Career Trajectories Of Women In STEM

Science, technology, engineering, and math are the four areas of study that make up STEM. These four areas all have one thing in common: they are all dominated by men. According to Lauren C. Williams, “men outnumber women 7 to 3 in tech jobs in New York City — and nationwide.”.7 Despite this, “women now earn more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men”.6 However, “women are a minority”.2 Women are a minority in all STEM careers. The ratio of men to women in scientific fields has never been one to one. For some unknown reason very few women are choosing to become chemists, physicists, engineers, computer technicians, or mathematicians. There are many proposed theories for why women are extremely outnumbered in these scientific

All though women in STEM face many challenges as a whole, a question being posed in this study is whether or not women in math and physics intensive studies face unique obstacles. Underrepresentation in STEM seems a stubborn fact of the matter, however, it is not even across the board. The number of women present in the life sciences (sciences such as biology, environmental studies, health care, etc.), both at the academic and professional level, is much higher than the number of women present in fields that focus heavily on math, physics, and engineering. More and more women are choosing to pursue post-secondary education and enter the specialized workforce; in 2010 the AAUW found “Women currently earn over half of all doctoral degrees

The force of societal stereotypes is a large part of this gap. Instead of joining STEM careers, the most common careers among women are secretaries, nurses, and elementary and middle school teachers (Mandell). This truly illustrates that when well-rounded, talented women have the choice, they are inclined to delve into the field in which society expects them to belong. In this way, the stereotype of women not being involved in STEM is forcing less women to be involved in these fields. The deficiency of women in technical fields, despite their well-roundedness and ability, can be directly related to unyielding cultural stereotypes that stigmatize women in supposedly masculine fields.

Women have struggled in establishing their rightful place in the STEM environment because of this image of a family where the mother is the chief caretaker of the children. Society believes that a woman’s first priority

In summary Mary Barbercheck Mixed Messages, is trying to display simply, where do gender roles come from? She states how there are two models in which why people believe why women don’t peruse careers after obtaining advance degrees. The first model is the deficit model; it examines the treatment women receive. Which emphasize barriers in the scientific community such as legal, political and social barrier. However, this also uses an assumption on women’s goals; that there the same as men’s. The second model is the difference mode, which can be seen as outdated says that simply women act differently than men, thus can obtain the same measurement of success as a man can. As describes in the text, the problem with both these model is that their

Females need a solid knowledge and understanding of STEM subjects, to help prepare for the global economy of the 21st Century.

Nurses, counselors, teachers, wedding planners, interior decorators, and pediatricians are just some of the important positions women hold in the workforce, however, there has been a lack of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related careers. Women tend to be drawn more towards careers dealing with secretarial work, health care and retail instead of engineering, chemistry, and technology. One of the biggest reason women do not enter these fields is due to cultural stereotypes. Another is due to the multitude of positions available to women that are not STEM related. Finally, women tend to look for jobs that are more flexible, hands on, financially rewarding and socially welcoming.

Even though some academics would say why use incentives to help better the underrepresentation of women in the STEM careers because government incentives can have a good cause and effect on the workforce of the STEM careers like they have in nursing and teaching. the cause would be the elevate women's interest in following the STEM paths and the effect would be an increased workforce that is more concentrated in STEM to fulfill the shortages in the workforce. Women

Since childhood, I have always known that I wanted to pursue a STEM related career. I was fascinated by the evolving technological world and the various advancements but computers, in specific, stood out to me. Soon, working with computers came easy to me and I was off in identifying new software and utilizing programming languages alongside electrical components for various projects such as an LED displaying text on an Arduino board. Mathematics and science have also been strengths of mine and coming from a family with strong mathematical and scientific knowledge, I learned to integrate them into coding projects such as Sierpinski’s carpet and a basketball game. It is no surprise that our modern world is heavily computation and data driven.

Because most STEM workers have a bachelor's degree or higher level of education, few STEM workers are younger than 25. Workers between the ages of 35 and 44 make up the largest share of the STEM workforce, while workers between the ages of 45 and 54 make up the largest share of non-STEM employment. The aging of the STEM workforce may have a disproportionate impact on women’s share of the STEM workforce. Some research indicates that younger women today are more likely to pursue training in a STEM field, and this may contribute to their larger share of employment in STEM compared with older women. This perspective would be consistent with a cohort effect, where we would expect higher shares of female employment in STEM in the future, as young women who are in STEM occupations age and retain STEM employment. On the other hand, these estimates could be consistent with an age effect. This is, when women are young, they are more likely to be employed in STEM, but as they age, they move out of STEM employment. also , among STEM workers, women were less likely than men to have children at home. About 62% of women had no children at home, compared with 57% of men. About 43% of women in STEM-related employment had children at home, compared with the 39% of women in non-STEM occupations, and 38% of women in

In his article, “Does Gender Matter?”, Ben A. Barres writes about the apparent absence of women in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields. He starts out the article by informing the reader about a few of the hypotheses that aim to explain this difference in presence, hypotheses that Barres aims to disprove. Barres explains, and at a few points depicts with charts and graphs, the significance of the gap between the amount of white men in the STEM majors and fields of studies and the amount of women and minorities in these same areas. He tell the readers the misconceptions such as the idea that women are inferior in these fields are untrue, and the fact is that woman and minorities are discouraged from entering into these areas

Huston, Pat. "A Snapshot Of Ohio: Girls Behind The STEM Equality Movement." Techniques: Connecting Education & Careers 90.3 (2015): 14. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 13 May 2016.

For as long as I can remember I have known I wanted to pursue a STEM related career with a focus on engineering. Dedicating myself to improve the world and making a difference in peoples’ lives through innovation and new technologies that will improve their standard of living is very appealing to me. For women, it is extremely competitive to find jobs, especially in a field that is highly dominated by men, which is why I would like to take this opportunity to get an introduction and a head start on my career. I believe that this program will give me the opportunity to gain experiences through professionals at a world-wide leading technology company.

Personally, I am determined to become a Computer Software Engineer by first obtaining my degree in Computer Science during college. Unfortunately, females are minorities in this pathway so they work harder to prove their ability to excel in STEM courses while being negatively influenced by sexism. As a female, I want to empower people (particularly women) to pursue STEM careers to prove our capability of completing the same tasks as males while possibly developing enhanced versions of their accomplishments. Although, the smaller percentage of students will be underestimated, I want to encourage others to do the best notwithstanding the situations. After all, there is no reason to strive for anything lower than the

Cox & Harquail (1991) looked at the relationship between gender, career paths, and career success with female and male with a master’s degree in business administration. The results concluded that female managers and male managers did not differ on overall promotions and career satisfaction, but female managers experienced lower salary increases, less management promotions, and lower hierarchical levels in comparison to male managers with similar education, experience, age, performance and career paths (Cox & Harquail, 1991). Cox and Harquail (1991) sampled 502 MBAs, consisting of 125 female and 377 male respondents, all being alumni from the same top business school in the country where questionnaires and letters were sent out to the alumni graduates from the ten-year period between 1976-1986.