Women’s Underrepresentation in Science: Our Choices?
March 20, 2009
by Judy Silver
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A new Cornell study of the reasons why there are fewer women at the top in Scientific, Technical, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields concludes that “a powerful explanatory factor is that mathematics-capable women disproportionately choose non-mathematics fields.”
For me, the study-of-studies (by Ceci, Williams and Barnett, published in this month’s Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association) raises as many questions as it answers. Importantly, it gives us a great opportunity to share ideas on what The New Agenda can/should be doing to help women in STEM fields.
The authors observe that “women who are highly competent in math are more likely than men to also have high verbal competence, thus allowing the option of going into the humanities or law.” This point is very interesting to me because it resonates with my personal story. As an undergrad, I studied physics, but I also loved to write, so I went to work writing for a trade magazine about lasers. To the extent that women make such choices freely (not forced by inhospitable conditions in STEM fields), should we embrace and celebrate those choices? Is underrepresentation of women in STEM a reflection of the broader kind of intelligence that women, on average, offer? On the other hand, does it call for universities to teach the sciences in a way that engages students on both the verbal and mathematical levels (e.g starting with cosmology instead of blocks on inclined planes)? What are the societal advantages of having women proportionally represented across all fields?
Then there’s the life-balance issue that is common across many professions. “Even very educated women are more likely than men to favor home-centered lifestyles and adaptive lifestyles, wherein family and home are paramount and work is adapted to fit around this choice,” say the authors. Women with PhDs are twice as likely as male PhDs to marry a person with a PhD, resulting in those women being twice as likely to change jobs due to their partners’ job moves. And sadly but believably, “The one research finding that is robust, incontrovertible, and based on up-to-date information, is that women’s fertility choices, and the timing of when to have children, are powerful predictors of career success…” The authors point out that this “fertility penalty” is particularly intense for women professors. “The tenure structure in academe demands that women who have children make their greatest intellectual achievements contemporaneously with their greatest physical and emotional achievements, a feat fathers are never expected to accomplish.” In 2005, Princeton announced that it automatically would grant faculty extra time to pursue tenure after the birth of a child. What other universities are making the tenure track flexible enough to include and reward women who are raising families? What are the exemplary aspects of those programs, and how can we give those universities positive support that would be meaningful to them? What else should we be encouraging universities (or donors to universities) to do? What are the parallels in the corporate world?
Not everything the Cornell authors examined turned out to be a factor in underrepresentation. “Institutional barriers and stereotypes, both of which are real, do not appear likely to account for most of the sex differences, nor does outright discrimination against women in hiring and remuneration. To the extent that such barriers and biases operate to decrease the entry and retention of women in math-intensive fields, there is no compelling evidence that the removal of these barriers would result in equalization of sex ratios…”
To me this seems to be a dramatic change. I’m fifty years old. Women of my generation and older – we’ve got war stories. And women who have built entire careers in STEM fields have much worse stories than mine — ugly, painful, stories of harassment and discrimination. Yet, the Cornell researchers say, “the best evidence on salary and hiring indicates that gender differences are small (or nonexistent) among younger faculty… Much of the evidence of discrimination… is dated and anecdotal and not compelling as an explanation of why women are underrepresented…” I’ve been out of the field for decades, so I have no knowledge of what’s going on today, but assuming that the authors are correct, this is good news. We certainly need to honor the hurt caused by the wrongs of the past, and to wipe out the vestiges of sexist barriers that still exist. At the same time, what are the examples of equality in technical fields that deserve our affirmation and celebration?
Finally, the hot potato. I wish I could tell you that the authors proved conclusively that boys and girls are equally competent at math. Unfortunately, their results are more nuanced. “We found that evidence for a direct effect of innate hormonal differences on math and spatial ability is contradictory and inclusive…” Of particular interest are the smartest of the smart, what the researchers call the “right tail” of the curve. Two thirds of the top 1% of scorers on SAT math tests are male. However, what does that mean in light of the fact that among Asian Americans, the top 1% contains slightly more women than men? Studies including other countries also are contradictory. Moreover, the authors point out that “if women were found in STEM professions commensurate with their scores on SAT-M… one would expect one third of engineers to be women, but only 15% actually are.” Clearly socio-cultural factors are in play. The authors call for more study on the right tail. Meanwhile, what can our educational system do to positively influence girls’ experience of and excitement about their science and math classes, and about potential careers in STEM. And how can women’s groups help?
Let’s brainstorm on ways we can help make sure that our girls have the best options possible when they decide whether a STEM career is their choice.
Great piece Judy. Thanks so much for writing about women in science for us.
thanks for writing this Judy. so many areas to work on. to keep girls interested in the sciences means empowering them to swim upstream. the softer sciences biology medicine are acceptable, engineering and math need support. the toy industries and advertisement are working heavily to prepare girls for their only role.
and then the big completely unresolved issue with fertility not interfering with professional choices. what if there is, the benefit for the professions to incorporate parent time with children without affecting careers. another option to move fertility late or adopting has its pluses and minuses. when I finally at age 50 opted for child and took the more family compatible job, that was opting out of career. curious to hear about ideas.
Thanks for shining a light on this Judy!!
What an interesting article! There seem to be so many different factors that contribute to the lack of women in STEM careers. These career paths, even starting in high school, are so competitive that I have often wondered if women’s aversion (for a million reasons) to those highly competitive situations is a contributor to the lack of women pursuing these fields.
I am an engineer who left the field to become a science teacher. I specifically did it because so few resumes crossing my desk were from women. I complained about it loudly and was challenged to put “my money where my mouth was” and go recruit some more women. I decided I needed to recruit some 13-year-olds.
When an English teacher chooses a book for the class to read in middle school, he or she often makes the choice through the lens of “What would the boys be willing to read?” Choose a book with a female main character, and a good portion of the boys will not bother to read the book no matter how good the book is. Choose a book about a boy, and the vast majority of the girls will read it, and if it’s a good book, they’ll even recommend it to their girlfriends. Rowlings did not write “Harriet Potter” for a reason.
But if the science teacher says, “How can I teach this in a way that will engage more of the girls?”, she gets told that science is a way of thinking, and that way of thinking is the scientific method, and that’s what the kids need to know if they want to grow up to be scientists. The truth is that not all scientific experiment is based on making a hypothesis, and then testing it. Sometimes scientists and engineers do things and see what happens before we make any judgments about what we think will happen. When I would describe a demonstration that I was about to do and require that every student write down a hypothesis about what was going to happen, most of the girls were very uncomfortable about making a “guess” and risking being wrong. I would hear comments like, “I hate it when you do this”. If, however, I just went ahead and did the demonstration, and then asked why did what happened happen, some of the best discussion came from the girls. Some of our most famous female biologists entered the forest to study the animals being very careful to not have any preconceived ideas of what they would observe because to do so would limit their ability to be an unbiased observer. I don’t believe that girls prefer biology to the physical sciences because they like to study “cute little animals” or “pretty flowers”. I think that women prefer a more global approach to discovery, and the biological sciences offer more of that,. It’s possible to think about the physical sciences that way, too, but we don’t teach them that way. (I taught physics and the earth sciences.)
We cater to boys in areas where traditionally they have had less success than girls although we often don’t even realize that we do it. I don’t believe in separating the sexes in math and science classes – after all, some of both kinds of thinking are needed, but I do believe in thinking about how girls relate to science when we decide how and what to teach. Although I don’t support “girl only” science classes, I do believe that setting up single sex lab groups occasionally is a good idea. If a teacher doesn’t do that, she ends up with a class where the boys all know how to use the lab equipment, and the girls learn how to collect and report the data. Doing that experiment is where my master’s thesis began.
Women and girls are good at science and math, and we need to stop buying the propaganda that we are not. Then we need to teach our daughters physics and calculus, and even more important, teach them that they belong in those classes. They deserve entry into the well-paying occupations that being good at math and science bring you. More than that, we need their brains there. What if the cure for cancer lies with a young woman who stopped taking math in the 10th grade because she didn’t think she needed to know more math because she’s a girl?
This is simply a great piece. It really is a national security risk that so many talented women do not seek and succeed in STEM field jobs.
* Twenty-five percent of US scientists and engineers will reach retirement age by 2010.
* Women have made significant progress in science and engineering, having earned half of bachelor’s degrees, 44 percent of master’s degrees and 37 percent of doctorates in science and engineering in 2003-2004.
* Despite their gains in degree attainment, women represented only 25 percent of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics US labor force in 2005.
In order for the US to remain competitive and to deal with the challenges that face us globally, we must educate students from all demographic backgrounds and encourage more to consider engineering.
The cultural factors that you mention as part of the “hot potato” have always intrigued me. The vast majority of the mathematics the human species possesses today was developed by Northwest European men, but that is only a very recent phenomenon. There was a time when Greek mathematics exceeded that of everyone else combined, and later it was the Arabs turn. We still use Arabic numerals, and the words algebra and algorithm are of Arabic origin, both having been invented by Arabs. Chinese and Hindu mathematicians had their glory days as well. Until very recently, Northwest Europe was something of an intellectual backwater.
So what happened? Did Northwest Europeans suddenly get smart and Greeks and Arabs dumb? It’s pretty clear that the reasons must be cultural, not biological, and this is for me a compelling reason to believe that any apparent male/female differences are cultural as well.
It must be pointed out, however, that the statement that the vast majority of the mathematics that we possess was developed by men is somewhat misleading. It’s probably the case that the majority of mathematics was developed by about 100 men, or about 0.000001% of the humans who have ever lived. Indeed a very significant amount can probably be attributed to just Newton, Euler, and Gauss. These people are by definition not normal. Being in this class is probably some sort of mental pathology, maybe similar to autism. So it may be more accurate to say that the majority of mathematics was developed by the mentally “ill”. Is one gender more likely to “suffer” from such pathologies than the other? I have no idea, but it is not an unreasonable question. Of course this kind of thinking doesn’t really apply to gender bias in STEM fields, whose ranks are filled by people who are perhaps a little unusual but generally not “pathological”.
Samanthasmom,
Thanks so much for sharing your story, and for your dedication to our children. Your insights on education are intriguing. What can we do to help? Are there curriculum materials that we should lobby school boards to adopt? Methods of teacher training that we should promote to education faculty? Studies that we should publicize?
Kevin,
Can you say more about lack of gender parity being a national security risk? How could we leverage that issue? What should we ask of whom in order to change that?
Judy, a study I have referenced is Reversing the Brain Drain by the Center for Work-Life Policy (http://www.worklifepolicy.org/). The study was done in response to Larry Summers infamous comments on women’s innate abilities. It does focus on women’s participation in the SET workforce.
I have been making the argument with our legislators that the need for foreign workers in specialized occupations, e.g. technology, science, finance, decreases women’s participation in these fields and will have the effect of stifling younger people aspiring to educations and careers in science, technology and engineering. My belief is that what these visas do is enable the current leadership to remain entrenched. The CEOs of leading technologies and universities regularly make a pitch to Congress to grant/continue these visa programs. Organizations I might point out that have a smaller percentage of women in professional positions.
Take a look at the numbers in the Brain Drain study. If you run off women just as they are gaining power and higher compensation, you are reducing the pool from which the decision makers are chosen and you are lowering costs, a valued objective in a capitalist environment. And women’s leaving is muddled; women have other equally demanding ‘pulls’ because of their added capabilities to replenish the human race. This provides a convenient explanation if an environment would be “more comfortable” without a different perspective or with less competition for the better paying jobs.
Even if it is true that women are not intellectually a majority of the top 1%, they are a majority attaining degrees in higher education and women are the intellectual equal of the remaining 99%. Is it good policy to ignore those who are able and motivated to learn and achieve degrees?
Really smart people, who are motivated, are not plentiful. Our society needs them. Saying we want people to continue their education, and then not open up the better jobs to women is a path to disaster. The numbers show that is what is happening.
Judy Silver ,
I will pull some additional info today as well. Essentially, given the need for STEM professionals versus the shortage of Americans studying in these fields, we are forced to recruit aggressively outside the US. If the people we recruit return to their native countries, we are essentially training our future competitors and making the country weaken.
Women are an untapped resource in the race to build a pool of US STEM professionals.
Anecdote alert.
#1 – In the 80s I was asked by a young woman of college age, whether the boys knew something she didn’t. She said they were quicker with answers and seemed more sure of themselves. (This was before I’d seen Tannen’s excellent books like TALKING NINE TO FIVE.) She was a calm, thoughtful girl. I said it was because she knew MORE than they did, and ran a check with more factors, rather than jumping in first with her first reaction.
#2 – I was never seriously into physics but did take one casual YWCA sort of course. When the teacher started talking about Shroedinger’s Cat and making fun of ‘softies’, I dropped out. SC seems to me an offensive metaphor and I don’t want to be around people who like it.
I tell these to point up a factor of the mini-cultures in which math and science are taught — which really has nothing to do with ability in those fields. (Well, there might be a correlation between speed of response and inventiveness, but that would need to be demonstrated.)
Um, excuse me?
Why assume the authors are correct when they discount discrimination? Study after study by the institutions that do discriminate has eventually been discounted when they cite “women’s choices” as the reason women are disappearing in technology and the sciences. “there is no compelling evidence that the removal of these barriers would result in equalization of sex ratios…” This is pure hand-waving. We’re simply to take their word for this?
I do work in IT and have for 30 years. I’ve seen the laws that made a difference in the early 80′s eviscerated by the agencies that were created to enforce them, the EEOC chief among those. I’ve tracked judge made laws that steadily chipped away at women’s right to be hired in the first place, as well as to keep their jobs and to work free from hostility and harassment. I’ve seen arbitration, which employers vastly prefer rather than the jury trials that forced them into compliance with the written statutes, become the judicially preferred method for disposing of discrimination cases.
This is on top of the legally enacted double standard for discrimination against women vs. against men of any race, religion or nation origin. Such laws as the lenient standard of intermediate scrutiny applied to discrimination against women, while discrimination against men is subjected to the much more difficult to overcome strict scrutiny. Or statues such as 1991 “Civil Rights Restoration Act” making damage awards unlimited for men but limited to $300,000 for women, thus removing for women the sole motivation for which most lawyers take cases, money. Or limiting Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, with its broader scope and realistic timelines, to (once again) race, religion and national origin. Women are held back, underpaid and harmed in employment as women long before they are for race, etc. – check any of the job segregation and pay stats – so the race, etc, effectively protect only men’s right to employment. Cornell itself erroneously listed the Civil Rights statutes solely under race discrimination; for all I know it still does.
I’ve seen women accept harassment, hostility and unfairness that would have been unthinkable two decades ago (and now virtually nonexistent in their racial, religious, etc form) for the sake of their by now token positions and for that same reason, join in enforcing silence and passivity on other women. One list a pioneer in IT started for women in the early 90’s is rife with this, after that woman died and the new go-along, get-along types took over.
And -any- employment lawyer will tell you that the vast majority of sex discrimination cases are dismissed on summary judgment in favor of the employers and have been for decades.
My field went from 30% or better in employment of women to most IT sites having no or at most a token one or two women. It’s been as simple as:
Not interviewing and not hiring women, no provable reason needed now.
Not giving women the same training, equipment or technical access as men, again no reason needed.
Not promoting women, ditto.
Not giving women opportunities in new technologies as they open up.
Hostile environments in which women are routinely referred to as bitches and discussed as whores, excused as just the normal culture. (The Ninth’s Circuit’s now chief judge, Kosinki, wrote that a employee reaching under a woman’s shirt and grabbing her bare breast did not constitute an environment hostile enough to affect working conditions. Kozinski incidentally also has a link to pornography on his site. Chief Judge Posner of the 7th circuit wrote a decision excusing the word bitch, among others, as not indicating gender specific hostility towards the woman her boss was screaming this at.).
Men who are as much parents as their children’s mothers shoving off all the time loss and career hits necessary for raising children onto their wives as “women’s work”. That’s discrimination, too, you know, even if it’s your husband doing it to you while his employer pretends his workforce is child-free.
I expect this study will turn out to be as bogus as the drumbeat of studies by the New York Times attempting to force women out of the workplace. I also expect that the facts exposing this study will also be reported, if at all, on page 15 of the lifestyle section of the Times and the Post.
My question, is why is a study so detrimental to women and so free of the reality of women’s actual lives in the sciences and technology accepted as true and expanded on by a post at the New Agenda?
I’m not agreeing with discounting discrimination. I’m looking at other factors which should be corrected, such as childcare issues, tenure track scheduling, etc. Imo in all this material, ‘discrimination’ is being defined much too narrowly.
The summary of the Brain Drain report Sally mentions is fascinating. It brings much more of a corporate perspective into the debate. The summary cites these reasons women get turned off mid-career: hostile macho cultures, severe isolation, mysterious career paths, reward systems that emphasize risk-taking and extreme pressure. It also cites companies having programs that may be game changers (Alcoa, J&J, Microsoft, Cisco, GE). Unfortunately, since corporations sponsored the report, the Center for Work-Life Policy is charging for it, and there’s no free information on what the ground-breaking approaches are, or on what women’s groups could do to help.
While looking at press coverage of the Brain Drain report, I stumbled across another source for research focused on corporations: The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. ( http://anitaborg.org/ ) They get government funding, so they have some research reports posted on line. From a quick glance at one of the reports, they identify many of the same problems the Brain Drain study and the Cornell study. Again, it’s hard to know how women’s groups could help.
Would it be useful to have representatives from some of these organizations on Ophelia to talk about how we could help? On the other hand, how far does TNA really want to go with this? After all, if you look at the ten goals of TNA, this is somewhat related to goal #4, but is not intimately connected to the other goals. So would going down this path would be too much of a distraction, especially when there are other organizations on the case?
The problem with the study is that “the best evidence on salary and hiring indicates that gender differences are small” doesn’t account for, as Lexia suggested, environmental issues that aren’t quantitatively measured.
I was an engineering grad of a top tech university and after stints at Ford and IBM, went to law school. There were no formal barriers to women (that I knew of), but both companies had substantial percentages of execs firmly wedged into old-boy thinking. There are hundreds of examples, none actionable, but all adding up to a disincentive to continue.
Even at an internet company at which I was briefly a director of biz dev, which one would think would be more hip with younger employees, the few women in the company were still excluded from a lot of the decisionmaking.
All that said, if I’d have been passionate about these fields, I’d still be in them. But being slightly less than that, there was enough reason to exit.
So that said, I think one solution is that for those women who are passionate and have risen to levels where they can influence hiring and mentoring, to really make an effort with newer female employees. And for those men so disposed, to do so also.
And because part of the reason women cannot always do this is because we have increased second-shift responsibility and need to go home at the end of the day, often, rather than bonding over drinks etc., we need to insist on and men need to step up regarding 50-50 household responsibility split.
Flora,
It is interesting that you defend Summers whose statements directly demeaned women but ridicule Obama for his supposed use of code words.
I do agree that the brain drain is a complex problem – the culture of the college campus and professional work environments; childcare and health care disparities, the lack of aggressive enforcement of existing discrimination laws and the lack of forceful promotion of affirmative action and glass ceiling policies.
Because issues like this are complex, I do applaud Obama’s approach with respect to the Council on Women – first have better coordination of women initiatives within the various government departments and agencies. Of course, this is more likely to happen when the Council is assigned a staff and budget.
Kevin,
I have defended Obama on the ‘code word’ issue, but I’m not going into it on this thread. Imo Summers did not say he invented the internet, but I’d rather not go deeply into that either. On that point I’ve just posted my opinion at my Summers blog.
Lexia’s discussion of the legal issues makes me wonder how we could help on that front. Is there any currently pending legislation that could benefit from our support? Are there any currently pending judicial appointments we should be paying attention to? Since I know nothing about law, I may not be even asking the questions senisibly, but is this an area where a group like TNA could make a difference? (And this circles back around to how important it is to have women in our legislatures!)
Lexia,
Thank you for injecting some much needed skepticism here.
Another part of the study deserves more scrutiny.
“Two thirds of the top 1% of scorers on SAT math tests are male. However, what does that mean in light of the fact that among Asian Americans, the top 1% contains slightly more women than men?”
So, do Asian women constitute a third gender? Or are Asian cultures more successful at teaching advanced math to both women and men? There’s nothing nuanced about it. Advocates of the girls-can’t-do-math meme need to explain this phenomenon, or admit their theory must be false.
*****A
Off this subject but I need some back up. I was curious when I saw a post come up regarding the article on the murder of Aasiya Hassan in New York. I almost wish I hadn’t read it.
The Brain Drain study was sponsored by the companies that Judy mentioned. The surprising thing is that the study found an abundance of women who graduated and entered the SET field “In the private sector, the female talent pipeline in SET is surprisingly deep and rich”. The question becomes what happens to them. “52% of highly qualified females working for SET companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures. Powerful “antigens” in SET corporate cultures contribute to the exodus of female talent.”
Those antigens are: harassment, macho culture, isolation, mysterious career paths, culture that rewards risk taking (even when it is not warranted).
The study does not support the popular version that women are making a choice to leave; hence the study’s use of the term antigen. Females are being rejected, even while society is saying we need scientist, engineers and technologists.
Or more accurately they are working at entry and mid career levels, and begin leaving in large numbers after a decade of working. Women are being rejected just as they reach a level where they should start to see significant responsibilities and compensation.
SET fields are going to be part of policy making even more so in the future. If women are not in positions of responsibility in these fields women will not be at table where policies are decided. Legislatures/politics is just one stool on that table.
And besides how unethical is it to say it is a level playing field, when the evidence is clear that it isn’t. Why are we importing foreign workers to fill jobs for a short term? Why will young people go into the SET field if preference is going to be given to foreign workers who will work longer hours, for less money and be under the control of their employer?
My answer is that the current leadership wants to maintain the status quo. I became interested in TNA to improve leadership in our society; not just political leadership. I want to see women in more leadership positions.
I think that this approach of who has what measured IQ and which aristocrat in the past excelled is the base line problem. There are some 3 billion women and girls on the planet as I write this. There is no doubt, at least in my mind, that many thousands of these individuals had a greater mathematical ability at birth than Newton did.
It is our loss that these exceptional individuals are not identified, nurtured, supported and offered opportunities in ways similar to which Newton was.
“the need for STEM professionals versus the shortage of Americans studying in these fields”
“the need for foreign workers”
Unfortunately (in some ways), there is no shortage. Employers hire H1B’s because they are cheaper and can’t complain about working conditions without the possibility of having to leave the U.S. In many ways, the call for more science education is a smokescreen. There are plenty of really brilliant PhDs who can’t get jobs, and this was true before the current downturn as well.
Thanks for bring up the H1B issue, the 15th. Yet another interesting facet. Here’s a January blog entry on the topic from Science magazine: http://sciencecareers.sciencem.....t.a0900001
And another, more recent one from Electronic Design News:
http://www.edn.com/blog/175000.....42254.html
Perhaps these women bloggers also would be interesting guests to have on Ophelia?
Lexia thank you for the post. As someone who works in the IT field, that is my experience also.
CBN,
Thank you for acknowledging it. Most women’s unwillingness to face the real problem, outright and unapologetic discrimination, makes me wild.
The women in IT know this is the problem, hell, women in academia know it is, they just keep doing whatever it takes to keep their own jobs, their faith in the system and in fairness somewhere in the world – and their place in a community where acceptable ideas are screened by the people who benefit most from discrimination: men of any race, creed or color.
One of the new memes aside from the “women choose” discriminatory situations [much the same way as "women choose" sexual exploitation, violence from their male partners, etc.] a woman employee will hear if she goes anywhere near her employer’s EEO department is “It’s almost impossible to prove discrimination”. IT IS ILLEGAL to have a process that is known not to function be the only option to fulfill a legal mandate, yet that is what most employers use now.
Another nasty little trick snuck into companies’ and universities’ EEO regs is a grim little warning that unfounded charges will be prosecuted. Given the ease and willingness with which employers will break the law, as well as the reality of how difficult employers and the government and courts have made it to prove sex discrimination, this warning is sufficient to discourage any woman from exercising her rights. Not only will she risk the employment based retaliation that has become a standard employer reaction, she now risks prosecution by her employer for having even made a charge of sex discrimination!
This kind of extreme retaliation used to be explicitly forbidden, but like most of the protections built over the first few years of EEOC enforcement, this one seems to have been quietly done away with as well.
In STEM and other fields, the hearing versus WalMart is big next week. The had previously indicated that it would not get involved in the case.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/.....tion-case/
When corporations sees the Labor Dept and EEOC watching and enforcing, conditions will change for the better for women. This is tangible – big numbers – action.
Hi everyone! I found this article time ago. I think it’s quite interesting.
http://arstechnica.com/old/con.....th-gap.ars
Lexia, I agree with you. That is why I referenced the study from the Center for Work Life Policy (Reversing the Brain Drain). The IT workforce has low female participation rates; the highest industry is government where they generally pay a little more attention to EEO laws.
My outrage reached a boiling point when I heard Tom Friedman and others, most recently Fareed Zacharia using their bully pulpit to advocate for admitting more engineers, technologists and scientists. This is all in the name of not wanting to allow the US to fall further behind. And I share your outrage that stating a position does not make it fact.
My belief is that people in leadership positions have structured the system to their advantage. That includes discriminating against women to keep the pool from which future leaders are selected smaller and more like minded; and, relying on foreign workers who not only work cheaper, but are in the US for a limited time.
Except for the recent implosion in the financial services industry, suggesting self dealing by decision makers would be grounds for stoning; a traditional recourse for dealing with outspoken women. While I haven’t been stoned, I have had my work ethic and capabilities based on my gender questioned (or just attacked) when I have spoken up about the logic of importing workers when the numbers say a pool of trained citizens already exists. And of course if __________(insert important person name here) says we need to do it …As a society we don’t question if it is society’s best interest. I think the current problems in finance make my point.
I have been writing and lobbying my representatives about the under representation of women in SET fields and the use of H1Bs since last year. I give them numbers and links to resources to make my point. It must be very disconcerting to be confronted with facts not anecdotes that run contrary to your perceptions.
BTW, my US Senator is Dodd, who is up for reelection in 2010 and is vulnerable. He was behind the recent legislation that required that banks accepting TARP funds to make a good faith effort to find US citizens before H1Bs. The law granting visas does not require this good faith effort to hire an H1B, in fact an American can be displaced in favor of an H1B.
I am outraged that US laws make American workers disposable by businesses; and that foreign workers are judged more qualified than US women. The implicit justification by the Friedman’s, Zacharia’s and the lawmakers is that the foreign workers are “highly skilled”.
Sally,
I’m glad you’re working on the H1B issue. My own view, from working in IT and seeing how many qualified women are shut out and how systematically this is done, is that there would be no shortage of US workers if there were no discrimination.
I didn’t know that even the token requirement for a U.S. worker had been done away with. I do remember one recruiter in the mid-90′s who was startled into admitting that the job was going to an H1B worker no matter what when I was able to satisfy the Byzantine qualifications her company had set up to discourage applicants while still being nominally legal.
Lexia, do you have a blog or know of other I.T. type of blogs that are tackling this issue.
Your views are so spot on and it is distressing to see these bogus studies/articles. Discrimination is running wild in this field and has gotten worse over the past 10 years. These articles are a cover up for the real problem of lack of females in I.T. (which you explained o well above.)
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