Inclusion, not just diversity, is the way forward for STEM
As part of our collaboration with UCL’s Women in STEM society, Enez Nathie discusses the limits to which encouraging girls into STEM fields is beneficial.
You’re picturing it too, a young girl in comically large goggles, peering expectantly into a beaker filled with an unknown bubbling substance. What does the beaker hold? Ethanol? The promise of equal pay for equal work?
Campaigns aimed at empowering girls to join STEM pathways would like you to believe it holds the secret to being happy and successful in a man’s world. But should they be promoting the unwelcoming male culture of STEM to girls when it results in a 52% dropout rate?
In the past decade dozens of campaigns have been set up with the aim of interesting girls in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Government initiatives, as well as non-profit organisations and corporations have all embarked on the mission to close the gender representation gap in STEM fields. Although they differ in their methods, what they all have in common is a failure to grasp the wider issue at hand: that diversity does not equal inclusion.
By telling girls that they too can be the man in the lab coat, without addressing the culture that makes STEM a male dominated field, organisations forgo the task of making it an inclusive space for women. It forces women and girls to adapt to a male dominated environment without paying attention to what makes it undesirable in the first place. Emphasising the recruitment of women, rather than retention, suggests an interest in fulfilling diversity quotas rather than achieving gender equality.
The focus on addressing the ‘leaky pipeline’, in which gendered stereotypes push girls away from STEM as early as pre-school, is only part of the problem. Many high-profile universities including Stanford and Berkeley now boast of computer science courses that have over 40% female students. However, the problem does not end at university. A study published in the Harvard Business Review reports a staggering drop-out rate of over 52% for women in science, technology and engineering jobs. With women citing the hostile ‘bro culture’ as the main reason for leaving. This culture is one that permits everyday gender discrimination. From a lack of flexible work arrangements for mothers, to most tellingly, “the simple discomfort of not fitting in in an otherwise homogeneous setting.”
The issue with women leaving STEM isn’t only one of gender equality, it’s also an economic one. It’s estimated that the number of women with PhD’s who leave the scientific workforce costs around 1.5 billion dollars per year in training and funding. That is triple the Department of Education’s annual STEM support fund. You don’t have to be an accountant to understand that any investment that ends in a 1.5-billion-dollar loss indicates a substantial problem.
In order to change the culture which results in dramatic costs to both women and society, empowerment of girls in STEM needs to focus on inclusion by tackling the internal STEM ‘bro culture’. These campaigns must realise that when they tell girls that in order to change the world they should join STEM, they are reinforcing the dominance of stereotypically masculine workplace culture and values. Not only does this place an added burden on women to conform to a workplace which is not inclusive of them, it perpetuates stereotypes that in order to be successful, women must act like men.
As a society, we need to be asking more complex questions about how we value work. Why do we only push women into male dominated fields, and never push men to work in typically feminine fields? And most importantly, why is it always a woman’s job to fit into a man’s world?