Double Standards? Education and Employment (STEM)

Last class the topic of female under-representation in certain STEM fields was briefly brought up with the suggestion that some universities have considered starting female computing colleges to encourage a growth in numbers.  Double standards, “any code or set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another…”(Dictionary.com), based on the history of society’s patriarchal infrastructure have perhaps implicitly discouraged females from entering certain fields.  Affirmative actions against gender discrimination have elicited criticism for encouraging double standards against men and reverse discrimination, resonating in phrases like ‘women don’t want equality they want rights’.  Double standards are ubiquitous, but is affirmative action remediating one double standard at the cost of promoting others?  And is it giving women “equality” in education and employment opportunity or is it giving them “rights”?

In light of the Women’s Rights Movement, affirmative action was expanded “to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin” and “to promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity through a positive, continuing program in each executive department and agency”.  It’s been accused of curing “discrimination with discrimination”.  Equating educational/job discrimination with affirmative action overlooks that the former is based on practices of exclusion while the latter is an attempt at inclusion.  To undo decades of exclusion without “special efforts” of inclusion trivializes the immediate action that was necessary. 

Still some critics suggest that the practice is outdated, citing generalizations like ‘women make up more than fifty percent of the work force’, yet they make seventy eight cents to the dollar when compared with men.  Generalizations are rarely fair, painting multidimensional social construct with a broad brush.  It’s not like we’re mixing red and blue marbles; while the representation of women in STEM has increased since the 1970s, they remain underrepresented in 80 percent of STEM employment (specifically engineering 13 percent and computing 27 percent).  According to a government census, less than a third of STEM workers were women in 2011.  To put that in perspective, that year the total workforce was made up of 48 percent women and 39 percent of science and engineering graduate were women, but the STEM workforce was 24 percent women. 

                According to a 2010 AAUW study sponsored by NSF “about as many girls as boys leave high school prepared to pursue science and engineering majors in college. Yet fewer women than men pursue these majors…By graduation, men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field…Women’s representation in science and engineering declines further at the graduate level and yet again in the transition to the workplace.”  After the idea of a female computing college was mentioned in class there was push back.  I think the regression of number of females in STEM as they transition from high school to undergraduate to graduate school to the workplace isn't as much an issue of opportunity as it is an issue of discourse. 

             While the gender gap needs to be remediated to encourage more females in STEM studies, we need to shift the conversation so we’re no separating “female engineers/scientists” from engineers/scientists in the workplace.  A qualified engineer is an engineer and a qualified scientist is a scientist.  When we stop tagging on the gender then we've shifted the “male-dominance” rhetoric associated with STEM disciplines that are implicitly holding on to the outdated standard “male engineer/scientist”. 

Sourecs:

http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/Why-So-Few-Women-in-Science-Technology-Engineering-and-Mathematics.pdf

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=60553