Girls typically abandon STEM at the high school / undergraduate level. I do not pretend to know all of the factors that go into that, but one such reason I have heard is that the gender bias in STEM tends to strongly favor boys at this level and perhaps a bigger component to that is not the teachers' bias, but the bias of peers and society that students at the high school level will be increasingly aware of.
I don't see any specific age when women abandon STEM as individual contributors; it seems to be constant throughout all life stages at a moderately higher rate than men. Until high school, however, there is no choice, and female grades are generally higher in everything, so they stick with it until they have to make a prioritization choice.
I see it naively like this: life is a long process of eliminating options that don't meet your interests or best chances at success. Women in general have more options in life than men, career being only one aspect of that, which means that over time, any one of those options is going to be chosen less and less.
Sociology distinguishes itself from economics in the assumption that people's choices are the result of stupidity or victimization. I just looked up the top math student in my 5th grade class. She's a 5th grade public school teacher after attending an Ivy for Geography. I have not the slightest clue why one would ever study Geography in college, nor would I find it financially prudent in my situation to be a public elementary schoolteacher, but I also know this person to be quite smart and fully-capable of making her own choices. I talk to female H1B engineers that came here for a better life, which was not STEM work, so they often quit as soon as they get a green card. I see women retiring earlier to start new careers. Female attrition is a constant feature of the entire STEM pipeline.
If I try to be honest with myself, I will admit that I was not at all intellectually interested in my engineering degree. Computers were always about creation and expression and social possibilities to me, not the pedantism and rigor that I practiced for financial reasons. I think we all just saw it as a test to see whether we could make it, or how well we could do, a game. It might as well have been pinball, and it never ends. 30-year SWE veterans still play leetcode. I am constantly being told that the opportunity to unleash my creativity and wonder upon the world is just around the corner. I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
All the STEM greats quit this game early. That says something. If Gates, Zuck, Musk, Jobs, etc. had never taken DiffEq, would they have been any less capable or motivated? I doubt it. The women that abandon STEM may have more in common with them than we admit. They're probably doing something better with their lives.
I think what's actually happening is that we're eliminating all non-STEM pipelines for building a career. The truly adventurous can go start their own businesses, but STEM has become the default pipeline for everyone because it's the only thing that pays well. Everything else, even being a lawyer or doctor, is much more of a "calling" than a career play. Other necessary professions like teaching or nursing are considered lower tier, when the really shouldn't be.
Because everyone is pushed into STEM, I believe that the bar for engineering has been lowered. I'm a SWE and over the last few years, I've realized that more and more of my coworkers don't have any idea how computers work. Most can't use a shell, don't understand unix, never wrote a line of C, are unclear what a pointer is, that sort of thing. It's no longer a requirement to understand computers and computer culture to be employed as a developer.
I think a lot of older SWEs probably recall stereotypes of women and minorities not being able to do computers because most of them didn't grow up with the culture. In the 80s and 90s, it was much less common for those demographics to have a computer in the home and to have internet access. We tried to fix that by promoting diversity, especially in the STEM pipeline. In reality, that diversity just killed the culture by sinking it to the lowest common denominator, which looks a lot like leetcode.
> I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
Then you'd be poor, which is why you didn't dispense with all of that.
Men have worse grades than women, so women get all the more desired non-STEM jobs. Men don't dominate STEM fields, it's actually that women dominate NON-STEM fields and men are only left With STEM jobs
If you "abandon STEM" in high school or undergrad, you're likely seeing people who are just completing prerequisites for the courses they actually want to take.
I find it interesting and perhaps telling that this comment is being down voted. I am wondering what an individual could take offense to. As far as I can tell I made two assertions:
1. Girls who are interested in STEM tend to abandon it at the high school / undergraduate level [factual]
2. That one factor in that may be a gender bias favoring males during this period in a students education. [well supported by academic research, though I presented the information casually and without citation]
If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
> If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
The sex/gender of the teacher didn't play a role at the middle school level though. I find it hard to keep up the narrative of "society doesn't want girls to go into STEM" when there's a lot of affirmative action, selective media representation, lots of programs etc. "But it's only to offset the invisible bias" I'm sure some might argue, but I think they overlook the possibility that there is nothing keeping them down and they just make different choices.
I didn't downvote your previous comment, but it did sound like you were a bit reaching for straws to turn an observation into the desired outcome by filling in the middle.
And I think it is valid to not agree with that narrative or to think my argument weak (as I admitted, my observation was casual and lacked citation).
However, gender bias and lack of representation are, from anecdotal observation, the most cited reason in academic journals for the lack of women in STEM. Take that for what you will.
And by all means make a counter argument, edify me, cite sources, but burying a comment for even the nascent mention of a connection between gender bias and the lack of women in STEM seems to demonstrate a lack of willingness of some on HN to even engage with the idea, which, funnily enough, could give credence to the existence of gender bias against women in STEM.
I'm not sure. My niece was on an all-women STEM floor of her college dormitory. After 2 semesters, she was the only woman still in STEM. The rest had all convinced each other to do something easier. Not the success story you might imagine.
Anecdotes aren't data for sure, but they can be helpful to build a mental model or explain a hypothesis. The argument would be much less clear if JoeAltmaier had simply said "I'm not sure" with no elaboration.
