Statistics from the US Census Bureau in 2015 show that although women count for almost 50% of the workforce in America, they only represent 25% of those employed by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers. This disparity in employment isn’t just indicative of potential misogyny or gender-based discrimination in those fields, it’s also a major problem that will affect the future of certain fields.
Why? For one thing, there is a growing demand for STEM professionals. According to the US Dept. of Commerce in 2017, employment in STEM fields is growing at a significant rate (faster than the employment rate of any other field). Meeting this demand by hiring women only makes sense, given that there are proportionally more of them who aren’t already involved in the field.
Another reason this would be beneficial is that it serves to broaden and better the research being conducted in the male-dominated field. As Stanford science historian Londa Schiebinger says, “There are lots of places where you can show the direct link between increase in number of women and outcome in knowledge. History, primatology, biology, medicine.” It seems like basic logic that by increasing the diversity of the researchers in any field, the knowledge will expand. This is because, inevitably, people of different backgrounds, cultures, creeds, and yes, genders, will approach problems and questions differently than each other. Diversity in the research results in diversity and reliability in the results.
Sometimes, this can be seen very clearly in fields dominated by men. Specifically, when they make oversights due to a lack of variety in their workplace. For example, a study done at McGill University in 2013 that was attempting to measure pain response in rats and mice had its results skewed. This was because the rodents were put off so much by the actual smell of the male researchers, they would become desensitized to pain because of stress and fear caused by the environment. And this wasn’t just a human smell. Female researchers could, apparently, conduct the same research without a problem. Now, clearly this wasn’t too detrimental to the world of science in the long run, but consider the implications: how many studies have been conducted on animals by predominantly or only male researchers? How do we know whether this has impacted all of them? It just goes to show that women in the workplace should be a valued presence to increase the validity of the work done.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the scope of the research done. If men are dominating fields like, for example, medicine, research conducted will predominantly serve men. This isn’t to say that every innovation from any field is only directly of use for the people who came up with it; merely that there will inevitably be gaps in research pertaining to other people. If research in medicine focuses on the male body and only acknowledges the female as some scaled-down version of this, there will inevitably be gaps in the healthcare of women. For example, many women with heart disease have, in the past, been misdiagnosed and faced fatal consequences for one specific reason: it wasn’t known that women exhibit different symptoms than men. There’s undoubtedly gaps of knowledge like this across the field, and those would be easily filled by a stronger female presence in the research.
These things and more make it evident that women in STEM occupations aren’t just an okay idea, they’re imperative to the betterment of research and human knowledge of those areas. If any women or girls find themselves attracted to STEM areas but are made hesitant by the lack of women they see in those areas, remember: those gaps are just waiting for you to come and fill them!
Sources:
- https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141107-gender-studies-women-scientific-research-feminist/
- https://www.elsevier.com/connect/3-reasons-gender-diversity-is-crucial-to-science
- https://www.elsevier.com/connect/why-science-is-gender-biased-and-what-we-can-do-about-it
- http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/index.html
- https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2019/demo/sehsd-wp2018-27.pdf
