By: Kendall Hunt RPD with contributions from the writing team of By Design Science grades 1-8
With graduation season in full swing, students of all ages are pondering their futures, making plans of study, and imagining dream jobs. But what jobs are they imagining—especially young female students? We’ve been told girls are less likely than boys to pursue degrees and careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects.
Is this true? Well, partially.
Educational gains
First, the positive news: more girls than ever are choosing a STEM-based educational field. According to data from the National Science Foundation, women earned 37.2% of all bachelor's degrees in the fields of science and engineering in 1980, which increased to 50.3% in 2010.
However, those numbers only tell part of the story. Research from the University of Washington shows that although some STEM fields, such as biology and mathematics, have dramatically increased their female membership, fields such as engineering and computer science have failed to do so. In other words, when girls do choose a STEM career, they gravitate toward hard sciences and math—not toward the more “applied” side of STEM, such as engineering.
The employment disconnect
The problem is, the hard sciences and math are the fields within STEM that are most likely to lead to employment in non-STEM-related occupations. A Harvard University study shows that engineering majors are most likely to enter STEM jobs, whereas graduates in the physical and biological sciences are the least likely to enter the STEM labor force. So even though female participation in STEM majors is increasing, their performance in the STEM job market itself is not, and the reason is that female STEM majors aren’t choosing the majors that are most likely to land them a STEM job.
The long and short of it? We’ve done a good job of encouraging and normalizing girls to enter the physical sciences. Now, we need to do the same specifically for engineering and programming. Here’s how K–12 teachers can have an impact as we head into summer.
How teachers can make a difference now
Don’t try to promote STEM by painting it as a field with low female involvement. Rather than encouraging girls to break the norm, this tactic may actually reinforce their beliefs that they “won’t fit in” in this field. Encourage the STEM interests of both boys and girls with these end-of-year ideas:
What tactics have you used to inspire your students to investigate computer science and engineering?
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315093/
https://depts.washington.edu/sibl/gender-and-stem/
http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/how-promoting-stem-fields-women-can-backfire