Telling Women's Lives

Adam Dailey – Why are there still so few women in science?

I found this particular piece to be so poignant because of the twofold problem that it represents. The lack of women’s participation in STEM fields is a direct manifestation of the problems that we have been studying in class, but it is also a huge problem within the STEM fields themselves. STEM is what ultimately is responsible for the major progressions in making life tangibly better for people, and the continued trend of positive development as a result of STEM jobs must be part and parcel with the expansion of the field’s vetting process to include women. It is a setback for both the STEM community and the global community when a woman is the best person for the job, but due to either institutional patriarchy within STEM fields or even the total dissuasion of taking on that career path in the first place, she does not do it.

The presence of a “boy curve” and a “girl curve” because the author’s professor thought that men and women would score similarly based on gender can only be described as baffling. How do you get such a prestigious job while still having such a fundamentally skewed vision of how the world works? This can be seen as a small portion of ultimately a much bigger problem; a social stigma outlined in one of the studies mentioned by Pollack as associating talent and interest in math as exclusively for “Asians and nerds”. This mindset is clearly hurting America, and the idea that pursuing an interest in math can lead to social ostracism will have a big, negative, and difficult to measure impact on our contributions in STEM unless it is averted soon. This is a fantastic article that informatively and concisely describes a big problem in both the professional and social realms of society.