Why Aren’t There More Women in Engineering & Science?
It was a small victory for women in tech earlier this year, when Mattel announced that longtime career model Barbie would have a new calling as a computer scientist. But as the New York Times pointed out this week, a doll is still a doll—and women in the world of tech aren’t faring as well as we might have hoped.
In 2008, we wrote a piece in Newsweek, Revenge of the Nerdette, about a group of female Tufts engineering students who called themselves the Nerd Girls. At the time, things seemed to be promising for young women in math and science: for the first time ever, high school girls had won both the team and individual contests at the Siemens Competition; young girls were dominating the blogosphere, and women earning 56 percent of the degrees in science and engineering. As the creator of the Nerd Girls put it at the time, “It’s OK, it’s smart, it’s cool to be a nerd, and girls are just embracing that.”
But here comes the BUT (and it seems like a broken record as we continue to write on this stuff): Once those ambitious young women hit the workforce, many of those promising statistics slowly begin to reverse themselves. As the Times notes, 56 percent of women with technical jobs leave work midway through their careers—double the turnover rate for men. Of those women, 20 percent leave the workforce entirely, while 31 percent take nontechnical jobs—suggesting that it’s not just child-rearing that’s behind the “opting-out.” Which would imply, perhaps, that it’s something more… retro: as a recent Center for Work-Life Policy study revealed, 63 percent of women who leave jobs in tech and engineering say they’ve experienced workplace harassment, and more than 50 percent say they felt they needed to “act like a man” in order to succeed.
Which leaves women with two options: hide all semblance of femininity—and play with the boys—or embrace their womanhood and everything that comes along with it. Now what’s wrong with that picture?
