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Statistics: Women and Men in STEM
In the past two decades, women have made progress in education. The large gaps in the education levels between women and men that were evident in the early 1970s have lessened for the younger generation. Young women are just as likely as young men to have completed at least a bachelor’s degree. In the National Education Goals, women studying mathematics, science and engineering should increase is the fifth goal to achieve. Closing the gender gap in overall educational attainment is not enough; significant progress must also be made in the crucial fields of mathematics and science.

Research studies suggest that many factors contribute to the attitudes, access, and achievement of young women in mathematics and science: encouragement from parents, preparation of mathematics and science teachers, interaction between teachers and students, curriculum content, hands-on laboratory experiences, high school achievement in mathematics and science, and resources available at home. In the US, research findings are mixed concerning the grade in which boys’ and girls’ attitudes about mathematics and sciences diverge. Analyzing several nationally representative longitudinal studies, one researcher found few differences between girls and boys in their attitudes about science in the early secondary school years.

Students’ aspirations towards careers in mathematics and science are influences to both their course taking in those areas and the level of effort put forth in their coursework. A gap in the career aspiration of boys and girls in science or engineering exists as early as eighth grade. Among the eighth grade class of 1988, boys were more than twice as likely as girls to aspire to be scientists or engineers (9 and 3 percent, respectively), although girls were more likely than boys to aspire to professional, business, or managerial occupations (38 and 20 percent respectively). While male and female high school seniors are equally likely to expect a career in science or mathematics, male seniors are much more likely than their female counterparts to expect a career in engineering.

A 1996 study of college freshmen by the Higher Education Research Institute shows that men and women differ greatly in their intended fields of study. Of first-time freshmen in 1996, 20 percent of men and 4 percent of women planned to major in computer sciences and engineering, while similar percentages of male and female freshmen planned to major in biology or physical sciences. The differences in the intended majors or male and female first-time freshmen directly relate to the differences in the fields in which men and women earn their degree. At the post-secondary level, women are less likely than men to earn a degree in mathematics, physical sciences, and computer sciences and engineering. The exception is in life science.

Percentage Distribution of Probable Fields of Study Among First-Time College Freshmen, by sex: Fall 1996
Physical Sciences includes fields such as astronomy, chemistry, earth science, mathematics, and physics. Professional includes fields such as architecture and health technologies.

Men and Women Earnings in STEM as Career
Although female college graduates shared in the earnings growth of all college graduates in the 1980s, they earned less on average than male college graduates. Some of the differences in salary are related to the occupation women and men entered. Among employed recent science and engineering bachelor’s degree recipients, women were less likely than men to be employed in science and engineering occupations. There remains an earnings gap between men and women in comparable scientific positions. Among more experiences bachelor’s and master’s scientists and engineers, the gap between men’s and women’s salaries is larger than for recent graduates. Salaries are highest in mathematics/ computer science and engineering, fields in which women are not highly represented. Among recent college graduates who majored in the natural sciences, women earned less than men did. There was no measureable difference between the starting salaries of men and women who majored in computer sciences and engineering, however. Even though women make up about half of the labor market, they are both underrepresented in jobs in scientific fields and are paid less than men. The mathematics and science fields continue to be areas where the gender gap remains large.

Women in STEM
According to the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey, women comprise 48 percent of the U.S. workforce but just 24 percent of STEM workers. Half as many women are working in STEM jobs as expected if gender representation in STEM professions mirrors the overall workforce. This underrepresentation has remained fairly constant over the past decade, even as women’s share of the college-education workforce has increased. Among STEM jobs, women’s representation has varied over time. While the female share has declined in computer and math jobs, their share has risen in other occupations. In 2009, women comprised 27 percent of the computer and math workforce (the largest of the four STEM components), a drop of 3 percentage points since 2000. Engineers are the second largest STEM occupational group, but only about one out of every seven engineers is female. The number of female engineers edged up by 12,000 over nine years, while the number of male engineers decline by 106,000.

Men are much more likely than women to have a STEM job regardless of educational attainment. In examining the relationship between STEM, gender and earnings, women earn considerably less than men, even after controlling for a wide set of characteristics such as education and age. On average, ne and women earn $36.34 and $31.11 per hour, respectively in STEM jobs. For every dollar earned by a man in STEM, a woman earns 14 vents less, smaller than the 21 percent gender wage gap in non-STEM occupations. The underrepresentation of women in STEM majors and jobs are attributable to a variety of factors including different choices men and women make in response to incentives in STEM education and STEM employment.

Gender, Work and Family
Recently a study was done to show the importance of careers to young men and women. In 1997, 58% of men and 56% of women say that being successful in a high-paying career or profession is one of the most important things or very important part of their lives. When the study was done again in 2011, 59% of men and 66% of women confirmed the importance of a profile career.

Gender and Work
There is a significant increase in the women's percentage as opposed to men but despite the fact that women are increasing in the labor force, there is still a low enrollment of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education and Careers. Among all workers ages 16 to 34, women’s earnings are more than 90% of men’s; this ratio drops for women ages 35 to 64, who earn 80% or less of what men earn across the board. While this could signal a changing workplace, women have tended to fall behind men as their careers progress, so it remains to be seen whether this is an age or generational phenomenon. One contributing factor is that professional women are not as well represented in higher paying job groups, such as computer and engineering fields, and are overrepresented in lower paying job groups, such as education and health care.

Where women hit the glass ceiling in many occupations, men hit what is considered the Glass Escalator, a term coined by Christine Williams. While the glass ceiling is a hindrance for women and minorities to reach the top an occupation dominated by the majority, the glass escalator is a hidden advantage for men to excel in a profession that is female dominated. For STEM, it is very likely for women to hit the glass ceiling because it is more likely for women to enroll in jobs that are male-dominated than for men to enroll in jobs that are female oriented.

Both men and women who work in nontraditional occupations encounter discrimination, but the forms and consequences of this discrimination are very different. Women entering traditionally male professions also face negative stereotypes suggesting they are not real women. However, these stereotypes do not seem to deter women to the same degree that they deter men from pursuing nontraditional professions. There is ample historical evidence that women flock to male-identified occupations once opportunities are available. Not so with men. Examples of occupations changing from predominantly female to predominantly male are very rare in our history. The few existing cases—such as medicine—suggest that redefinition of the occupations as appropriately masculine is necessary before men will consider joining them.

In a household, the mother has the main role to take care of the children while men work to provide the material needs for the family. This is the division of labor. Women have taken on the role of housewives and gained their stereotypical features because of this. Women’s occupations have been placed with jobs that fit their stereotype of nurturing, feminine concepts such as education, clerical work, caretaker; etc. Jobs in STEM field are out of the norm for a woman’s profession. This is linked to masculinity and femininity. There are two spheres of work for men and women. Dating back even to the hunter-gatherers stages, work for men was considered hunting, foraging while work for women was considered taking care of household labor. In the work sphere, until present day, there is masculinity in men’s occupation and femininity in women’s occupation. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are general professions that fall under the sphere of masculinity.

The problem that lies in the portrayal of women in science parallels the problematic ideas of women in the public sphere. The October 1993 issue of Working Woman issued a page completely free of images or text to illustrate the absence of positive women in the US. Women not only have denied their femininity in order to work as serious scientists but have obscured their sex entirely. Idealized images of scientists have not always been masculine. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries science, knowledge, truth, and other abstract ideals were portrayed as women. Mathematics is known as queen of the sciences. These feminine images do not empower women. Women scientists such as Emilie du Chatelet and Maria Cunitz invoked them in ambivalent and diverse ways. Today women scientists characterize science as aggressively competitive and their male colleagues as discourteous and rude, pushing others aside in their efforts to be first. Women’s drastic underrepresentation in physics is commonly blamed on its highly competitive culture. Sharon Traweek, an ethnographer of high-energy physics communities, found that many physicists like to see themselves as independent, vigorously assertive, and competitive.

Family
For men, marriage is a distinct advantage: married men with families on average earn more money, love longer, and progress faster in their careers than do single men. For women, a family is a liability. Working women with three or more children are at greater risk for heart disease than working women without children. Gerda Lerner wrote, “The sexual division of labor which has allotted to women the major responsibility for domestic services and the nurturance of children has freed men from the cumbersome details of daily survival activities, while it disproportionately has burdened women with them”. Science has been organized around the assumption that society need not reproduce itself, or that scientists are not among those involved in the tasks of reproduction. This is not true for female scientists. Professional women are still responsible for most domestic labor and child care. Being a scientists and a wife and mother is a burden in a society that expects women more often than men to put family ahead of career.