undefined | Better HN

0 pointsEForEndeavour7y ago0 comments

Your truncated quote is woefully incomplete at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. The full passage reads as follows, emphasis mine:

Women earned 57.3% of bachelor’s degrees in all fields in 2013 and 50.3% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees. However, women’s participation in science and engineering at the undergraduate level significantly differs by specific field of study. While women receive over half of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the biological sciences, they receive far fewer in the computer sciences (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%) and mathematics (43.1%).

More relevant points appear further down the page which illustrate what people talk about when they lament the underrepresentation of women in STEM:

Women make up half of the total U.S. college-educated workforce, but only 29% of the science and engineering workforce. Female scientists and engineers are concentrated in different occupations than are men, with relatively high shares of women in the social sciences (62%) and biological, agricultural, and environmental life sciences (48%) and relatively low shares in engineering (15%) and computer and mathematical sciences (25%).

For example:

35.2% of chemists are women;

11.1% of physicists and astronomers are women;

33.8% of environmental engineers are women;

22.7% of chemical engineers are women;

17.5% of civil, architectural, and sanitary engineers are women;

17.1% of industrial engineers are women;

10.7% of electrical or computer hardware engineers are women; and

7.9% of mechanical engineers are women.

0 comments

klipt7y ago

Yes, the point is that women are already the majority of STEM graduates, they're just graduating in the wrong kinds of STEM.

For example, women are over-represented among social science and biology graduates. Perhaps we should add a quota to make social science and biology graduates 50% men, then women blocked from social science and biology degrees would go into computer science instead and balance things out.

There is also a leaky pipeline where women e.g. study math but then go into teaching, which doesn't count as working in STEM. If we had a quota of 50% men in teaching, this would help make the pipeline leak less gender-biased.

Of course some women end up becoming stay at home moms, so we also need a quota where 50% of stay at home parents must be dads. You probably need the government to enforce that.

But if we have enough quotas to ensure 50% men in female dominated fields, then by elimination, those men have to come from currently male dominated fields, and the women pushed out by quotas have to go into male dominated fields, so things should even out.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse