Despite being an English major, I am concerned about the lack of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse reveal not only that the number of women with bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering disciplines is low, but that it has in fact decreased since 2004. Most drastically, women received only 23 percent of computer science degrees in 2004, while in 2014 this number fell to 18 percent. Coincidentally, I happen to be taking a statistics class that involves a little bit of computer science, which allows me some personal insight as to why this problem exists. After all, why don’t women just major in science? There’s no legal or written boundary stopping them.
While social structures have a lot to do with the lack of female STEM majors, I think our psychological barriers — or what an English major like me may refer to as “mind-forged manacles” — are far more influential. Clearly, I’m comfortable making references to poets like Blake, Poe and Plath, because I am told it is socially appropriate. The gender gap in STEM is a vicious cycle; because the statistics are already so low, we might subconsciously perceive humanities majors to be more accommodating for women than STEM. STEM is, therefore, a realm not just out of reach, but also undesirable. It’s hard to encourage people to go into a field that they perceive as hostile towards them.
However, it is also not true that humanities majors are, by default, more accommodating towards women. There’s a popular BuzzFeed video that reverses the stereotypical, often sexist roles that men and women play in the workplace. It draws on female experiences of feeling excluded in conversations and having ideas dismissed due to their perceived weakness and unacceptable femininity. I have felt this before in a couple of my humanities and social science classes — perhaps more so in high school, but even a little bit now. It is difficult to be in a class in which the majority of the literature is by white men, and then to have the most frequent hand-raisers also be men. The reality is that, even when most participants in a conversation are female, men can still dominate. A 2004 study at Harvard Law School found that men were 50 percent more likely than women to speak up at least once during class and 144 percent more likely to volunteer a comment at least three times. This is a social phenomenon known colloquially as “mansplaining.”
Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that the top 10 highest paying jobs for women still show a wage gap in favor of men and that as women continue to pursue these jobs, which are mostly in STEM, the average wage decreases. This indicates an even more problematic gender disparity in which the work that women do, whether it be humanities or STEM related, is generally devalued. An article by Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times cites a study involving U.S. census data on pay and type of job. The study shows that computer programming, which used to be a “relatively menial role done by women,” began to pay more after more men became programmers. Conversely, the wage for biologists fell about 18 percentage points when more women entered. And for the highest paying college major group, pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences and administration, the median earnings for women are $10,000 less than the median earnings for men.
So, the proportion of men to women in STEM fields is a good starting place to solve gender disparity in academia and, by extension, its impact on gender disparity in the workplace. And, granted, there have been several good initiatives aimed at solving this problem. New organizations like Girls Who Code help make coding a possible and accessible career for women, equipping girls with the resources and the mindset to follow their STEM pursuits. In addition, as I suggested earlier, mindset may just be the most important part. Because I may have subconsciously internalized the social stereotype that STEM is not for girls, I sometimes find it difficult to suppress pessimism and fear in the few STEM-related, or even simply numerically-based classes I have taken here. But this brings up another point. While I do regret my own pessimism towards STEM and believe it should be made clear that future generations of women should find comfort, passion and excitement in STEM fields, it is also important to realize that this only begins to solve the problem. The humanities should not be devalued because they are seen as traditionally female subjects. Furthermore, the subtle sexism that sometimes occurs in numerically female-dominated classrooms should serve as a reminder that, even when women are the statistical majority in a classroom, social assumptions about gender may persist. The low number of women in STEM fields is just one aspect of gender inequity in academia.
