7 thoughts on “What Keeps Women Out Of STEM”

  1. I think the comment by Joel H is enlightening. Success in fields like STEM, and really, in any research area requires a obsession to solve the problem. Look at Thomas Edison and how many long hours he spent focusing on finding the right material to make a light bulb work. You see the seem type of obsession in male dominated hobbies like model railroading, model shipbuilding, model aircraft, an almost fanatical focus on detail and getting it “right”. Again look at the guys who spend hundreds of hours to build an exact scale replica of a particular steam engine or aircraft, often to the jeers of their wives/girl friends who complain about being “abandoned” by how much time they spend on it and fail to understand why they “waste” so much time to make it “right”.

    Women by contrast excel at multi-tasking and the majority rarely become so obsessed with finding a solution to a particular problem or building such an exact replica of a steam engine or aircraft. Now I am sure someone will point of out exceptions, which there are, but by and large science, good science like good model building, is a lot of long hours of individual focused obsession with finding the answer to the Nth decimal point.

    1. And this matters even more in the software business, where the “best” software scales to a global consumer market and no one even knows who the third-best option is.

  2. I think a strong contributor to keeping women out of the Science and Math part of STEM is the fact that PhDs are trained by the process to be skeptical attack dogs…..someone utters a sentance and the rest attempt to tear it apart. It’s part of the science deal.

    This is not a trait women (speaking generally now) find attractive.

  3. This reminds me of why we cannot get many women into Ham Radio. The ladies like to say “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

  4. What a surprise. People choose their own paths and this isn’t a perfectly random distribution?

    Methinks the problem is innumeracy.

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