Recently, many people have been bringing up hard questions about equality; is every race truly equal? What about men and women? This question applies to all aspects of life- including science and STEM subjects. For example, have you ever noticed that there are more men than women in science or other STEM-related fields? Notably, this sexual disparity can be seen more in PECS (physics, engineering, and computer fields). Surely there must be a logical explanation to this alarming phenomenon.
Often people believe this gender disparity is caused by certain gender role expectations by the parents and even society around a young child. The product of sexism from back when women were expected to stay home while men worked, these expectations often keep girls from becoming immersed in and pursuing a career or interest in STEM.
However, there seems to be a bias towards men choosing PECS fields, as men with much lower academic accomplishments at the school and college levels major in PECS fields at the same rate as women with much better academic accomplishments, per an insightful study by Joseph R. Cimpian and his colleagues at New York University published on nyu.edu. According to the study, male students in the 1st percentile were majoring in PECS at the same rate as females in the 80th percentile. In other words, male students who had much worse academic achievements than their female counterparts were majoring in PECS similarly.
This gender disparity seems to be different from the common example of a gender-gap, as typically men have an edge over women only among high-achieving students. Therefore, even if we attract high-achieving men and women at the same rate to PECS, there would still be much more men than women in PECS.
Of course, this phenomenon has a variety of possible solutions that would fix the gender-gap occurring in PECS fields. One of the possibilities is to “dismantle barriers to women in these fields”, according to Cimpian. However, sciencemag.org suggests that unless we address the factors that repel “average- and low-achieving women” and attract “low-achieving men”, we won’t be able to truly fix the PECS gender gap.
As all genders and races become more and more equal in society, we should never forget the inequalities found in STEM-related fields, and must always seek to promote a healthy interest for science in girls and women. If science is really the future, then we need everyone to have an equal opportunity to contribute to what lies ahead.
Sources:
1. Joseph R. Cimpian, Taek H. Kim, Zachary T. Mcdermott. Understanding persistent gender gaps in STEM. Science, 2020 DOI: 10.1126/science.aba7377
2. NYU Study-Academic Achievement isn’t the Reason There are More Men than Women Majoring in Physics, Engineering and Computer Science1.