Why are we telling women do do STEM if that's not what they want to do, we should be supporting women want to do that. For example more entry level roles and considering women for those.
Isn't treating women differently from men sexist by definition?
If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender.
We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.
Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)
> Why are still people still confused about this?
Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?
Well they might act differently, unless they're from a country like Hungary, Russia, or Sweden, and then they are just like men in math. Nurture or Nucleotides... the experiment has already been run. The results are in, accepted or not.
> Well they might act differently, unless they're from a country like Hungary, Russia, or Sweden, and then they are just like men in math.
Could you clarify what does this mean (what is special about Hungary, Russia, Sweden)?
Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields?
As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we've shown many girls that STEM is really rewarding and it looks on TV like it involves a lot of staring at computer screens. Boring! So I expect that will change when we get to use more interactive interfaces. Also, I hope society does more work to let boys grow up feeling STEM isn't their only hope.
I would take the whole equality movement more seriously if I had been able, in the past decade, to spot a negative news article / report on women. When you get all the time exclusively negative news about men, you could start thinking that this is a coordinated (or emergent?) campaign.
I get positive news about my place in STEM every month, in the form of a paycheck which is more than four times my country's median individual income. I'll take concrete, quantifiable rewards over nice words in an opinion piece any day.
But your salary is about your place individually, not about gigantic groups of people.
In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.
That's assuming an internal company culture couldn't be created based on shared understanding that would lead to competitive advantage. Eg, if you create a company with only black women, you may not necessarily get the very best individuals, but you could create a very unique culture. That culture could empower the whole team to work better with each other with the end result being a more productive team even though…
Career Successful women in stem told me that she would have pursed for a different career if she wasn't the daughter of immigrants. She was destined to be an engineer or a doctor.
>engineer or a doctor
These are both STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Doctor is a crossover in my view, anyway. Sounds like she would like more autonomy with her career choices, rather than not be in a STEM field.
Iran has more women engineers and graduates overall. I'm told it can be as much as 75%. I half suspect that it's two things. The society at large is very gender unequal but applied engineering wants outcomes enough that it overcomes societal distortion to get capable women into roles for mutual benefit.
The second reason is that highly skilled Iranian women stem graduates qualify for immigration points in receiving economies like Australia.
I've worked with some, and know some. They're good. The system works for them as individuals if not in the wider sense of what we'd want in an equal society.
Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correlation vs causation fallacy at play here, these conclusions conveniently ignore a million other societal factors that affect such decisions. For instance, as much of a gender-equality-utopia Scandinavian countries are, they're certainly not free of gender roles and the societal institutions that enforce those. While of course anecdotal, several of my friends from these countries have talked about how they faced invisible, passive-aggressive forms of bullying from fellow students (a large majority of them reportedly female) for having 'geeky' interests such as math. When presented with other options that may eventually be equally or slightly less fulfilling, but come without the social pressure, it makes sense to most people to go with the flow. So much for "natural inclinations"...