Academic Book Review: Women and Minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Upping the Numbers

Women and Minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Upping the Numbers
by Ronald J. Burke (Editor), Mary C. Mattis (Editor)

I would very much like to one day leaf through the introduction of a book or article about women and minorities in science/tech/maths without feeling like I am reading myself in the report of a formal psychological study of how victims are affected by psychological abuse. For starters I would like it to not be an accurate comparison.

This collection of papers, picked up out of curiosity from the “new” shelf of the academic library just outside my office, is an honest and up-to-date (2007) look at the issues facing women and minorities getting into scientific fields, the issues facing them once they get there, and the cultural and educational biases that keep them from wanting to get into a field where they will face these problems, every step of the way from grade school to corporate research or academic tenure. Sadly, unlike slightly older works where the numbers indicated more women and minority students in every major scientific field save Computer Science, it is obvious that in the past few years these groups are quitting the fields or abandoning the education required to enter them. Why? Standard “geek male” and other unhelpful stereotypes are still going strong, discrimination is still evident, cultural and biological parenting issues discourage women from high-commitment fields particularly in countries without adequate labor laws, glass ceilings hover. The book is chock full of references to recent National Science Foundation research on the matter, and none of it is heartening.

What is heartening is a very thorough “what to do about it” section full of ideas that sound obvious from the inside. Suggestions regarding early school programs, more educational focus on collaborative and hands-on work and other changes to teaching style, attempts to change the surrounding cultural issues and the like sit side-by-side with commentary on fixing overt and covert discrimination and other problems not unique to the sciences. Interviews with female and minority students are quoted extensively. Where possible, suggested changes are backed up with evidence for programs that have worked and best corporate practices found in the real world.  As a career software engineer with an interest in science before starting grade school, I don’t disagree with a word of it.

The work is, of course, a costly library textbook for its small size, targeted for academic institutions. Since these institutions are often part of the problem, perhaps someone who needs to see it will still find it useful. For my part, I will give it a shout-out as the best work I’ve yet seen on the subject. Maybe someday when I am old I will be able to take some time sabbatical-style and write about how we fixed this. I can dream.

Women in CS: where have all the geek girls gone?

(source: American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center) (pdf)

There is a bulletin board that hangs on the lobby wall of the Physics building I work in. Amidst the job postings and conference posters and other standard university bulletin board components, there is a single graph that never fails to catch my attention. It’s not the best graph; the percentage axis is confusing and the data is a few years old, but I am aware of the real trends it is trying to represent. I believe the information is meant to be heartening. Except I’m on the red line, the only one that has been consistently declining for nearly as long as I have been alive, and I would rather have more women to work with than a career of affirmative action.

The declining numbers of women in my field of Computer Science has been a known issue that educators, industry members, and concerned geeks like the community of linuxchix have been trying to sort out since the early 1990s. The only Women’s Studies course I ever stomached in my loathing of second-wave feminism focused on “Women in Information Technology” and I was the only IT major in the class. I did a few months of library research and conducted interviews of all the female students I could find who had stuck with Computer Science or Information Systems degrees or dropped from them. I wrote a fifteen-page paper about the issues I found, mostly the same issues anyone discusses regarding women in science — confrontational and condescending attitudes from certain men in the field, self-doubt or social fallout from being assertive, actual or perceived ineptitudes at math self-traced back to early school expectations, unappealing perceptions of “geeky” people, and so on and so on. I finished my degree resigned at being one of two female students in all of my population-forty upper-level classes save Database Design (no math), and stepped out into the working world with no more of a clue than I had when I’d been made fun of at age twelve for being a geek and a tomboy.

The poster taunts me and my firsthand knowledge that its three-year-old data is still valid. All of the other sciences are improving. Where are we going wrong?