It is commonly known that men dominate in the STEM workforce, specifically in engineering. Some argue that it is definitely an issue present in this world, which led many to encourage girls to join theSTEM fields, which may make this persistent issue dissolve on its own. But this is not the case. In 2019, according to Harvard Business Review, the percentage of women in engineering and computer science has decreased instead of increased over time, with only 13% of women in the engineering field.
Why is this the case? As a result of male dominance in STEM careers, women tend to leave the workforce and end up joining careers in other fields. Since 2003, scientists Caroll Seron from the University of California Irvine, Erin Cech from the University of Michigan, Brian Rubineau from the University of McGill in Canada, and Susan S. Silbey from MIT conducted a study on engineering students around four schools to find out how the culture surrounding engineering affects these changes in career fields and why male dominance was one of the main reasons for the changes.
According to these scientists, the reasons that both men and women chose to enter the engineering field was their love of maths and physics but also the want for a well paid job in the future. Even though women and men were equally successful throughout their time in college, women had started to doubt their skills and capabilities to maintain their career. Once women discovered that collaborating with other engineers was very important in this field, they started to back out.Their main collaborative experiences had been negative due to the discriminatory treatment they had received from both their male peers and even their professors, especially during internships, which limited their opportunity to cultivate their skills set.
This gender stereotyping, followed by sexual harassment, leads to women slowly starting to doubt whether engineering was ever for them, resulting in many women leaving the field and rethinking their ambitions. Most importantly, women are not taken seriously in these fields. According to one student, “one thing that really bugs me about being an intern and a young girl is that the people whom I work with don’t take me seriously. Not everyone does this, but a fair amount of the older men in my working environment. They’ll treat me like I know nothing… What they don’t know is that I have a 3.7 GPA… I never used to really care, but now when it interferes with my profession, it just irritates me.” In careers such as medicine and law, the women to men ratio is fairly equal. Furthermore, the number of women in the life sciences is slowly increasing. With such low proportions of women in engineering, people need to pay more attention and help speak out about this gender disparity and place more effort into taking women more seriously.
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