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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday September 07 2017, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the doesn't-stem-student's-interest dept.

Research into the obvious, but someone has finally done it: Three women researchers have studied the behavior of undergraduates in STEM fields, and concluded that there basically is no problem. From the abstract:

"The results show that high school academic preparation, faculty gender composition, and major returns have little effect on major switching behaviors, and that women and men are equally likely to change their major in response to poor grades in major-related courses. Moreover, women in male-dominated majors do not exhibit different patterns of switching behaviors relative to their male colleagues."

Furthermore current recruitment efforts to attract more women tend to be counterproductive. In an interview, the primary author says:

"Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it's not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields."

One of our female students told me that the women are interviewed endlessly, for one project or another: "tell us about your experience", "are you doing ok", "have you experienced sexism", and on, and on. That alone is enough to make them question their career choice.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @01:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @01:32AM (#564872)

    STEM jobs are for social people. Nerds go to hell.

    Where did you interview for this job? Was it in the Valley?

    Not sure about him, but I feel the same and I'm working in New England. It's just general corporate culture IMO -- not a single damn thing gets done without twenty people in a room debating back and forth. Not one line of code gets written except by committee. I've seen literally one line of bash -- a single rsync command -- take four or five people to write. So if you do your best work alone...you never actually get to do your best work. Hell, "alone" doesn't even exist anymore with open plan office environments. And everything is so compartmentalized that even if you come up with some way to improve the overall process and hopefully make everyone's life easier, you have to get so many other departments on board that someone won't want to or won't understand how to do the work and it won't ever go anywhere.

    I do think the people going into STEM now are more like frat members than the people I went to college with. I think it really comes down to the fact that STEM, and computer jobs in general, are a victim of their own success.

    Christ, you might have a point there...I've been here thinking that was just because we were getting all the H1Bs who think America is just what they've seen from Hollywood. Most of the people I work with care more about playing football (soccer) than doing anything with tech...

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