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"society unwittingly steers female students into careers like health care, education, and law, and encourages male students to pursue STEM careers" Perhaps thi
by beloch 12y ago
"society unwittingly steers female students into careers like health care, education, and law, and encourages male students to pursue STEM careers"
Perhaps this is dong wittingly. Health care, education, and law are all fields that offer secure, local, long-term employment with excellent maternity benefits. Physicists, mathematicians, and other hard science fields often provide much less reliable employment, frequently with travel requirements (academics typically do not get to spend their careers in one place) and excessive time commitments required. Put simply, women steer clear of STEM jobs because they stink if you want to reproduce.
Want to make STEM jobs attractive to women? Start rewarding scientists in measure with their education investment. Stop treating grad students and post-docs worse than pipe-fitters and welders.
- lucasmullens 12y agoI really don't think people put much weight on what post-docs will be like when choosing their career. People just pick a career that interests them. Reproduction is not a concern for a typical 18-year-old.
- maaku 12y agoMaybe it wasn't for you, but for someone who was actually thinking about having kids it is a big deal.
- facepalm 12y agoIf that's true, maybe it is a good thing if society stirs people into the right direction. So that when they find they want children, surprise, they "accidentally" chose just the right profession for it. Personally I thought about income prospects when choosing a career. In my experience women are less likely to do so, which makes sense. (Edit: can't write more comments - it makes sense because women have the option to have children and are not expected to provide for the family financially).
- ryanmonroe 12y agoWhy does that make sense?
- jquery 12y agoTech is lucrative, but extremely unstable and hyper-competitive. In the past 6 years working in tech, both my wife and I have worked at 4 different companies. I have often wondered if this contributes to the reason that women leave tech in larger numbers than men. Sexism is unacceptable, of course, and we should root it out, but we do ourselves a disservice to dismiss other reasons tech might be hostile to women.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]