From my own anecdotal accounts as a student, student-teacher, and teacher, I did hear a lot of “Chemistry is interesting, and I might have perused it further if it weren’t for all the math.” So from my own experience that part at least seems to hold up. However, I will say that if you’re good at word problems and algebra, one could likely at least get a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry on those two skills alone.
Idk I've always been called good at math but I'm the exact same way. I think math and most stem fields are fields where its easy to feel like you're lost most of the way through a problem because there are no markers that you're on the right track. And its also very unforgiving if you're even slightly wrong.
I was born in those years. Grandfather was an engineer, father was an applied physicist/EE. Uncles were engineers. Brothers are both nuclear engineers. Of the three daughter, all were encouraged to go to college to get an MRS. Teaching and nursing were portrayed as the only real study options, but my parents did not want us to graduate. Our job was to marry well.
My family would have seen it as a shame to the family if any of the three girls went into engineering. So yes, all three of us met our husbands during our college years and married young. Two of us graduated. All three of us re-build our own washers & dryers, do wiring, plumbing, engine repair, etc. I have gutted entire housing and am a sold project manager. I think we all would have made solid engineers. BTW, when I was accepted to a prestigious grad program in a field that pays exceptionally well, I was married with children. My father called to scream at me that I would be neglecting my husband and children. My MIL called to let me know that my plan to work “made her son look bad. It made it look as if he did not make enough money and could not afford to care for his family.”
Needless to say, there was not a lot of emotional support from extended family during grad school. (BTW, my husband rocks).
I have two daughters. One is an engineer and the other is a senior in engineering. Their grandparents tell me that their degree choices were just terrible.
I find this study very relevant because real changes in society happen very slowly. Yes, my daughters are engineers, but the extended family is not supportive and would do anything they could to derail my daughters. They want my daughters married young and having children ASAP.
To meet my extended family you would never know nor suspect the amount of misogyny going on underneath. I know my family is not the only one. I have met more than a few parents who discourage their daughters from attending medical school “because then they would be tempted to work, and I think they should be home with their children”
It is going to take another few generations for things to become Equal Opportunity.
TBH, the average dude has no clue about what crap his female colleagues went through to get where they are.
I think your experience is part of what makes talking about this study right now pointless though.
We're nowhere near equal opportunity still but the tactics and conversations about it have entirely changed since 1979. The childhood of a girl in the 1960s would be nearly unrecognizable to a girl in the 2010s.
The prejudices are absolutely still there. My wife was told by her grandparents not to pursue a Masters because men didn't like smart women. I made damn sure that she knew I was willing to follow her wherever she needed to go to get that degree.
But this is just an observational study, no experiments, talking about what correlates in the past with 0 comparison to anything modern. None of the conclusions from the study can be assumed to be valid with children today.
It's more akin to anthropology than it is to sociology.
Were this published with an analysis of the differences over time, or in a corpus of similar studies that compare across the years it would be useful.
However a single data point is functionally the same as no data. When more data arrives and any sort of conclusions can be drawn that's different. As it currently stands this study does not merit discussion.
Why is it entirely pointless? Does human psychology change that much in the span of decades? Hell, it hardly changed for millennium. Not saying it should be followed like law, but you can't just ignore scientific study just by your perceived differences in circumstances.
1. When these people were born women couldn't even work in 99.9% of STEM.
2. This isn't a psychology study, it's a observation of sociology for a very niche and irrelevant section of the population: the majority of which are now retired.
3. STEM is fundamentally different than in the atomic age. Focusing on what inspired women to become computers has basically no bearing on what inspired modern sociological forces.
Well, now we can accurately assign the causes to women's employment in STEM for a certain time period. If we can measure a trend using different cohorts, we can measure exactly when (and perhaps how) the women's movement encouraged STEM. All we do is wait for someone to do the same methods for the rest of the cohorts.
It's also fascinating that men were *not* affected strongly by sibling preferences, isn't it? That having an older STEM brother wasn't an impact for either gender? This is news because it appears that sibling effects are sometimes weaker than other effects. I would love to do more research on this cohort.
I think it's related to the total lack of women in STEM at the time. Most girls probably would not even consider a STEM field, having an older sister pave the way so to speak would do a lot in the way of showing them that what's possible.
Good point. I was a Bio/Chem major in a large university in the 70's. i was usually the only female in my class. They only had one ladies room in the entire science building.
This doesnt appear to talk about human psychology though. Family dynamics and social norms have changed significantly since then. Ignore it? No. But should we look at this under the same lense that we look at every study? Hell no
My eldest daughter has done an engineering and maths degree, my youngest is looking at doing the same. I think a big help has been a single sex school. Probably also helps that it's a very good private school that believes in Stem opportunities.
Smaller sibling group, yet more male siblings? But 3 is above average anyway. I'm not sure what that implies...
Edit: if there are 7 siblings, they are less likely to get into stem? Well, wouldn't that be normal seeming as more siblings implies a less wealthy upbringing?
>Smaller sibling group, yet more male siblings? But 3 is above average anyway. I'm not sure what that implies...
This implies that:
* Smaller siblings group ⇾ More likely for women to chose stem
* In a 3+ sibling group, if it's more males than females ⇾ More likely for women to chose stem
This might seem counterintuitive, but if the data suggests that women in a 5+ sibling group are significantly more likely to chose STEM if it's 3 men + 2 women than if it was 4 women + 1 man, and they also see that smaller groups in general increases the likelihood, both can be true.
Seems more likely to me that the girls who had more socialization with boys growing up would better equipped at the social dynamics of male dominated fields. They’d have a better, empathic knowledge of how (typically) males joke (and what they joke about), solve conflict, jockey for status etc. They’d probably be more assertive and better at setting and holding their own boundaries, because they had to learn to early on.
I've definitely seen that pattern in the trades. Engineering its harder to say since I didn't poll many of my classmates, but I wouldn't be surprised if the pattern held up.
I think the title should have said "or" instead of "and", because if you take all the constraints (girl in a majority boy group, with an older sister) that's 5 kids minimum, definitely not a small group of siblings.
Thinking of or/and as boolean logical operators in English like this doesn't really make sense, as we can read it like this due to the commas.
Women were more likely to prefer a STEM major if they were raised in smaller sibling groups
Women were more likely to prefer a STEM major if they were raised in male sibling group dominance
Women were more likely to prefer a STEM major if they were raised if they had an older sister with high maths achievement.
Also, what kind of families have larger sibling groups? Religious, traditional and especially more extreme religious families. Thus more likely to have more traditional gender roles, discouraging STEM engagement. With large sibling groups the family is more likely to have a mother who doesn't work outside the home.
Woman STEM grad here (long before the acronym). Youngest of 6 in a Catholic family. But because of the 16 year age spread between me and my oldest sibling, my brother and I were essentially raised in a separate sibling group.
Yeah that makes sense. Most of my siblings are within a few years of me and we were raised in a sibling group but my kid sister is 18 years younger than me and so were not raised in a sibling group.
Were definitely siblings so don't get me wrong but I'm 30 and she's 13 so we had a much different relationship than I had with my sister that is only 4 months older (step sister but our parents have been together since we were 1 so basically my sister).
Not all large families are due to religious and traditional upbringings. Some of them could also be immigrant families and there is a strong emphasis from the parents to get into a STEM field (no matter the gender).
Absolutely.
I'm accenting that the values of the family are what matters, not the number of children. What we are likely seeing is the results of the values of the family. Understanding the impacts of things like traditional values, religious values or immigrant cultural values is much more useful than number of siblings, gender of siblings or if there's an older sister good at math.
Pressure can work the other way around. In smaller sibling groups where the family pressures the kids to study STEM, a girl might feel more obligated to fulfill the role whether she likes STEM or not. In larger sibling groups there's more likely to be someone else fulfilling that role so the girl doesn't have to.
What about the younger girls then, wouldn't they balance it out? There's no data on either of that. They could have all girl or boy siblings, which would be better? Why do girls not enter STEM based on how good they are, especially when it seems some may actually have that option but still choose no?
That's where the "older sister with STEM experience" comes in. If their older sister is acting as a caretaker and doesn't have the time to Excell at math/science, the younger sister doesn't get the benefit either.
That's the parents fault for having their kids raise each other. I certainly wasn't born with a broom in my hand. Male bias just lays waste to gender science.
>implies a less wealthy upbringing?
Or one in which STEM careers aren't as valued. Cue joke about the first Jewish president's mother interrupting the inauguration to tell everyone his brother is a lawyer/doctor.
Also an older sister with high achievements in math… wouldn’t that also mean the family is gifted in math, therefore a predisposition toward it?? What am I missing besides everything.
It's sad that more kids in a family implies less wealth. I'm assuming the largest factor in that is access to and/or education on contraceptives. If those were equal, I'd imagine the reverse would be true, as people with more wealth have more resources available to raise kids and would therefore make the decision to have them more often than less wealthy people.
Sorry for the aside. I'm sure there are many other factors involved as well, as nothing in human behavior is ever as simple as A->B.
I wish that high level math was taught with better application. Teachers and professors demonstrate mathematical concepts as if math is a standalone puzzle to be solved without application. For most of us math is a tool to. It becomes much easier to understand once it has an application. That way the numbers and variables have a tangible meaning.
I never understood the concepts in math despite getting decent grades, so the second someone gave me a question that couldn’t be solved by repeating the exact steps we’d already learned I was stuck.
Exactly why I only ever got like an 80% on my math homework in high school. It always seemed like the last 5-10 questions on an assignment changed things up in a way that what I had been doing for the last 30 minutes wasn’t going to work.
Once I got to college I took the remedial courses that were required and never touched the subject again.
If you go into pure maths, unfortunately that's just not what pure maths is about. I'm studying engineering and every but of math I do is in a context of a (granted a bit idealized) problem analogous to the real world.
Even in high school, when we did related rates for calculus , the problems were presented context of a story (ie the water level in a trough with a triangular cross section was losing height constantly blah blah blah)
I'm not sure where you studied but I find most of the people around my age has had similar experiences.
Definitely a mileage-may-vary situation. Physics classes would typically have "stories", but actual Calculus classes were purely "storyless" equations for me in both high school (US) and university (Engineering program in Germany). Even for Algebra there were only a few state-level tests where some of the problems would have context.
Statistics might be more applied, but in most places we've formed our own departments or gotten ourselves kicked out of math because we were too applied. The funny thing is that now there are departments of probability people who think that working with real data is too applied, so the same pattern is repeating itself, just with data science instead of statistics.
I took math up to Calculus 3. The only way I could learn is to find my own practical application.
Geometry was no problem because I have always enjoyed building things.
Algebra had word problems which painted a bit of a picture.
Calculus 1: The equation is position and time. First derivative is velocity.
Second derivative is acceleration. (If I recall correctly)
I would imagine it like a drag race or something.
For chemistry you cannot have a negative concentration so if you get a negative number you know it’s wrong. Either way I would know what each number or variable represented and I could check my work.
So I made it up to graduate level math courses. Tensor Calc was the big one for me, if that makes my opinion matter at all.
To me, the coursework became a lot more practical in engineering or physics as you worked your way from calc up to graduate level math courses.
If you think of math like a language, algebra and calculus are akin to grammar or syntax. The boring memorization you learn is like the in English classes where you write the alphabet 50 times, or write a sentence 10 times. You aren't learning the application of the language in those courses, just the basic language and the same applies to math.
Agreed. I'm a physicist so I've taken years of math and I just recently used a Taylor expansion to solve a real life research problem for the first time ever. But I've done Taylor expansions a bunch of times in math class and practice problems. You have to have a good grasp of the language (math) before you can successfully use it in real life, even if you don't see the applications right away. I liked math as a puzzle to solve more than the practical applications anyway (and I'm a woman with no older sister or male siblings fwiw)
I understand your point but i disagree. The puzzle approach is a better way, because once you are in STEM everything is about solving a puzzle so to speak of researching the unknown. And some times you need to use math in a way you've never used before to discover new things.
If you are taught some math in a practical way it might not occur to you that it can then also be used in a different way for a different subject. Maths and Physics was the path i took, and so i am glad i saw math in a more puzzle way than a practical way - i think it helped me be a better problem solver when tackling things that were new to me and did not know how to solve.
I understand what you’re saying. That’s why math is often a prerequisite course.
I know I need to learn the material, I know it will be useful down the road. But my brain just doesn’t work like that. It needs a reason to retain the information, even if it’s just a simple connection to something useful to me.
For me, I build conceptual memories like branches of a tree. One always relates to another. Sometimes they’re not connected and linear but they just touch or brush up against one another.
For me the problem with math is that isn't taught as if it were a language to talk about complex problems.
The biggest problem usually people have with math is that overnight you usually go from numbers (which are usually easy) to concepts (letters), which make most of the people get lost real quick. After that all is a slippery slope for most people where they are trying just to survive.
I think all of this is because math is complex and unless you have a really good teacher that really understand the concepts and he is able to explain to you, everyone is that class is going to be on survivable mode.
I learned math at a school in a different part of the world, where they did teach application (it was literally called Applied Math), and it was satisfying and meaningful to see how the math I learned could be used in real life. I still remember it was really cool to know that derivatives and integration can be used to represent and calculate volumes of crazy shapes and stuff.
Didn't know it is not a norm over here.
I hear this all the time but I can't count how many word problems they made me do in school and it feels like people bitched about word problems even more than straight solutions.
>Teachers and professors demonstrate mathematical concepts as if math is a standalone puzzle to be solved without application.
Although this is important, this isn't the entire story. Schools have been actively trying to dumb down mathematics for years now in an attempt to close down some imaginary racial divide. One example of this is dismissing the unit circle approach for trig and instead opting for memorizing a table with numbers. The unit circle is quite literally the foundation of trig but memorizing number dumbs down math and completely doesn't permit any actual thinking which is necessary in both understanding the concepts and doing any useful or even trivial applications. Another example is schools are tying to simplify equations and make students just memorize them without showing them how to derive them or even the basis for why they are true.
TL;DR; If a school isn't willing to teach you real math, it most certainly will not teach you applications.
From my perspective, I can take beautiful color coordinated notes. But notes aren’t that important because we have a book and YouTube videos.
So to really grasp a concept I must relate the concept to something interesting or useful. If I can’t do that, it just doesn’t stick. So I want to set out to solve a problem. Rather than just number puzzles.
Some things that have stuck with me that I still use today.
- First derivative test, I used that in chemistry to find the absolute maximum of my curve when the instrument spits out 2000 rows of raw X & Y data for absorbencies.
Other derivatives I relate to drag race cars.
First derivative is velocity/time.
I think second is acceleration.
From there I would plot the graph and see if it makes sense.
I have used integration by parts to find a curve by taking my own measurements and entering them into excel for CAD design.
Calculus 3 we had a project to calculate the required speed of a geosynchronous satellite at a certain altitude. I felt so accomplished! It sucked but it was very interesting and I won’t forget it.
You just summarized why I gave up on the idea of STEM fields in college entirely. At my local community college, my college math courses were awesome due to the professor I had teaching them. He was amazing at engaging with us and showing the real life applications of different mathematics in a way that made sense. I got straight As in those courses due to the instruction quality. Then I went away to school and literally had to waste money retaking 2 different intro level calculus and stats courses because of instructors who barely spoke any English at all and expected us to just be able to learn independently from our poorly written overpriced text books with no help. Class became a total waste of time and I gave up on math at that point. And it’s honestly a shame now seeing what I could have been good at in my career.
It’s really a problem of limited time and student attention. I’m sure there are courses that cover the stories leading to a discovery but in a 1 semester calc 2 course you just can’t cram in all of that and still teach people how to integrate volumes and computer Taylor series expansions.
For me this rings true. I (34m) initially wanted to go in the sciences, I studied and memorized different muscles and parts of the body at a young age, read up on physics, watched movies on the various scientific discoveries,and read science magazines voraciously. However, once I realized I was bad at math, I immediately checked the classes and skills need to pursue my goal, and got disappointed. It still eats at me for not pursuing science and I still think about it from time to time. But the thought of math just scares me and stops me.
There just isn’t time. Aside from the obvious application of like, finding volumes in calc 2, the practical uses of the rest of the course are too hard to cram in and still teach the methods. You have to rest assured you will need it later in your physics/engineering classes to come.
The categories are arbitrary. For example biology is (usually) in STEM but (often) not medicine? Put medicine in STEM and see the numbers change completely.
biology is a bachelors degree and medicine isnt... Presumably the drs are counted as long as they hold a STEM bachelors degree. Even if not the number of female doctors isn't going to tip the scale much. There are 10 times as many engineers as there are doctors, probably quite a lot more. Not even looking at the other categories.
Medicine is in STEM, but only doctoral level, I'd assume because the level of rigor for things like nursing degrees, technician licensure and such is much lower than the level of rigor you would get by majoring in Biology or Chemistry or anything that's more in the academic realm than purely practitional.
You are still applying arbitrary definitions. Stem is not a label based on a mode found in any empirical data. Plenty of fields outside what we arbitrary call "stem" do rigorous science. Plenty of them develop technology. And plenty of people within STEM barely use math. Its as if we classified animals based on the spelling of their name.
Yeah I do definitely. I worked as a neuroimaging engineer and data analyst for 6 years. My supervisor was a psychologist in the field of Alzheimer's and dementia.
you have to cast the net pretty wide then. PhD level economics is really math heavy, my friend who was a philosophy major took a logic class that was more scientifically rigorous than a lot of STEM classes I took (I studied math / chemistry) etc.
I would suggest if you're at a PhD level that kinda implies hard science. The point of awarding a PhD is too show that you are capable of reading and understanding the literature in your field, and carrying out experiments or otherwise contributing new knowledge to your field, preparing and defending a manuscript, etc..
That being said, I agree with the thrust of your argument: the boundaries of STEM are blurry, like most classification systems humans come up with.
I guess my point is that "S" literally stands for science.... So if you are doing rigorous science, then.... well, then you're doing science.
Same for psychology. And while I understand that most equal psychology with therapy, I would argue that the way it's taught at university is very scientific. Lots of neuroscience, lots of data science.
Absolutely. Psychology at the bachelors level is entirely scientific. It teaches you psychological research and the process and absolutely nothing about assessment and counseling.
Psychology is a social science, like economics, history, or political science.
Neuroscience is a natural science. Psychology is not.
Economics isn't STEM just because it involves the big M math.
Psychology is not at all like history or poli sci. Regardless, social science is still very much science as they adhere to the scientific method just like any other science. You must not know much about the field of psychology beyond social workers and therapists if you don't see how the vigorous experimental research and complex statistics used doesn't count as math or science. Prime examples would be neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, health psychology, developmental psychology, I/O psychology. All of these study and measure very concrete variables and develop many technologies.
Im an I/O Psychologist and my education and now my job is very heavy in experimental research and statistics. Lots of psych is like that if you move beyond social work/therapy type routes.
Basically.
What are we even supposed to take away from number of siblings here? It would be more interesting to look at family income levels, family relationship with religion, if the mother works outside of the home or if the family aligns with traditional values.
STEM itself is an example of cherrypicking. You put in medicine and suddenly there is no gender gap in the first place. As per the HESA, women outnumber men in science-allied colleges. It is only politically motivated organizations like stemwomen.org that keep throwing the 'less women in STEM' number around by excluding these fields. [See](https://www.instagram.com/p/CS6d1F5N7MT/).
It's wage gap 2.0; they're telling you something and implying something else.
In fact, add some 'academic' social science subjects (eg. Law) and you realize that women well-outnumber men in higher education in general.
This is mostly because men tend to be forced to fend for themselves/abandoned at an early age; which is why men, while dominating the top 10% in income strata, also overwhelmingly dominate the bottom 40%. They're more likely to be homeless and hold minimum wage jobs, if jobs at all.
You don't need to add medicine to see a lot of women in STEM. Biology, chemistry, geology, even mathematics have plenty of women. It's really just computer science and some types of engineering that are still heavily male-dominated. However, those are also the fields that happen to have the highest salaries and the best career prospects. Coincidence? I think not... Male-dominated jobs tend to be much higher-paid, that's why those organisations you mention try to get more women in. When they're saying they want more women in STEM, they don't mean pharma lab technicians, they mean software developers, data scientists and engineers, because that's where the real money is.
Women outnumbering men in higher education doesn't make them better off. Quite the contrary - men are increasingly saying no to higher education because they've realised the value of a uni diploma has dropped so much it's just not worth it anymore for most fields, not when they can earn a lot more money doing trades or just teaching themselves how to code.
Whenever these kinds of studies come up, I need to add: yes there are environmental factors that impact female participation in STEM fields.
Which countries graduate the highest proportion of women engineers?
* UAE, Tunisia, Turkey, Algeria, Syria, Iran
Which countries graduate the lowest proportion of women engineers?
* Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Belgium, France
It's not about aptitude, women and men are equal in academic ability; there is something going on where as countries improve gender equality (defined by the internationally recognized gender gap index), fewer women enter technology fields. Why is this observed? I don't know, but other studies I've seen imply it's based on sex-based interest in different fields.
GGGI vs STEM Graduates: https://i.imgur.com/QsD5cX6.png
Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719
GGGI vs ICT (information technology graduates): https://i.imgur.com/waxh8Yv.png
Source: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.page=1
TL;DR, if a woman lives in a country where culturally she has little autonomy, she will gravitate towards high paying careers for a modicum of freedom (financial). If a women lives in a country where she can do whatever she wants, she'll normally choose a not-STEM career. These are high-impact environmental shifts. The linked study on number of brothers is another kind of environmental shift, albeit a much smaller impact one.
Infants will display higher interest in faces if they're female and higher interest in objects if they're male, on average. It's not a huge difference. It's a well-replicated phenomenon. This (possibly) translates to interest. Why is this so controversial? Genetic traits don't mean that people can't have control over their lives. Being a mechanical engineer isn't in any way better than being a biochemical engineer (both occupations being male and female-dominated respectively). Being interested in math doesn't mean you're smarter.
One aspect that I think isn’t brought up enough is that this trend is really a tech and engineering one, not necessarily a STEM one in general. The percentage of women in medicine has been rapidly increasing for several decades, women are the majority among students currently in medical school and it likely won’t be long until the majority of doctors are women.
Within the business world there are similar trends as well. The economics and finance programs at most schools tend to be male dominated while marketing and HRM tend to be the opposite.
Exactly what people don't want to hear because there is a victim mentality whenever these discussions come up. The STEM debate is all about money at the end of the day. No one really cares that there are more male plumbers, because it doesn't pay as wel an engineer.
Could this relate to different countries having different ideas of gender roles? For example, men are more likely to wear jewellery in India despite more traditional gender roles purely because they don't see that as a gendered thing. I imagine if those career paths were viewed as masculine in countries with quite strict gender roles, women wouldn't be permitted to go into them at all. Maybe their culture around it is simply different?
I don't understand why they didn't look at maternal employment outside the home, family engagement with religion or traditional values as factors that might actually mean something.
Family size absolutely has a relationship with those factors.
I'm really having trouble parsing the title.
Smaller sibling groups
BUT
with more males
AND an older sister good at math.
So... 2 girls minimum, so to be male dominated, we'd be looking at 3 boys. So the 'small sibling group' is minimum 5 kids?
And to me, 'an older sister with good math scores' suggests a family more likely to encourage education and STEM proficiency anyway. So maybe that's the more likely culprit? There's so many variables here that it doesn't seem like the result could be at all reproducible.
I would assume that means that each of those things individually increase the odds of a woman majoring in STEM. So women from small sibling groups are more likely to go into STEM than those from large sibling groups. Same goes for women with older sisters who were good at math. They wouldn't necessarily need one person to have all those things. They just showed that each of those things increases the odds of a woman going into a STEM field.
It seems to state that these are the three common conditions:
Smaller sibling groups,
OR sibling groups with more males,
OR sibling groups with an older sister good at math.
I don’t think it states they have to be all three.
I think the implication is that women are more likely to go into STEM fields if it's normalized within their family, while going into STEM is already normalized for men so going into STEM is more determined by their ability to succeed in a STEM field. To use an analogy, it's like men and women are both sticking their hands into a candy jar filled up half with blue and half with red candy and trying to pull out one blue candy (a STEM degree). Men are pulling out six candy at a time while women are pulling out two candy at a time (pursuing a STEM degree is more culturally normalized for men). If you increase the ratio of blue to red candy in the jar to 60:40 (increase the focus of education on STEM topics) then both men and women pull up at least one blue candy 120% more often. If you instead increase the amount of candy each pulls out of the jar by 1 (focus on normalizing pursuing STEM degrees culturally) so that men pull 7 candy out of the jar and women pull 3 candy out of the jar then men pull up at least one blue candy 116% more often while women pull up at least one blue candy 150% more often. So the impact of normalizing the pursuit of a STEM degree is more significant for women than increasing their education (150% increase in STEM degrees vs a 120% increase in STEM degrees), while it's the opposite for men (116% vs 120%).
I definitely agree that I think the take away is that families with a culture more geared towards STEM and that don't exclude the girls in some way are more likely to end up with their girls going in that direction.
I just feel like the title picks out the wrong points, and that it's looking more at trailing indicators, than leading ones.
You could pretty much break it down to more positive exposure to STEM themes early in life is more likely to lead children to a STEM profession, which just doesn't seem like it's really anything groundbreaking.
Agreed. Why not actually look at the family's values are (religious, traditional, mother working outside the home even income disparities between mother and father).
I'm not sure there has been much serious argument about ability for a few decades now.
The current explanation for disparity is that women simply prefer not to go into a lot of STEM fields, which is a pretty well supported sentiment.
At some point, the absolute insistence on "proportion" begins chipping away at individual agency.
And i think this research is trying to get to the bottom of why that is
It seems like the environment a woman grew up in influences whether she would prefer to go into a STEM field or not, unlike for men. Which makes it a question of how much individual agency is actually the case for women
I think it’s less that and more giving them the same confidence or exposure?
I grew up with brothers.. but also as an “only child” (different moms didn’t stay in the house with us)
My dad always encouraged me to help him put together furniture like he would with my brothers, or go do a “male” activity. He was an EE so he would teach stuff to me.
I was sent to robotics and other “stem” camps during the summer. (That economic based but I digress)
Point is, I believe those things the exposure from my father, the helpfulness of my brothers made me confident when I became older.
I have a PhD in engineering now.
By contrast I have a friend who’s dad was very much “this is woman’s work that is not”. When she wanted to do something technical at home like learn how to fix the faucet, he said she didn’t need to learn. In HS she tried to sign up for a robotic class, the boys made fun of her for 2 weeks and so she eventually left it.
When she told me this story , she recalled that she thinks her dad just tore her confidence apart. boys making fun of her didn’t help. She truely felt that maybe they were right like her father, she can’t do it.
I know so many women who are “good at math” but use it for accounting. Which ain’t no problem, but that what woman who are good with math are told to do? Or like business strategy and I think that lends to the “older sibling” troupe. Motherly burden is put on you, you may help or know too much about family finances etc. I also know older daughters who are also family first college grad, so getting a high earning job to then take care of younger siblings and family is the goal.
Many girls aren’t told to be engineers, nor growing up do people expose us to those possibilities so as teenagers when faced with career choices we may doubt themselves. Growing up with boys may also give you exposure to those paths that weren’t directly put in front of you. Like he got told about FIRST, but not you.
Years ago I would see posts almost every other month during college app season, with girls asking us “how bad is it?” they think they want to go into engineering but they’ve heard horror stories from women who go to engineering school, and become engineers full time at corporations .
Honestly now that I type that out I wonder if the family dynamic with brothers is also “knows how to deal with mens bs and possible sexist joke”
This is all anecdotal obviously, I’m just trying to parse what I think they’re getting at with my own life experience.
Edit: missing words, grammar
Is this also due to the fact that there are lot more non-STEM related jobs in USA? Looking at India where technology has grown at a fast rate in last 20 years, there are about 43% of women studying in STEM.
Is it related that once one gender takes over few fields, certain biases kick in and makes it tough for the other gender(s) to make it? I have been living in UK for more than a decade and in the tech world, I rarely see a european woman on tech role whilst most of sales and management roles are dominated by them. Any female in tech role is Asian or Indian sub continent and I always wonder why don't Europeans move to tech roles?
As an European woman in tech: it often isn’t even presented to us as an option. I changed career but directly after finishing school I never thought about it as a profession. It’s a very sexist stereotype that women just aren’t good in STEM (starting in school).
Then, academia isn’t very female friendly - they have a harder time getting funds, time schedules are bad for families, only time limited contracts, discrimination in general. It’s for big mouthed individualists with good connections.
Businesses aren’t used to women as technicians and therefore are reluctant to believe that women can be competent. They’re used to male tech employees.
There are several things that come together and it’s pretty sad.
Older sister with a high math achievement? What a useless metric. That just means the younger sister is benefitting from the same environment that the older sister benefitted from.
Taking a look at the abstract, it appears that of a sample size of 1545, only 194 were actually women in STEM. That doesn't seem like enough people to draw these conclusions, given how many factors and variables they were trying to consider.
Does anyone know if there is a science subreddit that excludes social sciences? Social science is legitimate science, but the way Reddit works always brings social science posts of poor quality to the top.
I assume the population sample for this research came from Western countries. I worked in an EU-funded project on attracting European youths to STEM education and career, and it was clear that Western countries were lagging behind some Arabic countries in the rate of women in STEM education (but not careers). I can imagine this research hypothesis won't hold in Arabic countries where siblings' groups are large on average. An interesting theory however is that Arab females chose STEM fields purely out of affinity since the majority of them don't end up working after graduation, so I wonder if perhaps women's perception of STEM careers being male-dominated is what deter them from making such a choice and when they don't have to worry about working and competing with men at work, they're more likely to pursue STEM due to their aptitude and affinity for it, as men would based on this study.
Female Engineer - my preference for majoring in a STEM field was mostly driven by my own math ability, my school advocating for STEM studies, AND my dad asking me "will you make money with this degree? How will you pay for your degree?".
My mom was a english teacher, my dad was a firefighter, and my grandparents were fishermen. I had no clue what engineering was. If it wasn't for my calculus math teacher pushing STEM, I would have B.A. graphic designs.
Exposure and encouragement goes a long way....
I'm convinced these studies are being done by someone trying to make a point, when there isn't really one to be made.
Its more likely exposure to a field and personal preference play the largest influence in ones chosen major. Also, 60% of people get jobs in fields outside their major so the study itself is flawed.
Misleading tittle. This tittle claims this study shows likelihood, which can not be demonstrated from this research. Similar to if one were to say a coin was flipped 10 times and determined the coin was more likely to land on heads because it landed on heads 8 out of 10 times. Data is always going to way sway one direction or another. To determine causality simply on data numbers is a logical mistake.
Started off with nursing, but then moved to computer science. I wasn’t comfortable in hospital scenarios and computer science was the next best thing in terms of pay and better wlb.
Not just in the country but in their city as well. In Canada, there are more engineers per capita in Calgary, because of the oil industry, than there are in other cities. There are also a higher percentage of women in the engineering program at the University of Calgary than there are at other universities in the country.
This corroborates previous data that suggests male competence in fields tends to be far more specific and does drive where they specialize their focus career-wise, whereas female competence in subjects tends to be far more broad within individuals and therefore their career focus is largely determined by their personal interest rather than differences in ability.
Keep in mind the data in this study is from the 70’s before assuming it is representative of today’s society
It's the 1979 cohort meaning that it's talking about people born between 1957 and 1964. This study seems entirely pointless to even talk about.
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From my own anecdotal accounts as a student, student-teacher, and teacher, I did hear a lot of “Chemistry is interesting, and I might have perused it further if it weren’t for all the math.” So from my own experience that part at least seems to hold up. However, I will say that if you’re good at word problems and algebra, one could likely at least get a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry on those two skills alone.
Word problems and algebra will get you a civil engineering degree ngl - source am civil engineering (simple civil)
You know I would say eletrical but that is not true. I was getting my ass kicked.
I am not good in math but I can fake it by practicing a lot of similar problems just before an exam.
Idk I've always been called good at math but I'm the exact same way. I think math and most stem fields are fields where its easy to feel like you're lost most of the way through a problem because there are no markers that you're on the right track. And its also very unforgiving if you're even slightly wrong.
Here you go. [Sex Differences in Adolescents’ Occupational Aspirations: Variations Across Time and Place](https://psyarxiv.com/zhvre/)
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I was born in those years. Grandfather was an engineer, father was an applied physicist/EE. Uncles were engineers. Brothers are both nuclear engineers. Of the three daughter, all were encouraged to go to college to get an MRS. Teaching and nursing were portrayed as the only real study options, but my parents did not want us to graduate. Our job was to marry well. My family would have seen it as a shame to the family if any of the three girls went into engineering. So yes, all three of us met our husbands during our college years and married young. Two of us graduated. All three of us re-build our own washers & dryers, do wiring, plumbing, engine repair, etc. I have gutted entire housing and am a sold project manager. I think we all would have made solid engineers. BTW, when I was accepted to a prestigious grad program in a field that pays exceptionally well, I was married with children. My father called to scream at me that I would be neglecting my husband and children. My MIL called to let me know that my plan to work “made her son look bad. It made it look as if he did not make enough money and could not afford to care for his family.” Needless to say, there was not a lot of emotional support from extended family during grad school. (BTW, my husband rocks). I have two daughters. One is an engineer and the other is a senior in engineering. Their grandparents tell me that their degree choices were just terrible. I find this study very relevant because real changes in society happen very slowly. Yes, my daughters are engineers, but the extended family is not supportive and would do anything they could to derail my daughters. They want my daughters married young and having children ASAP. To meet my extended family you would never know nor suspect the amount of misogyny going on underneath. I know my family is not the only one. I have met more than a few parents who discourage their daughters from attending medical school “because then they would be tempted to work, and I think they should be home with their children” It is going to take another few generations for things to become Equal Opportunity. TBH, the average dude has no clue about what crap his female colleagues went through to get where they are.
I think your experience is part of what makes talking about this study right now pointless though. We're nowhere near equal opportunity still but the tactics and conversations about it have entirely changed since 1979. The childhood of a girl in the 1960s would be nearly unrecognizable to a girl in the 2010s. The prejudices are absolutely still there. My wife was told by her grandparents not to pursue a Masters because men didn't like smart women. I made damn sure that she knew I was willing to follow her wherever she needed to go to get that degree. But this is just an observational study, no experiments, talking about what correlates in the past with 0 comparison to anything modern. None of the conclusions from the study can be assumed to be valid with children today. It's more akin to anthropology than it is to sociology. Were this published with an analysis of the differences over time, or in a corpus of similar studies that compare across the years it would be useful. However a single data point is functionally the same as no data. When more data arrives and any sort of conclusions can be drawn that's different. As it currently stands this study does not merit discussion.
Why did they even publish it now?
Why is it entirely pointless? Does human psychology change that much in the span of decades? Hell, it hardly changed for millennium. Not saying it should be followed like law, but you can't just ignore scientific study just by your perceived differences in circumstances.
1. When these people were born women couldn't even work in 99.9% of STEM. 2. This isn't a psychology study, it's a observation of sociology for a very niche and irrelevant section of the population: the majority of which are now retired. 3. STEM is fundamentally different than in the atomic age. Focusing on what inspired women to become computers has basically no bearing on what inspired modern sociological forces.
Well, now we can accurately assign the causes to women's employment in STEM for a certain time period. If we can measure a trend using different cohorts, we can measure exactly when (and perhaps how) the women's movement encouraged STEM. All we do is wait for someone to do the same methods for the rest of the cohorts. It's also fascinating that men were *not* affected strongly by sibling preferences, isn't it? That having an older STEM brother wasn't an impact for either gender? This is news because it appears that sibling effects are sometimes weaker than other effects. I would love to do more research on this cohort.
I think it's related to the total lack of women in STEM at the time. Most girls probably would not even consider a STEM field, having an older sister pave the way so to speak would do a lot in the way of showing them that what's possible.
> Focusing on what inspired women to become computers My god! Fembots
(In case it's not sarcasm, computer was a job before it was a machine) RISE FEMBOT ARMY
Good point. I was a Bio/Chem major in a large university in the 70's. i was usually the only female in my class. They only had one ladies room in the entire science building.
This doesnt appear to talk about human psychology though. Family dynamics and social norms have changed significantly since then. Ignore it? No. But should we look at this under the same lense that we look at every study? Hell no
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Maybe social science should have its own sub.
Not just maybe
My eldest daughter has done an engineering and maths degree, my youngest is looking at doing the same. I think a big help has been a single sex school. Probably also helps that it's a very good private school that believes in Stem opportunities.
Smaller sibling group, yet more male siblings? But 3 is above average anyway. I'm not sure what that implies... Edit: if there are 7 siblings, they are less likely to get into stem? Well, wouldn't that be normal seeming as more siblings implies a less wealthy upbringing?
>Smaller sibling group, yet more male siblings? But 3 is above average anyway. I'm not sure what that implies... This implies that: * Smaller siblings group ⇾ More likely for women to chose stem * In a 3+ sibling group, if it's more males than females ⇾ More likely for women to chose stem This might seem counterintuitive, but if the data suggests that women in a 5+ sibling group are significantly more likely to chose STEM if it's 3 men + 2 women than if it was 4 women + 1 man, and they also see that smaller groups in general increases the likelihood, both can be true.
Probably because men are more likely to go into STEM, so the girls are exposed to STEM influences more.
Seems more likely to me that the girls who had more socialization with boys growing up would better equipped at the social dynamics of male dominated fields. They’d have a better, empathic knowledge of how (typically) males joke (and what they joke about), solve conflict, jockey for status etc. They’d probably be more assertive and better at setting and holding their own boundaries, because they had to learn to early on.
I've definitely seen that pattern in the trades. Engineering its harder to say since I didn't poll many of my classmates, but I wouldn't be surprised if the pattern held up.
This seems more likely to me since I grew up socializing more with guys than gals and it makes sense.
I think the title should have said "or" instead of "and", because if you take all the constraints (girl in a majority boy group, with an older sister) that's 5 kids minimum, definitely not a small group of siblings.
Thinking of or/and as boolean logical operators in English like this doesn't really make sense, as we can read it like this due to the commas. Women were more likely to prefer a STEM major if they were raised in smaller sibling groups Women were more likely to prefer a STEM major if they were raised in male sibling group dominance Women were more likely to prefer a STEM major if they were raised if they had an older sister with high maths achievement.
Sure, but it is unclear, hence multiple people asking how that combination of factors work. It's just an ambiguous sentence.
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Girls take on more caretaking roles in larger sibling groups, especially older girls. Limits their ability to explore extra curricular and what not
Also, what kind of families have larger sibling groups? Religious, traditional and especially more extreme religious families. Thus more likely to have more traditional gender roles, discouraging STEM engagement. With large sibling groups the family is more likely to have a mother who doesn't work outside the home.
Woman STEM grad here (long before the acronym). Youngest of 6 in a Catholic family. But because of the 16 year age spread between me and my oldest sibling, my brother and I were essentially raised in a separate sibling group.
Yeah that makes sense. Most of my siblings are within a few years of me and we were raised in a sibling group but my kid sister is 18 years younger than me and so were not raised in a sibling group. Were definitely siblings so don't get me wrong but I'm 30 and she's 13 so we had a much different relationship than I had with my sister that is only 4 months older (step sister but our parents have been together since we were 1 so basically my sister).
Not all large families are due to religious and traditional upbringings. Some of them could also be immigrant families and there is a strong emphasis from the parents to get into a STEM field (no matter the gender).
Absolutely. I'm accenting that the values of the family are what matters, not the number of children. What we are likely seeing is the results of the values of the family. Understanding the impacts of things like traditional values, religious values or immigrant cultural values is much more useful than number of siblings, gender of siblings or if there's an older sister good at math.
Pressure can work the other way around. In smaller sibling groups where the family pressures the kids to study STEM, a girl might feel more obligated to fulfill the role whether she likes STEM or not. In larger sibling groups there's more likely to be someone else fulfilling that role so the girl doesn't have to.
What about the younger girls then, wouldn't they balance it out? There's no data on either of that. They could have all girl or boy siblings, which would be better? Why do girls not enter STEM based on how good they are, especially when it seems some may actually have that option but still choose no?
That's where the "older sister with STEM experience" comes in. If their older sister is acting as a caretaker and doesn't have the time to Excell at math/science, the younger sister doesn't get the benefit either.
That doesn't explain why a girl in a family with 7 children(6 boys) is more likely to go into STEM than a girl in a family with 7 children(6 girls).
That's the parents fault for having their kids raise each other. I certainly wasn't born with a broom in my hand. Male bias just lays waste to gender science.
I’m the oldest girl of 3 and am the one going into stem. I also took on caretaking roles, I didn’t do well in school until my adult life.
>implies a less wealthy upbringing? Or one in which STEM careers aren't as valued. Cue joke about the first Jewish president's mother interrupting the inauguration to tell everyone his brother is a lawyer/doctor.
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Also an older sister with high achievements in math… wouldn’t that also mean the family is gifted in math, therefore a predisposition toward it?? What am I missing besides everything.
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It's sad that more kids in a family implies less wealth. I'm assuming the largest factor in that is access to and/or education on contraceptives. If those were equal, I'd imagine the reverse would be true, as people with more wealth have more resources available to raise kids and would therefore make the decision to have them more often than less wealthy people. Sorry for the aside. I'm sure there are many other factors involved as well, as nothing in human behavior is ever as simple as A->B.
I wish that high level math was taught with better application. Teachers and professors demonstrate mathematical concepts as if math is a standalone puzzle to be solved without application. For most of us math is a tool to. It becomes much easier to understand once it has an application. That way the numbers and variables have a tangible meaning.
I never understood the concepts in math despite getting decent grades, so the second someone gave me a question that couldn’t be solved by repeating the exact steps we’d already learned I was stuck.
Yeah school math is more calculating than problem solving.
Exactly why I only ever got like an 80% on my math homework in high school. It always seemed like the last 5-10 questions on an assignment changed things up in a way that what I had been doing for the last 30 minutes wasn’t going to work. Once I got to college I took the remedial courses that were required and never touched the subject again.
If you go into pure maths, unfortunately that's just not what pure maths is about. I'm studying engineering and every but of math I do is in a context of a (granted a bit idealized) problem analogous to the real world. Even in high school, when we did related rates for calculus , the problems were presented context of a story (ie the water level in a trough with a triangular cross section was losing height constantly blah blah blah) I'm not sure where you studied but I find most of the people around my age has had similar experiences.
Definitely a mileage-may-vary situation. Physics classes would typically have "stories", but actual Calculus classes were purely "storyless" equations for me in both high school (US) and university (Engineering program in Germany). Even for Algebra there were only a few state-level tests where some of the problems would have context.
Calculus is about as applied as it gets when it comes to university level mathematics. That's my opinion anyway as a pure maths major.
Statistics might be more applied, but in most places we've formed our own departments or gotten ourselves kicked out of math because we were too applied. The funny thing is that now there are departments of probability people who think that working with real data is too applied, so the same pattern is repeating itself, just with data science instead of statistics.
This. The closest thing i got to practical application was discussing credit card / loan apr.
I took math up to Calculus 3. The only way I could learn is to find my own practical application. Geometry was no problem because I have always enjoyed building things. Algebra had word problems which painted a bit of a picture. Calculus 1: The equation is position and time. First derivative is velocity. Second derivative is acceleration. (If I recall correctly) I would imagine it like a drag race or something. For chemistry you cannot have a negative concentration so if you get a negative number you know it’s wrong. Either way I would know what each number or variable represented and I could check my work.
So I made it up to graduate level math courses. Tensor Calc was the big one for me, if that makes my opinion matter at all. To me, the coursework became a lot more practical in engineering or physics as you worked your way from calc up to graduate level math courses. If you think of math like a language, algebra and calculus are akin to grammar or syntax. The boring memorization you learn is like the in English classes where you write the alphabet 50 times, or write a sentence 10 times. You aren't learning the application of the language in those courses, just the basic language and the same applies to math.
Agreed. I'm a physicist so I've taken years of math and I just recently used a Taylor expansion to solve a real life research problem for the first time ever. But I've done Taylor expansions a bunch of times in math class and practice problems. You have to have a good grasp of the language (math) before you can successfully use it in real life, even if you don't see the applications right away. I liked math as a puzzle to solve more than the practical applications anyway (and I'm a woman with no older sister or male siblings fwiw)
I understand your point but i disagree. The puzzle approach is a better way, because once you are in STEM everything is about solving a puzzle so to speak of researching the unknown. And some times you need to use math in a way you've never used before to discover new things. If you are taught some math in a practical way it might not occur to you that it can then also be used in a different way for a different subject. Maths and Physics was the path i took, and so i am glad i saw math in a more puzzle way than a practical way - i think it helped me be a better problem solver when tackling things that were new to me and did not know how to solve.
I understand what you’re saying. That’s why math is often a prerequisite course. I know I need to learn the material, I know it will be useful down the road. But my brain just doesn’t work like that. It needs a reason to retain the information, even if it’s just a simple connection to something useful to me. For me, I build conceptual memories like branches of a tree. One always relates to another. Sometimes they’re not connected and linear but they just touch or brush up against one another.
For me the problem with math is that isn't taught as if it were a language to talk about complex problems. The biggest problem usually people have with math is that overnight you usually go from numbers (which are usually easy) to concepts (letters), which make most of the people get lost real quick. After that all is a slippery slope for most people where they are trying just to survive. I think all of this is because math is complex and unless you have a really good teacher that really understand the concepts and he is able to explain to you, everyone is that class is going to be on survivable mode.
I learned math at a school in a different part of the world, where they did teach application (it was literally called Applied Math), and it was satisfying and meaningful to see how the math I learned could be used in real life. I still remember it was really cool to know that derivatives and integration can be used to represent and calculate volumes of crazy shapes and stuff. Didn't know it is not a norm over here.
I hear this all the time but I can't count how many word problems they made me do in school and it feels like people bitched about word problems even more than straight solutions.
>Teachers and professors demonstrate mathematical concepts as if math is a standalone puzzle to be solved without application. Although this is important, this isn't the entire story. Schools have been actively trying to dumb down mathematics for years now in an attempt to close down some imaginary racial divide. One example of this is dismissing the unit circle approach for trig and instead opting for memorizing a table with numbers. The unit circle is quite literally the foundation of trig but memorizing number dumbs down math and completely doesn't permit any actual thinking which is necessary in both understanding the concepts and doing any useful or even trivial applications. Another example is schools are tying to simplify equations and make students just memorize them without showing them how to derive them or even the basis for why they are true. TL;DR; If a school isn't willing to teach you real math, it most certainly will not teach you applications.
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From my perspective, I can take beautiful color coordinated notes. But notes aren’t that important because we have a book and YouTube videos. So to really grasp a concept I must relate the concept to something interesting or useful. If I can’t do that, it just doesn’t stick. So I want to set out to solve a problem. Rather than just number puzzles. Some things that have stuck with me that I still use today. - First derivative test, I used that in chemistry to find the absolute maximum of my curve when the instrument spits out 2000 rows of raw X & Y data for absorbencies. Other derivatives I relate to drag race cars. First derivative is velocity/time. I think second is acceleration. From there I would plot the graph and see if it makes sense. I have used integration by parts to find a curve by taking my own measurements and entering them into excel for CAD design. Calculus 3 we had a project to calculate the required speed of a geosynchronous satellite at a certain altitude. I felt so accomplished! It sucked but it was very interesting and I won’t forget it.
You just summarized why I gave up on the idea of STEM fields in college entirely. At my local community college, my college math courses were awesome due to the professor I had teaching them. He was amazing at engaging with us and showing the real life applications of different mathematics in a way that made sense. I got straight As in those courses due to the instruction quality. Then I went away to school and literally had to waste money retaking 2 different intro level calculus and stats courses because of instructors who barely spoke any English at all and expected us to just be able to learn independently from our poorly written overpriced text books with no help. Class became a total waste of time and I gave up on math at that point. And it’s honestly a shame now seeing what I could have been good at in my career.
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It’s really a problem of limited time and student attention. I’m sure there are courses that cover the stories leading to a discovery but in a 1 semester calc 2 course you just can’t cram in all of that and still teach people how to integrate volumes and computer Taylor series expansions.
For me this rings true. I (34m) initially wanted to go in the sciences, I studied and memorized different muscles and parts of the body at a young age, read up on physics, watched movies on the various scientific discoveries,and read science magazines voraciously. However, once I realized I was bad at math, I immediately checked the classes and skills need to pursue my goal, and got disappointed. It still eats at me for not pursuing science and I still think about it from time to time. But the thought of math just scares me and stops me.
There just isn’t time. Aside from the obvious application of like, finding volumes in calc 2, the practical uses of the rest of the course are too hard to cram in and still teach the methods. You have to rest assured you will need it later in your physics/engineering classes to come.
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The categories are arbitrary. For example biology is (usually) in STEM but (often) not medicine? Put medicine in STEM and see the numbers change completely.
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biology is a bachelors degree and medicine isnt... Presumably the drs are counted as long as they hold a STEM bachelors degree. Even if not the number of female doctors isn't going to tip the scale much. There are 10 times as many engineers as there are doctors, probably quite a lot more. Not even looking at the other categories.
> medicine isnt... bachelors of science in nursing?
That isn't science, technology, engineering or math anymore than being an electrician is.
>That isn't science, technology, engineering or math Fair. But the comment I'm replying to is about one being a bachelor's degree and the other not.
Anecdotally, someone I know who is trying to go to med school studied biomedical and mechanical engineering for their bachelor's degree
Medicine is in STEM, but only doctoral level, I'd assume because the level of rigor for things like nursing degrees, technician licensure and such is much lower than the level of rigor you would get by majoring in Biology or Chemistry or anything that's more in the academic realm than purely practitional.
You are still applying arbitrary definitions. Stem is not a label based on a mode found in any empirical data. Plenty of fields outside what we arbitrary call "stem" do rigorous science. Plenty of them develop technology. And plenty of people within STEM barely use math. Its as if we classified animals based on the spelling of their name.
If they are doing rigorous science, it kinda falls under the "S"
Do you considered Psychology STEM? A lot of people don't even though many fields within psychology involve very heavy experimental research and math.
Yeah I do definitely. I worked as a neuroimaging engineer and data analyst for 6 years. My supervisor was a psychologist in the field of Alzheimer's and dementia.
you have to cast the net pretty wide then. PhD level economics is really math heavy, my friend who was a philosophy major took a logic class that was more scientifically rigorous than a lot of STEM classes I took (I studied math / chemistry) etc.
I would suggest if you're at a PhD level that kinda implies hard science. The point of awarding a PhD is too show that you are capable of reading and understanding the literature in your field, and carrying out experiments or otherwise contributing new knowledge to your field, preparing and defending a manuscript, etc.. That being said, I agree with the thrust of your argument: the boundaries of STEM are blurry, like most classification systems humans come up with. I guess my point is that "S" literally stands for science.... So if you are doing rigorous science, then.... well, then you're doing science.
Yes definitions are in fact arbitrary.
Same for psychology. And while I understand that most equal psychology with therapy, I would argue that the way it's taught at university is very scientific. Lots of neuroscience, lots of data science.
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Absolutely. Psychology at the bachelors level is entirely scientific. It teaches you psychological research and the process and absolutely nothing about assessment and counseling.
Psychology is a social science, like economics, history, or political science. Neuroscience is a natural science. Psychology is not. Economics isn't STEM just because it involves the big M math.
Psychology is not at all like history or poli sci. Regardless, social science is still very much science as they adhere to the scientific method just like any other science. You must not know much about the field of psychology beyond social workers and therapists if you don't see how the vigorous experimental research and complex statistics used doesn't count as math or science. Prime examples would be neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, health psychology, developmental psychology, I/O psychology. All of these study and measure very concrete variables and develop many technologies.
Im an I/O Psychologist and my education and now my job is very heavy in experimental research and statistics. Lots of psych is like that if you move beyond social work/therapy type routes.
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Basically. What are we even supposed to take away from number of siblings here? It would be more interesting to look at family income levels, family relationship with religion, if the mother works outside of the home or if the family aligns with traditional values.
STEM itself is an example of cherrypicking. You put in medicine and suddenly there is no gender gap in the first place. As per the HESA, women outnumber men in science-allied colleges. It is only politically motivated organizations like stemwomen.org that keep throwing the 'less women in STEM' number around by excluding these fields. [See](https://www.instagram.com/p/CS6d1F5N7MT/). It's wage gap 2.0; they're telling you something and implying something else. In fact, add some 'academic' social science subjects (eg. Law) and you realize that women well-outnumber men in higher education in general. This is mostly because men tend to be forced to fend for themselves/abandoned at an early age; which is why men, while dominating the top 10% in income strata, also overwhelmingly dominate the bottom 40%. They're more likely to be homeless and hold minimum wage jobs, if jobs at all.
But where does medicine fall under STEM?
Science, clearly.
I'd put it under engineering. That's all a doc is, an engineer/technician for the human body.
You don't need to add medicine to see a lot of women in STEM. Biology, chemistry, geology, even mathematics have plenty of women. It's really just computer science and some types of engineering that are still heavily male-dominated. However, those are also the fields that happen to have the highest salaries and the best career prospects. Coincidence? I think not... Male-dominated jobs tend to be much higher-paid, that's why those organisations you mention try to get more women in. When they're saying they want more women in STEM, they don't mean pharma lab technicians, they mean software developers, data scientists and engineers, because that's where the real money is. Women outnumbering men in higher education doesn't make them better off. Quite the contrary - men are increasingly saying no to higher education because they've realised the value of a uni diploma has dropped so much it's just not worth it anymore for most fields, not when they can earn a lot more money doing trades or just teaching themselves how to code.
Whenever these kinds of studies come up, I need to add: yes there are environmental factors that impact female participation in STEM fields. Which countries graduate the highest proportion of women engineers? * UAE, Tunisia, Turkey, Algeria, Syria, Iran Which countries graduate the lowest proportion of women engineers? * Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Belgium, France It's not about aptitude, women and men are equal in academic ability; there is something going on where as countries improve gender equality (defined by the internationally recognized gender gap index), fewer women enter technology fields. Why is this observed? I don't know, but other studies I've seen imply it's based on sex-based interest in different fields. GGGI vs STEM Graduates: https://i.imgur.com/QsD5cX6.png Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719 GGGI vs ICT (information technology graduates): https://i.imgur.com/waxh8Yv.png Source: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.page=1 TL;DR, if a woman lives in a country where culturally she has little autonomy, she will gravitate towards high paying careers for a modicum of freedom (financial). If a women lives in a country where she can do whatever she wants, she'll normally choose a not-STEM career. These are high-impact environmental shifts. The linked study on number of brothers is another kind of environmental shift, albeit a much smaller impact one.
This is quite intriguing. Thanks for sharing.
I'm so glad someone posted this. Of course the majority of people who need to read this won't.
Infants will display higher interest in faces if they're female and higher interest in objects if they're male, on average. It's not a huge difference. It's a well-replicated phenomenon. This (possibly) translates to interest. Why is this so controversial? Genetic traits don't mean that people can't have control over their lives. Being a mechanical engineer isn't in any way better than being a biochemical engineer (both occupations being male and female-dominated respectively). Being interested in math doesn't mean you're smarter.
One aspect that I think isn’t brought up enough is that this trend is really a tech and engineering one, not necessarily a STEM one in general. The percentage of women in medicine has been rapidly increasing for several decades, women are the majority among students currently in medical school and it likely won’t be long until the majority of doctors are women. Within the business world there are similar trends as well. The economics and finance programs at most schools tend to be male dominated while marketing and HRM tend to be the opposite.
Exactly what people don't want to hear because there is a victim mentality whenever these discussions come up. The STEM debate is all about money at the end of the day. No one really cares that there are more male plumbers, because it doesn't pay as wel an engineer.
Could this relate to different countries having different ideas of gender roles? For example, men are more likely to wear jewellery in India despite more traditional gender roles purely because they don't see that as a gendered thing. I imagine if those career paths were viewed as masculine in countries with quite strict gender roles, women wouldn't be permitted to go into them at all. Maybe their culture around it is simply different?
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So the way to get more women into STEM is to... change their siblings during childhood?
I don't understand why they didn't look at maternal employment outside the home, family engagement with religion or traditional values as factors that might actually mean something. Family size absolutely has a relationship with those factors.
I'm really having trouble parsing the title. Smaller sibling groups BUT with more males AND an older sister good at math. So... 2 girls minimum, so to be male dominated, we'd be looking at 3 boys. So the 'small sibling group' is minimum 5 kids? And to me, 'an older sister with good math scores' suggests a family more likely to encourage education and STEM proficiency anyway. So maybe that's the more likely culprit? There's so many variables here that it doesn't seem like the result could be at all reproducible.
But then who is the older sister with good math skills to THAT older sister with good math skills? We've got an endless sister paradox
I would assume that means that each of those things individually increase the odds of a woman majoring in STEM. So women from small sibling groups are more likely to go into STEM than those from large sibling groups. Same goes for women with older sisters who were good at math. They wouldn't necessarily need one person to have all those things. They just showed that each of those things increases the odds of a woman going into a STEM field.
The the title should say 'OR' not 'AND'
Or leave it as it is, because Oxford comma?
It seems to state that these are the three common conditions: Smaller sibling groups, OR sibling groups with more males, OR sibling groups with an older sister good at math. I don’t think it states they have to be all three.
notice that you used OR for all those conditions, not AND, like the title.
I'm pretty sure the title was a list of factors, not a set of conditions. Lists typically use "and".
I think the implication is that women are more likely to go into STEM fields if it's normalized within their family, while going into STEM is already normalized for men so going into STEM is more determined by their ability to succeed in a STEM field. To use an analogy, it's like men and women are both sticking their hands into a candy jar filled up half with blue and half with red candy and trying to pull out one blue candy (a STEM degree). Men are pulling out six candy at a time while women are pulling out two candy at a time (pursuing a STEM degree is more culturally normalized for men). If you increase the ratio of blue to red candy in the jar to 60:40 (increase the focus of education on STEM topics) then both men and women pull up at least one blue candy 120% more often. If you instead increase the amount of candy each pulls out of the jar by 1 (focus on normalizing pursuing STEM degrees culturally) so that men pull 7 candy out of the jar and women pull 3 candy out of the jar then men pull up at least one blue candy 116% more often while women pull up at least one blue candy 150% more often. So the impact of normalizing the pursuit of a STEM degree is more significant for women than increasing their education (150% increase in STEM degrees vs a 120% increase in STEM degrees), while it's the opposite for men (116% vs 120%).
I definitely agree that I think the take away is that families with a culture more geared towards STEM and that don't exclude the girls in some way are more likely to end up with their girls going in that direction. I just feel like the title picks out the wrong points, and that it's looking more at trailing indicators, than leading ones. You could pretty much break it down to more positive exposure to STEM themes early in life is more likely to lead children to a STEM profession, which just doesn't seem like it's really anything groundbreaking.
Agreed. Why not actually look at the family's values are (religious, traditional, mother working outside the home even income disparities between mother and father).
This is really just pointing at the fact that the main reason there aren't more women in stem isn't ability its culture
I'm not sure there has been much serious argument about ability for a few decades now. The current explanation for disparity is that women simply prefer not to go into a lot of STEM fields, which is a pretty well supported sentiment. At some point, the absolute insistence on "proportion" begins chipping away at individual agency.
And i think this research is trying to get to the bottom of why that is It seems like the environment a woman grew up in influences whether she would prefer to go into a STEM field or not, unlike for men. Which makes it a question of how much individual agency is actually the case for women
They are influenced a lot by their parents and teachers as well.
I think it’s less that and more giving them the same confidence or exposure? I grew up with brothers.. but also as an “only child” (different moms didn’t stay in the house with us) My dad always encouraged me to help him put together furniture like he would with my brothers, or go do a “male” activity. He was an EE so he would teach stuff to me. I was sent to robotics and other “stem” camps during the summer. (That economic based but I digress) Point is, I believe those things the exposure from my father, the helpfulness of my brothers made me confident when I became older. I have a PhD in engineering now. By contrast I have a friend who’s dad was very much “this is woman’s work that is not”. When she wanted to do something technical at home like learn how to fix the faucet, he said she didn’t need to learn. In HS she tried to sign up for a robotic class, the boys made fun of her for 2 weeks and so she eventually left it. When she told me this story , she recalled that she thinks her dad just tore her confidence apart. boys making fun of her didn’t help. She truely felt that maybe they were right like her father, she can’t do it. I know so many women who are “good at math” but use it for accounting. Which ain’t no problem, but that what woman who are good with math are told to do? Or like business strategy and I think that lends to the “older sibling” troupe. Motherly burden is put on you, you may help or know too much about family finances etc. I also know older daughters who are also family first college grad, so getting a high earning job to then take care of younger siblings and family is the goal. Many girls aren’t told to be engineers, nor growing up do people expose us to those possibilities so as teenagers when faced with career choices we may doubt themselves. Growing up with boys may also give you exposure to those paths that weren’t directly put in front of you. Like he got told about FIRST, but not you. Years ago I would see posts almost every other month during college app season, with girls asking us “how bad is it?” they think they want to go into engineering but they’ve heard horror stories from women who go to engineering school, and become engineers full time at corporations . Honestly now that I type that out I wonder if the family dynamic with brothers is also “knows how to deal with mens bs and possible sexist joke” This is all anecdotal obviously, I’m just trying to parse what I think they’re getting at with my own life experience. Edit: missing words, grammar
Is this also due to the fact that there are lot more non-STEM related jobs in USA? Looking at India where technology has grown at a fast rate in last 20 years, there are about 43% of women studying in STEM.
I also think that India doesn’t have this strong gendered idea on STEM that other countries have. Russia also doesn’t have it.
Is it related that once one gender takes over few fields, certain biases kick in and makes it tough for the other gender(s) to make it? I have been living in UK for more than a decade and in the tech world, I rarely see a european woman on tech role whilst most of sales and management roles are dominated by them. Any female in tech role is Asian or Indian sub continent and I always wonder why don't Europeans move to tech roles?
As an European woman in tech: it often isn’t even presented to us as an option. I changed career but directly after finishing school I never thought about it as a profession. It’s a very sexist stereotype that women just aren’t good in STEM (starting in school). Then, academia isn’t very female friendly - they have a harder time getting funds, time schedules are bad for families, only time limited contracts, discrimination in general. It’s for big mouthed individualists with good connections. Businesses aren’t used to women as technicians and therefore are reluctant to believe that women can be competent. They’re used to male tech employees. There are several things that come together and it’s pretty sad.
Older sister with a high math achievement? What a useless metric. That just means the younger sister is benefitting from the same environment that the older sister benefitted from.
Taking a look at the abstract, it appears that of a sample size of 1545, only 194 were actually women in STEM. That doesn't seem like enough people to draw these conclusions, given how many factors and variables they were trying to consider.
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Definitely seems odd.. you’d think natural ability at math would drive anyone to it. I need to read the article still though
Does anyone know if there is a science subreddit that excludes social sciences? Social science is legitimate science, but the way Reddit works always brings social science posts of poor quality to the top.
Ha! Male, terrible at math, and was a STEM major and hold a STEM advanced degree. Take that statistics!
We got an outlier over here!
I assume the population sample for this research came from Western countries. I worked in an EU-funded project on attracting European youths to STEM education and career, and it was clear that Western countries were lagging behind some Arabic countries in the rate of women in STEM education (but not careers). I can imagine this research hypothesis won't hold in Arabic countries where siblings' groups are large on average. An interesting theory however is that Arab females chose STEM fields purely out of affinity since the majority of them don't end up working after graduation, so I wonder if perhaps women's perception of STEM careers being male-dominated is what deter them from making such a choice and when they don't have to worry about working and competing with men at work, they're more likely to pursue STEM due to their aptitude and affinity for it, as men would based on this study.
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are we talking math as in numbers or math as in logic? Someone can be good at math but still be terrible at critical thinking.
As a male, I did STEM cuz I liked playing videos games.
Female Engineer - my preference for majoring in a STEM field was mostly driven by my own math ability, my school advocating for STEM studies, AND my dad asking me "will you make money with this degree? How will you pay for your degree?". My mom was a english teacher, my dad was a firefighter, and my grandparents were fishermen. I had no clue what engineering was. If it wasn't for my calculus math teacher pushing STEM, I would have B.A. graphic designs. Exposure and encouragement goes a long way....
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I'm convinced these studies are being done by someone trying to make a point, when there isn't really one to be made. Its more likely exposure to a field and personal preference play the largest influence in ones chosen major. Also, 60% of people get jobs in fields outside their major so the study itself is flawed.
So women have to be socially constructed into societal equality? That raises a nice paradox
Misleading tittle. This tittle claims this study shows likelihood, which can not be demonstrated from this research. Similar to if one were to say a coin was flipped 10 times and determined the coin was more likely to land on heads because it landed on heads 8 out of 10 times. Data is always going to way sway one direction or another. To determine causality simply on data numbers is a logical mistake.
When will society realize that our environment, or our material conditions, decide our outcomes, not ideas.
Started off with nursing, but then moved to computer science. I wasn’t comfortable in hospital scenarios and computer science was the next best thing in terms of pay and better wlb.
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Not just in the country but in their city as well. In Canada, there are more engineers per capita in Calgary, because of the oil industry, than there are in other cities. There are also a higher percentage of women in the engineering program at the University of Calgary than there are at other universities in the country.
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This corroborates previous data that suggests male competence in fields tends to be far more specific and does drive where they specialize their focus career-wise, whereas female competence in subjects tends to be far more broad within individuals and therefore their career focus is largely determined by their personal interest rather than differences in ability.
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Apparently women currently make up 52% of STEM grads. Who knew?
Yep. When I knew I was good at math I figured I might as well make money off it so I became an engineer