My pseudonym is Ix wrote:Matt wrote:f we want more women in the industry, we need to give women a reason to be a part of the industry.
Funneling women into STEM educational paths will do little to affect industry demographics if, once women join the workforce, they find themselves having to sacrifice major aspects of their lives, and endure harassment and boys-club mentalities, while producing work that doesn't appear to value them as either creator or customer. They'll just leave.
-m
I'm studying engineering at the moment, a field that has about 10% women in it and has done for the last 30 years (and probably much more, I don't have the data to say). This is not because engineering is an all-boys' club; engineers are by and large a friendly bunch, and I've never seen any of the girls on our course treated anything other than normally. The same is true with regards to all evidence I have from industry; most male engineers have zero problem with women doing the job, because engineers prize something working above all else and their main concern is whether a person is capable of doing their job.
Yeah, you may never notice inequality of treatment. That's kind of the point.
Multiple studies have shown that when teachers
allow boys to dominate class discussions, teachers and male students usually perceive that the talking time has been allocated equally. When one teacher actually made a conscious effort to improve the ratio of speaking time allotted, by the time he reached the point where they were truly being treated equally, both he and the boys in his class felt that he was spending 90% of his time on the girls. The problem is, boys are raised from birth so that situations where they dominate classroom conversation feel normal, and they assume that normal is equal. This pattern is found to be more prominent in classrooms with male teachers, and science teachers are more likely to be male because of the very real historical boy's club.
A club that, in the field of programming especially, was
deliberately constructed by organizations that sought to turn a female-dominated field into a more prestigious male-dominated one.
These fields have also come to value aggressive, take-charge behavior. Studies consistently show that when women exhibit this kind of behavior, people perceive them as unlikable, whereas it does not have a negative impact on the likability of men.
This devastating anecdote from a sixteen-year-old girl hits incredibly close to home:
Sometimes I feel like saying that I disagree, that there are other ways of looking at it, but where would that get me? My teacher thinks I’m showing off, and the boys jeer. But if I pretend I don’t understand, it’s very different. The teacher is sympathetic and the boys are helpful. They really respond if they can show YOU how it is done, but there’s nothing but ‘aggro’ if you give any signs of showing THEM how it is done.
Oh man, I hear ya, anonymized study participant. I could never figure out why guys in my science classes were so much meaner and more "aggro" towards me than any of the other girls, until I realized that I'd been missing this social cue. My speaking habits more closely resembled the boys', rather than the more popular girls who employed the techniques she describes above, all the while getting the best grades in the class. It was clear their confusion was feigned, designed to reduce aggression. I've always been terrible at picking up on gender-based social norms, so I didn't learn this trick until years later, and I still suck at it.
What's more, studies keep showing that even when all other things are absolutely, completely equal, everyone - men and women alike - will subconsciously assume that men are better at technology things and
favor hiring or mentoring them over equally qualified women. They will honestly believe they are judging solely on merit, but they won't be, at all.
So the engineers you're talking about probably THINK they're prizing someone's ability to do the job over all other things, but chances are they aren't. The study was specifically designed to debunk the common inaccurate assumption that you're putting forth in your post: that people in various science and technology fields would be unbiased about gender. Everyone thinks they're being unbiased and judging solely based on ability, but most people aren't, including women!
The boy's club is alive, well, and imperceptible to most people until we actually sit down and do science to it. How much of it is gender stereotyping in earlier life, and how much is an invisible silencing of women's voices? How much is omnipersistent micro-aggressions when they express themselves with the kind of assertiveness that boys are rewarded for?
The personal account of Ben Barres is very telling. He is a transgender computer scientist who
reports startling differences in his treatment by colleagues during different periods of his career when his gender was perceived differently. So if there are circumstances where female students are being treated unequally, you probably wouldn't notice... and the female students might not be conscious of it either. It's not your fault, it's an omnipresent social force, one that we have to become consciously aware of if we want to fight it.
These days, sexism doesn't look like a fatcat chomping a cigar and saying "women can't do the job!" It looks like someone of either gender saying "I just want the best person for the job, regardless of gender" and then picking a man over an equally qualified woman because of an unconscious bias. It doesn't look like a woman being barred from a classroom, it looks like a woman being interrupted when she tries to contribute to the discussion, while a man is allowed to aggressively talk over her.
The only way to fight this is to be conscious of it. You gave us an innocent assessment of your perception of an environment, but studies show that those perceptions are often incredibly misleading.
I know you probably did not intend it, but the way you phrased your argument is characteristic of a new movement that attempts to attribute a lack of female representation in these fields to women's internalized sexism - a girl wants to be girly, and science isn't girly, so she chooses not to pursue it. There's very little research that reinforces that interpretation.
Instead, when gender stereotyping is a factor, it's almost always externally imposed. Women don't get into science because when they look for mentors, they find more encouragement in non-science fields. When they seek advice, they are not advised to go into science. When they excel equally at science and non-science, they are praised more for excellence in non-science. So women's perception of science as unfeminine and the "boys' club" are not two different forces pushing women away from science. Women's perception of science as unfeminine is a symptom of the "boys' club" of institutionalized sexism we often believe is a thing of the past.
So when you downplay the possibility that people in your field might really be treating women differently and play up the idea that some societal force takes hold of women and causes them to choose not to pursue science, it perpetuates a number of incredibly dangerous misconceptions.
The boys' club used to have a sign that said "no girls allowed." The sign's gone, they let them in the door now... they just pay them less, offer them fewer jobs, mock them if they are assertive, interrupt them when they speak, make threatening jokes at their expense, and then act surprised when all the women leave.
"We've got to figure out why women aren't interested in coming here!" they say.
The problem isn't deeper than the boy's club, the boy's club is deeper, larger, and more omnipresent than you could possibly imagine, and you've been trained your entire life to be psychologically incapable of noticing it.
The boys' club created the perception that computer programming isn't for women. They did it on purpose. It happened recently enough that we have the paper trail. They actually managed to reverse a perception that programming was women's work. This isn't just some untraceable social phenomenon, a vague societal problem - it's the direct result of deliberate actions designed to push women out of an industry. It happened less than sixty years ago. Some of these people are still alive.
And they would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling Smithsonian historians and experimental psychologists. They would have convinced everyone that this was a mysterious societal problem, that women in these fields are treated equally, that they are guilt-free - but if you take even the slightest effort to do research, you can pull the mask off.