Talk:Women in STEM fields

Article title?

Wow, what a title! Is a simplified version possible? Kind regards, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 14:44, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Article Revisions

I plan to revise this article in order to expand its scope and address some of the issues raised about its style. I also plan to change the title to "Women in STEM (United States)" since I agree with DASonnenfeld that the current title is pretty bulky. Another reason for the title revision is to include information about the challenges and obstacles that women face in STEM careers, but also to acknowledge the progress that has been made by women in STEM fields. I plan to reorganize the article, give a more balanced view of some of the topics that are currently presented as fact here (e.g., biological explanations for women's low representation in STEM fields), and to expand the topics covered. In particular, I would like to add a section on social-psychological explanations for women's underrepresentation in STEM fields. In this section, I will cover topics like discrimination (both overt and implicit), stereotypes and conceptions of the "ideal scientist", stereotype threat, the Pygmalion effect, and the Black Sheep effect. I will also include new sections about women's historical presence in STEM fields and progress that has been made thus far in addressing the gender disparities in STEM fields. In revising this article, I plan to draw heavily on sociological and psychological literature. I welcome any feedback or suggestions. Naomi FK (talk) 21:16, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure if [Women in STEM (United States)]] is the best name, while shorter, STEM is a jargon term unknown to all. I'd suggest WP:RM for a wider discussion. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:46, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the name change, apart from the "(United States)" part. I totally understand if you feel like writing only about the situation in the United States - you are a volunteer and write only what you feel like writing - but I think the article should be about the whole world. Lova Falk talk 07:56, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

HI all. Like Piotrus, I would also have concerns about using an uncommon acronym in the article title. Also, like Lova Falk, I would also be concerned with a US-centric title without significant justification. Most of all, however, I am concerned with the massive amounts of overlap between this article and the Inequality in the workplace article. It seems to me that the latter article speaks in some detail about gender issues amongst the “hard” sciences. Why the separate article at all? Cheers Andrew (talk) 02:29, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you all for the feedback. I'll hold off on the name change for the time being. What do you think of "Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math" in order to avoid the issue of using the term "STEM"? Lova_Falk, I completely agree that the article should address the experiences of women in the whole world. The reason I was planning on including "(United States)" was that most of the sources I have found deal with the United States, specifically, and I thought that some people might think that I was overstepping in using the experiences of women in the United States as a proxy for all women in the world. I would love more feedback on how to resolve this issue. Andrew, I took a look at the Inequality in the workplace article. While I do agree that it gives a good overview of the issue and touches upon many of the issues that I wish to address, I do think that a separate article is necessary. For one, many scholars have chosen to study the experiences of women in STEM fields in particular, and the unique challenges that women often experience in these fields. There are also a number of issues and phenomena that are not discussed in the [Inequality in the workplace]] article that I think are very relevant and need to be discussed. Please feel free to offer any more suggestions or feedback that you believe might help improve this article! Naomi FK (talk) 13:35, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

New Outline for Article

Here are the changes I plan to make to the article outline:

1. History of women in STEM fields (new section added)

1. Role models

1.1 Historical roles

1.2 Biological background (deleting this section: has no references and no substantial information)

2. Recent advances in technology (deleting this section. The relevant information from this section may be incorporated in the new section “Progress in gender equality”) 2. Feminism and STEM 3. Statistics (moved from below to reorganize outline: sub-sections are reorganized)

3.1 Representation of women in STEM fields (moved and renamed from “Women in STEM”)

3.1.1 Percentage distribution of Probable Fields of Study Among First-Time College Freshmen, by sex: Fall 1996 (moved and made into a further sub-section)

3.2 Men and women’s earnings in STEM careers (moved and renamed from “Men and Women Earnings in STEM as a Career”)

4. Explanations for the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields (renaming this section from “Some reasons for low enrollment in STEM subjects”)

4.1 Biological explanations (new sub-section added)

4.2 Structural explanations (moved from below and renamed—used to be “Gender, work and family”)

4.2.1 Effects of age (moved from below)

4.2.2 Territorial segregation (moved from below)

4.2.3 Leaky Pipeline (moved from below and renamed)

4.2.4 Gender and work (moved from below)

4.2.5 Work-family balance (moved from below and renamed)

4.3 Social-psychological explanations (new sub-section added)

4.3.1 Stereotypes and heuristics

4.3.1.1 Conceptions of the “ideal scientist”

4.3.2 Discrimination (new sub-section added)

4.3.2.1 Overt discrimination (new sub-section added)

4.3.2.2 Implicit discrimination (new sub-section added)

4.3.3 Stereotype threat (new sub-section added)

4.3.4 Pygmalion effect (new sub-section added)

4.3.5 Black Sheep effect (new sub-section added)

4.3.6 Queen Bee effect (new sub-section added)

5. Minority Women and STEM 6. Statistics (moving this section to reorganize outline)

6.1 Percentage distribution of Probable Fields of Study Among First-Time College Freshmen, by sex: Fall 1996

6.2 Men and Women Earnings in STEM as a Career

6.3 Women in STEM

7. Gender, work and family (moving this section to reorganize outline and re-titling it “structural factors”)

7.1 Effects of age

7.2 Territorial Segregation

7.3 Pipeline

7.4 Gender and Work

7.5 Family

6. Progress in gender equality (new section added. May incorporate some of the information from the “recent advances in technology” section)

7. Strategies for increasing the representation of women in STEM fields (renamed from “Future strategy” and edited to include more sources and strategies)

9. See also

10. References Naomi FK (talk) 13:51, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Additional Contribution - Article Review Thoughts

I think the current title of the article works well and I agree with leaving it open to women in STEM worldwide. I would recommend getting the numbers and statistics for the number of women in STEM fields worldwide. Overall, this article has good use of statistics and studies in order to relay information about the representation of women in STEM fields and the organization of the article is clear and easy to follow. One of my suggestions would be to maybe add a comparison of the gap in pay between men and women even within the STEM field under the “Men and women’s earning in STEM careers”. As of now the article compares men and women, but it seems like the differences in the pay gap are only due to men and women entering different occupations and experience. The comparison may already be there but I think it should be clearer and emphasized. I would also recommend expanding upon the “Strategies for increasing the representation of women in STEM fields”. You list that Annie-Marie Slaughter has suggested some strategies, but then don’t list or discuss the strategies she suggested. I think that delving into these different strategies would strengthen the article by looking at this issue from many different perspectives. I also think that adding more blue links to the article will help with traffic flow and exposure to the article. You can add blue links to words like stereotype threat and discrimination. Mmcolson (talk) 05:28, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback! My hesitation with leaving it open to women in STEM worldwide was that most of the literature I have found focuses on women in STEM fields in developed countries, particularly the United States. I will look to see if I can find information to try to give the article more of a global focus, but I am wary of overgeneralizing from the experiences of women in certain nations to the experiences of women worldwide. I agree that the "Strategies for increasing the representation of women in STEM fields" section needs work and will focus on expanding this section for my final entry. Thanks for the suggestions of how to incorporate more statistics, I'll definitely keep them in mind as I move forward. Naomi FK (talk) 14:30, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Additional Contributions Feedback

I agree that the current title is an improvement. However, I think that more could be done in the article to really demonstrate that the article is dealing with women throughout the world, rather than just in the U.S. For instance, I really appreciate the discussion of the leaky pipeline, but I wonder if there is a parallel set of statistics for women dealing with an educational program more like that of the UK, in which specialization occurs much earlier.

I enjoyed your additional social-psychological factors, but do think that in some areas those could stand to be slightly more clear. The "Stereotypes and heuristics" section is certainly an important one that I think needs to remain, but it would benefit from a stronger discussion of exactly what types of stereotypes exist of people in the STEM fields and how those affect women who choose to work in those areas.

I also don't know if this is relevant to your topic, but I think that a discussion of some prominent and/or pioneering women in STEM fields could be incorporated into the article. Additionally, some of these women are making concrete efforts to increase the representation of women in STEM fields, which I think is currently the weakest section of the article. Things like the Sally Ride Festivals or The Society of Women Engineers come to mind as stakeholder groups that are actively working to increase female representation in STEM fields. Allisonraven (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 18:42, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback! As I mentioned above, I'm considering changing the article title to just focusing on women in the United States, since I'm not sure that there's enough material out there for me to really represent the diverse experiences of women in STEM around the world. I'll definitely keep the UK in mind, though, when I'm looking for ways to resolve this issue. I am thinking of adding a subsection to the "Stereotypes and heuristics" section to talk about traditional conceptions of scientists and how these stereotypes might disadvantage women who are looking to enter the field. There is another article titled Women in science that discusses some of the prominent women in STEM fields, though I'll definitely keep your suggestions in mind when revising the "Strategies for increasing the representation of women in STEM fields" section. Naomi FK (talk) 14:30, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

These "Women in..." articles may reveal, ironically, favouritism and bias themselves.

Even as they discuss discrimination against women, they often themselves read like they're written by gender biased ideologues, who at some points seem to, shamefully, pride themselves on items such as men's declining college enrolment and graduation rates relative to women's, which are serious issues in and of themselves and probably deserve their own entries too as long as there's going to be a plethora of "Women in..." articles such as this one. There are also signs of the pay gap based on discrimination myth (and yes it is a myth, sorry if you don't like to hear that, but it has been long disproven) being peddled around here, such as in the following sentence, "Women in STEM fields earn considerably less than men, even after controlling for a wide set of characteristics such as education and age." Well...what are the other characteristics in this supposed "wide set"? Surely if you controlled that enough, you would see factors that better explained why women earn less money such as the total number of hours worked per sex either in a week, month, or year (men work more hours in total than women do, especially in science and technology fields), time taken off to care for young children which also ties into the greater liklihood of women taking part-time work, a position that offers a better work/life balance (and so pays less), or leaving employment altogether if they wish to spend more time with their children. This is one example of the bias I'm referring to in this, and like, articles.

There also seems to be a gynocentric focus on women at this encyclopedia. What about African Americans in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or computing, or whatever) or hispanics, or any other racial or ethnic minority groups for that matter? Are they not considered as important of a topic for an encyclopedia? I'm addressing here a potential favouritism shown towards women as an historically disadvantaged group that I think needs some attention at this encyclopedia. It's as important for an encyclopedia not to show favourtism towards a certain group as it is for an encyclopedia not to be biased. I would appreciate any comments about this.

(It's no one's fault that the vast majority of the editors and writers here are men, but I am wondering if there exists a possible, and completely needless, "guilt trip" on the part of many male editors here as the cause for this favouritism towards articles on women; I only bring this up because surely there has to be some explanation, pyschological or otherwise, as to why there is so much attention given here at Wikipedia to only women in almost every aspect of life and yet so little given to any other groups of people. Just a possible psychological explanation for this obvious discrepancy.) Alialiac (talk) 11:46, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions

Hi all!

I just have a few comments and suggestions that may help strengthen the content of this article.

First of all, I think that this article did a good job of remaining bias-free by listing relevant facts and presenting statistics regarding women working in STEM fields, and listing possible factors that contribute to the absence of females working within these industries. One thing that may seem a bit biased, however, are the strategies that are listed to "improve" or "fix" this issue, which makes the article seem agenda-based rather than specifically factual.

It may also be helpful to include a historical timeline detailing the emergence of women within the science, technology, engineering, and math fields; thus, providing some correlation between the feminist movement and the characteristics of STEM industries. This could effectively be done by including a side-by-side picture of important events that occurred in the areas of feminism and STEM industries that possibly correlate in some way. A timeline picture would not only provide visual reference, but would also correlate with [Wikipedia: Good Article Criteria]

Also, should the title be "Women in STEM Fields" with a capital F?

Finally, some of the data detailing the differences in boy and girl behavior may benefit with some factual or statistical support; thus, decreasing the likelihood that it could be seen as a biased opinion rather than an actual occurrence.

Carolynslu (talk) 18:41, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your input. Only the first letter is capitalized in a title, so the lower case F is correct. Biolprof (talk) 18:55, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

I also think that some vague agenda-like well-meaning statements are unnecessary and would personally remove the sentence "If girls are brought up in an environment where they are encouraged to use and develop their spatial skills, this gender gap in spatial sense will likely narrow." It seems to me that it does not add much to the previous referenced sentenced. Alexandre Oberlin (talk) 14:40, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

AFD?

This is a silly article. How about blacks who unicycle? Generally heterosexual males are underrepresented in gay marriage situations. We need a wiki for that. For social justice.Xkit (talk) 04:45, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Biological explanations

This section references a source that says spatial skills are learned and developed but in the title and and start of paragraph talks about "biological explanations". Added contradict tag. Esailija (talk) 12:37, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Title change

Considering this is mostly an article about the STEM fields in USA and no other place in the world i suggest that USA is added in the end of the article. The article contains few sources of STEM fields representation statistics for males and females in more than USA. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.211.165.66 (talk) 22:17, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to one external link on Women in STEM fields. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add {{cbignore}} after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}} to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:

• Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20140719123310/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50056290/ns/local_news-phoenix_az/t/popovich-girls-need-be-shown-path-success-through-stem-education/ to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50056290/ns/local_news-phoenix_az/t/popovich-girls-need-be-shown-path-success-through-stem-education/#.UL2VYYNfCSo

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—^{cyberbot II}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 10:33, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Adding an International Component

I think it may be interesting to add an international component by adding a few small sections, each that address women in STEM in a specific region in the world. This would broaden the article's perspective and show how the nuances of gender inequality manifests itself in different regions. A reference to get started could be:

Perna, Laura, Lundy-Wagner Valerie, Drezner Noah D., Gasman Marybeth, Yoon Susan, Bose Enakshi, and Gary Shannon. "The Contribution of HBCUS to the Preparation of African American Women for Stem Careers: A Case Study." Research in Higher Education 50, no. 1 (2009): 1-23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29782903.

Please refer back to my user page for my info - Venkam (talk) 01:44, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing in regards to adding some more internationally-relevant information to the page. Here are a couple of sources I have found about women in STEM fields in Asia and Latin America, respectively:

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO Bangkok Office. A Complex Formula: Girls and Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in Asia. Copy-Ed. Rachel McCarthy. Paris: UNESCO; Seoul: Korean Women’s Development Institute, 2015. Web. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002315/231519e.pdf.

Castillo, Rafael, et al. Women in Science and Technology: What Does the Literature Say?. Inter-American Development Bank, 2014. Web. IDB-TN-637. https://publications.iadb.org/bitstream/handle/11319/6047/CTI%20TN%20Women%20in%20Science%20and%20Technology.pdf?sequence=1.

Lctham01 (talk) 21:06, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

I am an undergraduate student at Rice University, currently considering article for revision for a Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities class. I was thinking the same thing was lacking as the above commenter. I would love to see areas such as the UK or China represented, as others have brought up that this is a very US-centered article. These sources that you have listed look very interesting. I too have found some. I will post a list of citations on my Talk page. Thanks!

Akweaver32 (talk) 01:51, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Any thoughts on how the page should be reorganized to accommodate these sections? I feel like the information that is already up on the page applies pretty much only to women in STEM in the US, so maybe all/some of the existing content should be included under a "Women in STEM fields in the US" header with subsequent headers for women in STEM in Asia, Latin America, etc. Having a smaller section devoted to women in STEM worldwide has been suggested but I worry that since almost all the information already on the Wiki page is applicable to only American women in STEM, having subsections for women in other parts of the world would be misleading by implying that the information and research on STEM gender disparity in the US is also relevant to the STEM gender disparity in other countries, which is not necessarily true. I hope that made some sense, and let me know what you think! By the way, I'm a student at the University of Louisville editing this article for a Women & Gender Studies class.

Update: I also would like to add a section under "Strategies for increasing representation of women" about organizations and government agencies that work to increase female participation in STEM. It could start as something like this: "Organizations such as Girls Who Code, Engineer Girl, and Kode with Klossy (spearheaded by supermodel Karlie Kloss) aim to encourage women and girls to explore male-dominated STEM fields. Many of these organizations offer summer programs and scholarships to girls interested in STEM fields. The U.S. government has funded similar endeavors; the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs created TechGirls and TechWomen, exchange programs which teach Middle Eastern and North African girls and women skills valuable in STEM fields and encourage them to pursue STEM careers."

Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2013/03/205866.htm

Lctham01 (talk) 19:18, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Minor grammar correction

A sentence under section 3.1 reads "They found that faculty strongly preferred to hire an assistant professor who was a women over an identically-qualified competitor who was a man." I think "women" should be changed to "woman."

Lctham01 (talk) 22:54, 11 September 2016 (UTC)