the science on the subject being sexist? I am more interested in the truth than in making the numbers between men and women be exactly 50/50 in everything.
Women don't prefer non-STEM fields on average, this is an artifact of Western countries. There's no disparity in many developing countries including China. It's not about 50/50, it's about 100% of the population being literate with respect to complexities of modern economy.
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#59The article posits that the affluence of a country (not gender equality itself, though correlated) affects how much the economic security that comes with high-paying STEM jobs is an incentive to purse those jobs.
That can explain a gradient between countries, and doesn't affect the original, purely gender question either way.
Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads
#60> Girls also tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. These differences were near-universal across all the countries and regions studied. So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).
Alternative theory:
In richer countries the family and friends force/pressure girls to do "girly" things and study a non STEM subject, but in poor countries they can do whatever is necessary for survival and can choose a better paying field, like STEM if they want.
It's a difficult subject, because it's almost impossible to make a controlled experiment and distinguish which explanation is the correct one. (You can't get a million subject and create 10-20 isolated societies with a different level of resources and initial culture and measure the results 100 years later.)
I also would like to see the correlation with the number of "stay at home moms". In some rich countries is common that after marriage / the first child the mom left the work. In poor countries it's more difficult and both parents must have a paying work. Why study a long career if you are not going to work too long in the field?