Gender Imbalance In STEM

If us females got a dollar for every time we hear someone say ‘women can’t make it in STEM’, then by the time we’re about to enter college we would have enough money to fund our STEM educations. In this predominantly patriarchal world, we witness gender disparity in almost all walks of life with women and minorities at the receiving end of it. And according to every study, report or census ever recorded, the world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics is no different.
About half of the population in the world is female yet only about a third of STEM students are women with the percentage of them actually holding job profiles in STEM fields being even more slim. This unfortunate underrepresentation of one gender has proven to be incessant and is borne out of umpteen factors saturated in utter prejudice, intolerance and preconceived notions blocking women’s progress.
One of the major barriers to women in STEM is Stereotype Threat that arises in situations where a negative stereotype is relevant to evaluating performance. This is not just prevalent for people who agree to a stereotypical outlook but even individuals who constantly refute gender and science stereotypes can hold that belief at an unconscious level. These are implicit biases that continue to influence assumptions about people and behaviour. However meta-analyses consistently show that girls and boys are on average much more similar than they are different across a range of skills.  For instance, a meta-analysis of gender differences in mathematics, based on 100 studies and testing more than three million people, found that girls outperformed boys overall in primary school, there was no difference in secondary school and there was only a very slight and inconsistent male advantage for complex problem solving.
These gender stereotypes arise from a lot of places. Even extremely young minds can absorb these prejudices and they affect both the genders but in different ways. A recent study by Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie and Andrei Cimpian has shown that five-year-old girls are just as likely to say that girls can be extremely smart but from six years up they think brilliance is much more likely in boys. These findings suggest gendered notions of intelligence are picked up very early and start having an effect on the sorts of interests that girls pursue.
Now to quote some scientific terms there are the Black Sheep effect and Queen Bee effect. The former occurs when one is likely to favour people of their own gender when they are highly qualified but evaluate them much lower than the other gender when they have average qualities. This proposes that established women in STEM are less likely to help early career women who display average or insufficient qualifications which further hinder women’s progress in STEM.
Then there is the Queen Bee effect that suggests that successful women in professions intimidated by men do not necessarily think of their success as a proof of negative stereotypes about women’s analytical and quantitative abilities being just that: a stereotype, which again explains how unconscious biases by women themselves may help in perpetuating discrimination rather than abolishing it.
In careers dealing with STEM fields beginners look for mentorship, congeniality and support from superiors as well as colleagues. This encouragement and guidance goes a long way for women deciding whether to continue pursuing a career in their discipline and the lack of same usually results in an early exit for aspiring young individuals. Another major issue is the gender pay gap that again closes many doors of opportunities for women especially when they struggle to balance family and work. When a nuclear family cannot afford childcare, typically it is the mother who has to give up her career because the man makes more money.
To put an end to this unfortunate pattern of discrimination, it is essential to tackle the stereotypes children are exposed to at the earliest in order to encourage more and more young girls to take up stem education and careers since studies have proven now and again that the capabilities and intelligence of both the genders are at par. It is more important now than ever because STEM is shaping the jobs of the future and the demand for technological and cognitive skills is on the rise.
The world requires a multitude of strategies to put an end to this gender imbalance in STEM careers that has prevailed since their origin during the Age of Enlightenment. We need social and psychological interventions to combat negative stereotypes, we need to promote women’s education especially in developing and under developed countries, we need to introduce young minds to female role models, and we definitely need self affirmation for women and organised from everyone especially the opposite gender. All of it is necessary to let us women escape this pigeonhole and carry forward the legacy of Katherine Johnson, Margaret Heafield and other such talented women in STEM throughout ages.