NSF statistics show that between 19, women earning PhDs in STEM were almost equal to men in every other area:įor the sake of clarity, though, it’s worth noting that in many colleges and universities, social sciences and psychology are not housed in STEM colleges – they are often set apart in their own colleges or schools (often together) and sometimes share space with humanities in other words, for the purposes of administration and funding, social science and psychology often aren’t STEM. When it comes to STEM, PBS News Hour has found, for instance, that the gender gap is really only confined to engineering and computer science. Women and men tend to have different interests and different social needs as a result, women often go into college programs that are less openly competitive and more nurturing, like humanities and education. Despite the National Science Foundation’s initiatives to increase women’s presence in STEM, there are many who argue that the problem isn’t as large as perceived, or that it’s not a problem at all. It’s still very much an open question of where the discrepancy between men and women in STEM comes from, and what can be done to change it.
It’s not, but it’s more complicated than just “men dominate the sciences.” For young women considering a college degree and career in the sciences, Value Colleges has compiled a guide to understanding the complexity of the STEM gender gap. The statistics are hard to argue, but there is no shortage of argument about the why and the what’s to be done.Ĭonvinced it’s a “pipeline” issue – not enough girls and young women being won over by STEM interests early in their lives – the National Science Foundation has spent the last decade advocating for programs, scholarships, and marketing to encourage girls to take an interest in STEM, the assumption being that more girls going to college for STEM will change the landscape of the field over time.Īnd that campaign has worked – the number of women going into STEM degree programs has steadily risen during the 21st century, so much so that many pundits are happy to call the gender gap closed. Curious, then, that men outnumber women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics ( STEM) – in some cases, extravagantly: for example, only 15% of working engineers are women. In the US population, women outnumber men by just short of 1%.
Women first outnumbered men in college in 1979, and nationwide women make up 57% of college students. Women in STEM: What You Need to Know Before Putting on the Lab Coat
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