Women in mathematics, engineering and technology. (Essay Sample)

Student's Name: Professor's Name: Course: Date: Women in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Introduction Women are greatly underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce which has remained to be America's important tool to innovation and helping it attain a global competitive edge (David Beede 11). Despite the fact women make up half the U.S population, they are not well represented in this STEM workforce even the number of women having the STEM degree are so few that it then leaves an opportunity that is untapped hence inhibiting the expansion of the STEM employment in the United States even if as a nation there is an agreement, that it should increase in its competitiveness. You will realize that even if the share of the overall workforce was occupied by college- educated women, less than 25 per cent occupied STEM jobs (David Beede 6). But those that got an opportunity to do so, they earned 33 per cent more than those that occupied non-STEM jobs. This per cent was also relatively higher than the STEM premium offered to men. Therefore for this reason the wage gap is smaller in STEM jobs as compared to those in non-stem jobs. There are many factors that contribute to all the discrepancies of women and men in STEM jobs. Some of them including nonexistence of female role models, stereotyping of gender, lack of family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields, social norms and legal systems. This paper aims at shedding light on why there are few women in the field of mathematics and engineering (Correl 45). In trying to analyze the effects of social norms and legal systems, it is clearly evident that according to Correl (50) at if you compared men and women of the same age group, who possess the same amount of time since they undertook their PhDs, in the same field of knowledge, and all have recent academic productions, inclusive of articles, and publishing of books, and also carrying out their dissertations as instructed, the chances of a male Associate professor being given a higher rank to becoming a full professor is 2.5 times higher than that of a fellow woman who also have the very similar professional, personal and family qualities (Correl 55). This raises the question, does gender biasness still exist in the promotion of women who aspire to become engineers or work in science and mathematics related fields. According to (Weneras and world 321) in their analysis they state that women were required to have 2.5 more results as compared to men in order to achieve merit in the same qualification. Also (Steinpreis 509) indicate that in the U.s men and women would vote for a male contestant than a female counter part with the same academic qualifications. A curriculum that was signed by a man, woman and another in initials, once ranked the one signed by a man took the first position, followed by the one in initials, while the one signed by a woman took the lowest position (Ceci and Williams 20). According to Correll (46) in an assessment of job applications materials of both women and men whose only difference were parental status, showed that women who had children but with equal merit were deemed to be less competent and that were not committed as their counterparts without children, whereas there is this comparison between women, men who do not have children were not given a more advantage than those that had it in fact worked in the favour of those that had children. According to the study by (Correl 52) employers favored fathers over mothers. There is enough evidence to prove that there is still existence of stereotypes that negatively impacted on the women's professional careers and mostly in the Science, technology, engineering and mathematics field. The Harvard University shows that this social norms and stereotypes influence how boys and girls participate in sciences and also their performance on the same and eventually determine the success of both men and women in the careers associated with science (Ceci 26). In the society the image of a scientist and an engineer is still more associated with masculinity, in class set up boys have been cultured to think that their mathematical literacy is higher than that of girls with the same ability. This in return influences the career choices, so we end up having boys inclined to selecting careers in science while women feel undermined since the emphasis mostly is on the biased idea on what boys are good in rather than focusing on the ability itself. In the recruitment process, women who assertive are considered to be competent but also as disagreeable on the other hand which results to biasness in the process of recruitment. The fact that most people consider leadership characteristics of women as similar to their gender roles, this affects the leadership choice of women (Weneras 323). Social norms and legal systems have greatly affected the dominance of women in science and mathematics. People equate the amount of time spent in work and at home to raise a family. And since women are considered to be home makers, then rarely do people consider hiring them for such complex and highly demanding jobs that may require them to work away from home (Correl 20). Since the opening to well-paying STEM jobs is a STEM degree, an examination was conducted to show to what extent college-educated workers had STEM degrees. There were 2.5 million college-educate working women who were in possession of the STEM degree, in the year 2009 as compared to 6.7 million men. This huge disparity is even more worsened by the fact that in the overall labour force, the representation of women is 21.4 million that is 49 percent of the total and only 22.2 million men employed have bachelor degrees (David Beede 10). In STEM another major difference between men and women is their majors. Female STEM majors study the physical and life sciences. Very few men decide to study those fields. However the share of women deciding to undertake mathematics is slightly higher than men. While a good number of men will choose engineering degrees and just a small number of women dare venture into such studies. When it comes to computer science there is an equal share of both men and women. But the surprising thing is that the number of men in the STEM workforce will outnumber that of women in all field of studies (SteinPreis 507). In STEM, men are likely to be given managerial jobs as compared to women whereas women will be found in the education or healthcare centers their number being twice as that of their counterpart's men. In financial and business occupations both men and women with STEM degree obtained an equal share. The path of women substantially change in the long run even if they choose STEM degrees, 2.7 million of men work in STEM jobs that is if they have STEM degrees but only 0-6 women work in STEM. Science and engineering form the basics of a community in various areas ranging from generation of energy, the transportation industry, environmental and health controls, data bank and communication. Scientists and engineers there play and indispensable role in the entire workforce based on the size of the workforce, talents and also competitiveness (Allen 265). These engineering and science fields are characterized by observable gender imbalances in participation, and also in the rewards. Men are more likely to be employed compared to women and they are also likely to be found in more senior positions as opposed to their female counterparts (Brewer 266). These gender differences have been in the limelight for over the past half a decade indicating that scientific careers should be opened to talent but not based on physical appearance. These gender differences start all the way down from undergraduate education. In engineering fields careers are molded at a young age with an educational source that starts early in life forming a continuous progression in learning (Golde 267). Women pursuing tertiary course and degrees in scientific fields have been seen to rise over the past decades but they still remain underrepresented in fields outside social, behavior and life sciences. These under representations have been caused by stereotype threats and implicit bias. This is where a negative stereotype is relevant to evaluating performance (Allen 268). Many people tend to believe women are genetically weak and not equipped with the tensile strength required to pursue engineering or even the might to operate heavy machinery. This may result to biasness in the recruitment proves and overall results to fewer females in the science and engineering industry (Brewer 269). Women have also been raised from a society orienting the girl child to lighter domestic tasks and therefore mentoring them from an early age that lades are meant to handle light duties compared to their male siblings who from an early age are equipped with road construction toys and are taught driving skills from an early age because that is what the society expects from them. This in conclusion has resulted to fewer women in the science and engineering fields but the numbers are slightly rising with the changing curriculum. The results are synonymous in aerospace industry where women have been known to travel to the outer space for exploration and research of the galaxies (Allen 269). In the STEM workforce, the workers there earn better or relatively higher than their counterparts in non-STEM jobs. There is also something that is referred to as gender wage gap, a research showed that women earn less than men even when they have similar set of characteristics for example education and age. For every dollar that a man earned in STEM, a woman got 14 per cent less, which is equivalent to 21 percent gender wage gap in the non –STEM jobs which is smaller but of course indicates a clear gender disparity. This situati...