Closing the “gender gap” in the science, technology, engineering and math fields has become an important initiative across college campuses.
Back on the first day of the semester, a roommate of mine who studies aerospace engineering jokingly texted me to express his feigned bewilderment at the presence of two girls in his upper-level engineering course of 30 students.
Somewhere else on this campus, you can be certain there was a male student sitting in a psychology course mentally high-fiving himself for the brilliant decision to pursue a major that surrounds him with female students.
Both of these situations portray the gender disparity seen in specific fields of study, yet despite the parallel, our society approaches the two situations in strikingly different ways.
We must ask ourselves why academia is troubled so deeply by the dearth of women in STEM fields, while the comparable absence of men in fields like nursing, journalism and psychology is viewed with considerably less concern.
A few months had passed since the first day of school, and I was once again reminded of this gender dynamic as I strolled through the Barrett, the Honors College dining Hall. The refectory had been sectioned off for an event called “Barrett Women in Engineering Lunch.”
At the time, I had little reason to think much about it, being a male economics major. I was brought to reflect on the event when I stumbled upon a New York Times op-ed, “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” by University of Michigan creative writing professor Eileen Pollack.
Pollack writes about her experience as an undergraduate physics student at Yale University and the obstacles she faced in her personal journey toward acceptance in the science community (a community that she ultimately rejected). She points out that the gender disparity is “entirely dependent on culture — a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees.”
This explanation is entirely valid, yet I was left pondering why the honors college had not hosted a “Men in Psychology Luncheon” or a “Nursing Isn’t For Sissies Brunch.”
All joking aside, there needed to be something else to explain this difference in level of concern for disproportion in different fields. Does culture teach men that they will be ridiculed for pursuing nursing? Or that construction engineering is a more acceptable major than studio art or dance?
The answer lies in a statistic stated by many sources, but most notably by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “Even forty years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law, women only receive 77 cents for every dollar men earn.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the single most influential factor of this verified statistic is the discrepancy in educational choices by men and women. Many men go into high-paying fields in STEM disciplines, while women dominate lower-paying fields, such as education and communications. The true motive behind the encouragement of women in science fields where men outnumber them is that the escalation of women in STEM professions is largely seen as a social mechanism.
Men are not necessarily advised to persist in female-dominated fields because, as a whole, they have less to gain from it. Female innovation and excellence in STEM fields is now viewed not just as the furthering of science, but also of the status of women in our society by providing higher salaries.
This does not necessarily mean mathematically and scientifically gifted women do more for their gender than their male counterparts in fields such as English or education.
Institutional support for women engineers, and lack thereof for men in “feminine” fields, comes from the fact that women pursuing engineering has measurable benefits in the status of female workers' wages in this country.
Reach the columnist at bjmurph2@asu.edu.
