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Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in gene
by fatdog 10y ago
Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general.
Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.
Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people.
Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak.
A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity.
Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she?
Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.
The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.
- dpark 10y agoI've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men not recognize the same? You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in any field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway. So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it? I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism, that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.
- fatdog 10y agoIf engineering were lower status work than a lot of people think it is, it would provide a more viable explanation than the effect of a conspiracy. Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into engineering. The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or lesser amount of effort. Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.
- dpark 10y agoI'm pretty sure it's sexist (but maybe in the other direction?) to claim that men are in general too stupid to realize that they should leave engineering. "Perceived barriers" also indicate some sort of sexism is at play here. (The alternative that women are just imagining these barriers seems far-fetched and equally sexist.) Perhaps more to the point, this argument only holds up if women who leave engineering go into more prestigious/higher status fields. Is there any evidence of that?