Good news on women in science

The Boston Globe
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / March 28, 2010

THE NUMBER of women in science and engineering is growing, yet men continue to outnumber women, especially at the upper levels of these professions.’’

So begins a new research report, “Why So Few?,’’ published last week by the American Association of University Women, an advocacy group that describes itself as “the nation’s leading voice promoting education and equity for women and girls.’’ The report argues that “social and environmental factors’’ — negative stereotypes about girls’ math skills, for example, or the hard-driving culture of many science and technology workplaces — contribute significantly to the “striking disparity’’ between the numbers of men and women in the so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math.
That disparity, says the association, is reflected in statistics like these:
The Labor Department reports that women account for only 10 percent of the nation’s civil and aerospace engineers, 8 percent of the electrical engineers, and 7 percent of the mechanical engineers....

And in academia? The report concedes that “when women . . . apply for STEM faculty positions at major research universities they are more likely than men to be hired.’’ (emphasis added) Not even “the nation’s leading voice promoting education and equity for women,’’ it turns out, can make a convincing case that sexist bias is a serious problem in science, engineering, or math.

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