MIT Librarians Claim Star Wars Posters, 'Geeky Stuff' In Offices Keep Women Out Of STEM Careers

[lvmensch]

I would note that this thread seems to equate STEM and IT. They are simply not the same thing. IT is a field in STEM but easily drops below STEM in lots of its jobs.

I am older than most of you and retired some 20 odd years ago. But I also ran big STEM operations for 20 years before I retired. The primary problem we had was simple. There were virtually no skilled women. And that to a large degree leads to the present problem. There simply has not been a set of women rising through the ranks of STEM over the last 25 years. There are now women in positions of power...but they did not come up the STEM ranks. So we have those who came up through HR, Marketing, Accounting...but few real STEM people..

And note that the present pressure tends to be on the IT side. No EEs? No MEs? No Physicists? All coders?

I suspect we still have a dislike among the females for the classic STEM stuff. Don't claim to understand why as I think there are pretty good data that gals are the smarter gender.

I personally liked the entry of the female into the Engineering professions. If nothing else it cleaned up the language in the progress meetings...and that was a victory for civilization.

But I hope my Granddaughters do better. Two appear headed toward real STEM. Real Engineers hopefully.

[Toyman at Jewel Lake]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

Happy to help.


No, it isn't "Star Wars" posters...this isn't the 90s. I haven't seen Star Wars anything at the office for many years. Most of the youngsters from India in the field now have never seen any of the Star Wars movies (at least not the ones I've worked with).


Women get little to no guidance and if we ask for help, we look weak...so we try to figure things out on our own instead of getting the opportunity to do "peer programming" or "pair programming" (the terms are used interchangeably). So we miss out both on relationship-building and knowledge transfer.


Additionally, the field was already rife with sexism and there are three major roadblocks for women in I.T. right now:

• Age discrimination: it begins much earlier for us, as in in our 40s.
• The "bro" culture, mostly found in Silicon Valley but also present in other tech startups and small companies throughout the country.
• The "H1B" culture which is primarily male, south Asian, and under 35. It's a triple threat in terms of discrimination against women given that men in general discriminate against women (even subconsciously), the under 35s are more likely to discriminate on the basis of age which hits us disproportionately, and south Asian culture is more patriarchal and more likely to have a cultural bias against women, particularly assertive & highly skilled women.

Star Wars posters have nothing to do with it.

My observations in the engineering industry is that young women entering the field were more likely to get help, assistance and mentoring than young men, up to perhaps 10 years ago. First, companies wanted to see a more diverse workforce and set up programs aimed specifically at women. Women-only professional organizations (Society of Women Engineers for example) provided help only to women, whereas SME or ASME assisted all. And let's face it, more mid-level managers enjoy mentoring young women than the typical "nerdy" 20-something male engineering grad.

Fast forward to ~2010 and I believe that has started to change. The use of sexual harassment claims to extort promotions or job retention that has not been earned has had a chilling effect on males in a position to mentor younger women. (I'll admit my experience is limited. For the last 10 years I have worked at a small company rather than corporation). Fortunately though, engineering now has enough women in mid-level positions that there are more female mentors available.

The biggest issue I see is the lack of women entering the engineering fields (sciences might be different). In the early 80s I'd guess we had 10-15% females in our classes. From what I hear from young graduates, that has if anything decreased in the last 35 years.