Women in STEM

I’m a software developer and my wife is a teacher in Silicon Valley. We have two kids about to enter high school so, as of late, we are hearing a lot, and I mean a lot, about STEM - specifically about how to get girls into STEM. We already have overt diversity quotas on tech company boards today, and there’s also evidence of soft quotas (like tying manager bonuses to diversity metrics) in tech. As bad as that is (and it is), you really can’t solve the diversity problem, if there even is one (more on that later). Giving jobs to non, or under-qualified, candidates is a recipe for disaster.

Common sense would dictate that you need to examine the entire pipeline, all the way back to infancy, if you really want to address the social forces supposedly steering females away from STEM. In this post I’m going to take a quick look one step back: college.

For this analysis I was lazy and grabbed some data that was handy - a dataset of three UK colleges provided by a Guardian article: The gender gap at universities: where are all the men? I’m sure the subjects of study differ from national averages, but given the dataset covers three universities, and that the female:male ratio is the same as the US overall average, I’m going to consider this sufficient for this analysis.

This shows 38% more women seeking undergraduate degrees than men. Women are more likely to graduate, and men less likely. Forbes reports that women now make up 60% of graduating students1 - a full 50% more graduates than men.

Back on topic… Companies can’t just hire non-qualified candidates, universities need to produce them. If you want gender equality (i.e. 50/50) amongst the engineering staff, then you need gender equality amongst college graduates. You need to somehow balance the graduates in those fields.

By the way - this entire analysis is predicated on the assumption that women currently enrolled in a non-STEM subject could be convinced, and have the aptitude, to switch to STEM and obtain a degree. This is clearly impossible. This is really a thought experiment to examine what college would have to look like in order to enable the gender diversity currently desired by many companies and individuals.

Looking at the breakdown of the subjects studied we see this participation rate. I’ve highlighted the STEM: (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in red.

One observation is that, again for these three universities, all other fields are already dominated by women.

So how do we go about solving this? One approach is to bring in new female students - students not currently destined for university. These students would either enter the STEM fields, or displace students in other fields so that they may enter STEM.

This is quite unrealistic for many reasons. First off, who will pay for these new students? How many students not currently attending can qualify for admission? How will you take women, and not men? You still need to get women to enter STEM - and if those new female students have the same proclivities as the currently enrolled students then that won’t solve the problem. I haven’t heard of anybody suggesting this approach, but did want to run the numbers.

So, assuming that there are no qualified, but not currently attending students, then we need to migrate them from one field of study to another. The second approach is to embark on a campaign to convince women to switch majors to one in STEM. So there would now be less women in the non-STEM subjects.

A problem here is that we are now (likely) over producing STEM graduates and under producing non-STEM grads. Computer science has nearly doubled the number of graduates. This will depress the market for engineers and likely raise the salaries for non-STEM graduates now in low supply.

I would say that the above, encouraging women into STEM, is our current approach. Sure, the economics won’t play out as simply as I have represented them here, but this is the general idea.

A third approach, one that maintains the same number of graduates for each subject, but also ensures gender equality in STEM graduation, is where men are displaced from STEM subjects into non-STEM subjects.

Interesting to note that both solution #2 and #3 result in more men than women in business.

However, this crude analysis, even if done correctly by an economist, still ignores the absolute most fundamental issue. Even more than salaries, assuming one is earning a living wage, people want rewarding careers. Not everybody wants to be a software engineer - even those fully capable of becoming one. Our real measure must be equality of opportunity and not outcome. If twice as many women as men want to be engineers, and women are equally competent, then that should be reflected by an engineering force that is two thirds women.

As crude as my analysis is, and it is, I feel that the targets (50/50 in STEM) are even more crude. They do not take into consideration what students actually want to do for a living. They are already resulting in quotas, both in industry, and at the university level. They are pushing people into careers that they may not find rewarding or for which they are under qualified. They are also barring others from entering their chosen career. This is unfair to everyone: women, men, and the companies that employ them.

I’m lucky enough to have two amazing kids. My daughter is a self confident straight-A student. We’ve had both kids in summer camps to learn computer programming: both Java and Python. She and I have done basic electronics - soldering. She also loves to rebuild the carburetor on her motorcycle. That being said she does seem to be leaning towards subjects more associated with female interests: communications, art, law, biology, music. It frustrates me that the current STEM initiative, so popular today, is trying to steer her into tech when I know that her brother wants much more to be in that field. I’m seeing what appears to be the formation of a system within society that will unfairly give the job that he craves to her - and she doesn’t even want it. This is wrong.