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The Diversity Pipeline


zelticgar

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You really think that there is a huge untapped pool of (mostly female) potential CS graduates that are impeded by the education system that hides from them the fact that they will be probably economically far better off studying CS than sociology or history? I tend to think that someone smart enough for any STEM degree should be able to get such information by themselves. It is not really something hidden that has to be found out.

Do you have any stats (or hunches) what happened to the 5000 female CS students that "went missing" between 2003 and 2015? What did the corresponding portion of the later cohorts do instead?

 

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What I find interesting, that we are discussing this subject only as a problem in terms of

a) choices that women make (apparently the wrong ones?) and

b ) economic status (sucess = earn a lot of Money)

But maybe it's not only women who do not chose STEM because their environment doesn't support that choice: if the social pressure is on men to chose a well-paid career, to provide income an to gain social status in order to find a wife, then maybe it's also a case of men being under pressure to chose these subjects STEM in order to fulfil these expectations. So maybe it's those two factors coming together that make a bigger difference than expected.

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Could it be that engineering is just boring?

Because clearly the gender gap is closing fast (or reversed) in a few prestigious and traditionally male dominated fields, like law and medicine, but STEM is holding out. This is a bit of a random hypothesis and I wouldn't defend it particularly strongly unless I could find some data, but going into STEM and particularly CS could appear a very workmanlike career choice at this point. To me at least, if I was going to make a decision, somewhere in my late teens, that I'm going to be a career-oriented woman and push into male fields, I'd pick an exciting one - like, say, law or medicine. Being a programmer (again, at least to me) seems both difficult AND uninteresting.

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I think both Alarich and Datepalm make important points. I mentioned the Soviet Union above. Most capitalist incentives both in status and financial rewards were removed there and there was probably also some educational/social program to further equal opportunities for women.

And I have seen stats similar to the ones mentioned by HappyEnt that there are more female programmers in India than in e.g. Norway. Because in Norway there is not such a big gap in status or income between a nurse and a programmer. In India there is, so women have a special incentive to get into such a field because it can lift them into the middle class whereas in Norway they do not because they can be middle class as a nurse.

As for "boring", I guess almost every field has boring bits and there are obviously people who are really thrilled by engineering or programming.

I think the usual framing of the question is typical for current capitalist "false consciousness" with the postmodern "diversity" twist: Leave all crazy, dysfunctional, unjust structures in place (because yeah free markets) but  look out for certain percentages to ensure diversity. This is fiddling with secondary symptoms but never touching the "system" (why should there be such differences in compensation and status in the first place?)

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This is a fun topic because it pulls together a large variety of social theories. 

I think it's significant that other developed countries with cheaper tuition and more feminist culture have a similarly low or even lower proportion of women in CS than the US, because my default expectation would be that the culture of tech -- both frat-boy Silicon Valley and deep nerdism -- would be a hostile environment for women and partly responsible for the imbalance, and yet more feminist cultures experience the same.  

I worked in a software development function for a while early in my career in Seattle which was ~50:50, but I've heard that is unusual.  The best coders there on the core code were all men, while the women mostly had roles like QA & testing, documentation and lowly HTML.  It wasn't obvious how all those people had been channeled into those tracks to that point but the gap in experience and ability was large and unlikely to close.  As with the education stats, there seems to be some upstream filtering going on.

I don't think it's a foregone conclusion at all that absent any external barriers, like culture, cost, hiring practices, etc that we would have gender balance in CS, and I don't think the earnings potential and work satisfaction for the median coder are attractive enough to say this is a huge missed opportunity for women with sufficient left-brain ability who presumably pursue other advanced education for other career opportunities instead.  It's not as if the default alternative is a menial service job.  Coding salaries aren't all that high and seem to be deflated by exploitation of the H1-B program, which disproportionately comprises low level coders at relatively low salaries.

Another contributor to gender imbalance in CS and STEM could be the more pervasive gender expectations.  It's not just that tech firms can be hostile to women, it's that parents, teachers, media, female friends and potential romantic partners can all send tacitly disapproving signals about what kind of women work in STEM.  Male nerds suffer socially but at least have banded together; I think female nerds may suffer even more. 

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I don't buy that social expectations are so important here. How could these account for 1/3 fewer female CS in the last 12 years? Social expectations have been becoming more gender-neutral since several decades. What could have changed in the last decade?

I think the question should be approached by considering the personal good and the common good. It is good for people to have well-paid fulfilling jobs and most people enjoy doing stuff they are good at more than doing stuff where they are struggling. It is bad for people to "waste" several years of education to end up in menial jobs. It is also bad to have huge untapped potentials of people who could do higher status and more fulfilling jobs than they actually do. But simply from results/percentages we cannot know if there are huge untapped potentials.

We have increased the percentage of college and advanced degrees considerably in the last 50 years or so (details differ between countries but overall this is the trend). It is only to be expected that most of the untapped potentials have been tapped by now (in Western countries) and we are reaching saturation. For a STEM degree one needs at least 1 STD above average ability in maths etc., for a STEM (or at least maths, physics, CS) PhD probably around 2 STD. There are only so many people with such abilites. And some of them have different inclinations and because of their high ability they will do well in fields with even higher prestige or compensation like Finance, Law, Medicine or becoming the director of the MoMA.

The "line of attack" can only be to tap those people around +1 STD of maths ability who are not better elsewhere (because we do not want the phenomenally gifted writer or art historian into an average STEM job but rather let her flourish at what she is brilliant at) but who for whatever reason don't realize that they could get a pretty good job with a STEM degree rather than no degree or a degree in a field that is less fulfilling (or where there simply are not many jobs to go around). E.g. the jobless sociology PhD would probably have been able to get a STEM B.A., so this case might be a "waste" from a larger perspective. But it does not make much sense to force someone of average ability into something they will not really be good at.

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3 hours ago, Jo498 said:

There are also a vast differences between fields. Many academic/professional fields that were considered "male" in the 1950s have achieved (close to) gender parity or have actually more female graduates by now, e.g. medicine and law. I don't really believe in curiously selective patriarchy that affects high prestige fields like medicine far less than electrical engineering or CS. While I find the drop in the stats above since the early 2000s astonishing, 18% is not that bad from a "social" perspective, i.e. one would not be the only woman in a class most of the time. When I studied physics in the 1990s the anecdotally felt percentage of women majoring in physics was in the low single digits and I believe it was worse in some engineering subjects (but slightly better in maths and certainly better in chemistry; biology probably had already a female majority, not sure about CS).

 

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Jo,

I've read somewhere that there are more women going to law school now, on average, than men.  I'll have to look for it.

[ETA]

Here it is:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/business/dealbook/women-majority-of-us-law-students-first-time.html

Honestly, I've been out of law school 15 years.  The top law schools were close to 50/50 at that time.  You would think over the years that this would translate into more women with equity roles in big law firms.  Quite the opposite.  Here is one example of a study showing that there has been little progress.  (It's actually depressing when you dwell on it too much).  And, though I need to search more for the studies that show this, women are particularly under-represented in transactional practices.  I can tell you (though this is pure anecdata), any time there are more than two women in a meeting we remark on it.  It stands out.  (Full disclosure - I am an equity partner at an AmLaw 10 firm in a transactional practice). This is all to say that pipeline isn't enough.  When I was coming through law school, we were all told that pipeline would naturally fix the problem; that by the time we came along it would be significantly better.  I can now officially cry bullcrap on that.  And, before someone says it, it's not all "election out."  And, some of the "election out" is because the women in question see the writing on the wall - the equally or less talented man getting the better client access, etc. etc. - if you don't think you have a shot, why kill yourself in this job, money aside?  What I will tell you is that the superstars make it through.  So the 17% in the article - those women are the best of the best of the best (like hold on, they are going to take your lunch money in negotiations and make you say thank you for the privilege - remember these are the people that made it through a lot of stuff to make it to equity).  And if you look at numbers at firm managers, the numbers are even more depressing.  That should also be starting to turn based on "pipeline", and it isn't really.  

45 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

I don't buy that social expectations are so important here. How could these account for 1/3 fewer female CS in the last 12 years? Social expectations have been becoming more gender-neutral since several decades. What could have changed in the last decade?

I think the question should be approached by considering the personal good and the common good. It is good for people to have well-paid fulfilling jobs and most people enjoy doing stuff they are good at more than doing stuff where they are struggling. It is bad for people to "waste" several years of education to end up in menial jobs. It is also bad to have huge untapped potentials of people who could do higher status and more fulfilling jobs than they actually do. But simply from results/percentages we cannot know if there are huge untapped potentials.

We have increased the percentage of college and advanced degrees considerably in the last 50 years or so (details differ between countries but overall this is the trend). It is only to be expected that most of the untapped potentials have been tapped by now (in Western countries) and we are reaching saturation. For a STEM degree one needs at least 1 STD above average ability in maths etc., for a STEM (or at least maths, physics, CS) PhD probably around 2 STD. There are only so many people with such abilites. And some of them have different inclinations and because of their high ability they will do well in fields with even higher prestige or compensation like Finance, Law, Medicine or becoming the director of the MoMA.

The "line of attack" can only be to tap those people around +1 STD of maths ability who are not better elsewhere (because we do not want the phenomenally gifted writer or art historian into an average STEM job but rather let her flourish at what she is brilliant at) but who for whatever reason don't realize that they could get a pretty good job with a STEM degree rather than no degree or a degree in a field that is less fulfilling (or where there simply are not many jobs to go around). E.g. the jobless sociology PhD would probably have been able to get a STEM B.A., so this case might be a "waste" from a larger perspective. But it does not make much sense to force someone of average ability into something they will not really be good at.

So, again, I think in defining "fulfilling" you also have to factor in how much extraneous bs you are willing to put up with on a day to day basis to succeed in a field.  Forget about having the technical ability.  You have to also be willing to suffer the slings and arrows not of outrageous fortune but of outrageous colleagues, supervisors, clients, etc.  I gotta tell you, the number of times I've showed up at meetings and had someone still ask "where's the tax guy", the times I've been asked to make coffee/make dinner reservations/make copies (you get the picture), the times I have had completely inappropriate comments made to me (including the time there was a coordinated effort by some guys to leave me alone with a third guy so that I ended up on an accidental "date" - my rings are NOT subtle, and yet....that was a scary one even though we were basically in public), the times I've had to listen to young women being criticized not for their legal acumen but for "intangibles" like "assertiveness" (either too much or too little), and the hypocrisy when the young man is being praised for the EXACT SAME THING THAT THE YOUNG WOMAN IS BEING CRITICIZED FOR, the time I sat through a meeting where my client (also a woman - we were the only two women in the room) was berated for 15 minutes for her appearance and the fact that she smiled, the person who reported to me who (i) never showed up on time for meetings but would dial in, and, as I was on the phone with a public company CEO that you would know kept sending me little ims telling me what a good job I was doing and to go get him, and other completely patronizing bs - he also told me he didn't realize how impressive I was, and that I could be his "consultant" on an area of the law that he should frankly know (and, though I'd like to fire him, there are some golf buddies of his who are protecting him even though his substantive knowledge is frankly nonexistent), I could go ON AND ON AND ON....  Anyhow, despite all that I stick with my job - I generally love what I do, I'm really good at it, and I generally adore my colleagues.  BUT, I could imagine not wanting to deal with these externalities every single damn day.  It can be exhausting.  

/end rant.  I can't even come up with a TL/DR summary. :P

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1 hour ago, Jo498 said:

I don't buy that social expectations are so important here. How could these account for 1/3 fewer female CS in the last 12 years?

How does any alternative hypothesis account for it?

I return to the theme: if there's any discrepancy here, it has to be accounted for. Social influences provide a hypothesis that appears to be able to explain at least part of what's going on. Free choice alone does not, because absent any influences free choice should lead to an even or almost even split. What other explanations are there? Free choice affected by biological factors of some sort? Extremely speculative at best, way less plausible on its face than free choice influenced by social factors and with considerably less evidence.

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4 hours ago, zelticgar said:

Point is wasted opportunity to improve the economic status of a huge population. I also think we need to spend as much time pointing the finger at our education system as we do at industry when discussing problems related to lack of diversity in particular fields. 

You mean our underfunded education system in a society that vilifies rather than supports its teachers?

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Yeah, it's amazing to think that women wouldn't want to get into the tech industry given how well received women have been when they do things in the tech industry, especially in social media

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2 hours ago, Jo498 said:

I don't buy that social expectations are so important here. How could these account for 1/3 fewer female CS in the last 12 years? Social expectations have been becoming more gender-neutral since several decades. What could have changed in the last decade?

We don't know that. Ideas about gender roles, at least in the US, do not seem to be evolving particularly fast in the past decades. IIRC, there's a survey somewhere that shows that the current generation entering the workforce is actually more conservative about ideas about gendered breadwinnner/housekeeper notions than their parents generation. (This I think...http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-millennials-politics-conservative-20160907-snap-story.html)

And picking up the argument with Alaric and Zabzie, are those BA degree, CS jobs are that attractive, really? They pay ok and they're a safe choice. They're the factory line job of yesteryear, and men have more pressure put on them to take them, except in countries where there's economic pressure on both genders to get a 'sensible' job. (For, example, Palestinians in Israel, men and women, disproportionately study accounting, which is competitve and has a high entry bar.)

In some sense, we should be asking why men are overrepresented in this field. (This isn't to say that there aren't some people who transcend that, love CS, and thrive and are fulfilled there...and I wonder if that percentage isn't higher amongst the women who do make it in CS that it is amongst men.)

Actually, what are the stats like for things like civil engineering?

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I don't have a degree,  I left school at 16 and got an engineering apprenticeship with a Car manufacturing company.   I have been with the same company for 23 years and now work in their IT department on the helpdesk

In my year as an apprenticeship there was 100 people.  8 of which where girls  one of which only got the join cos her Mum filled in the application form on her behalf.    

1 was already pregnant,  left to have the baby, came back in the year below, and got pregnant again a couple of years later, left and never came back.

1 became a drug addict  and dropped out.

so 6 made it to the end of the apprenticeship.   5 of which left within 5 years which left only me.

 

during my apprenticeship I was personally sent to lots of schools to be an example of a woman in engineering, particularly all girls schools.   The girls just where not interested when they where with their friends, but some did quietly sneak back to talk to you when alone.   when with their friends they wanted to be hair dresser, or vets.   so from that I'd say peer pressure has a lot to do with not wanting to be different and choose a male dominated career.

 

My experience actually working in the field has not been a positive one when it comes to my gender.   there has been so much crap you have to deal with especially when on the shop floor.   the fact that every guy thinks they have the right to your personal attention if you just happen to be walking past.    often they try and complement you by saying  "its great you can do that, have an apprenticeship  I couldn't do it and I'm a man"    other common things are   "doesn't your husband mind you working here doing this job?"    either that or they try and chat you up, often touch you.          and this is from the basic line workers.

when it comes to my peers and management your often over looked talked over and generally ignored if there are other men around.  It can be difficult to make your voice heard.  I'd say most of the time people don't even notice how they are acting.  its so ingrained.   

Even when people are trying to be nice and encouraging, they do it in a way that is rather patronising and somehow make it felt that your gender is relevant to the conversation.

So if I was to talk to a young woman thinking of entering this career.  I'd tell them, it can be really rewarding and interesting, but you do need to be prepared for a lot of crap.  Make sure they go into it with they eyes open so they know exactly what they are letting themselves in for.

 

You want more woman in these jobs?  you have to change the attitude of the Men doing the jobs first and the environment to be more open and accepting of woman.   and not go    "oooh  wow  look Tits, must go and annoy the tits."

 

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15 hours ago, mormont said:

How does any alternative hypothesis account for it?

I return to the theme: if there's any discrepancy here, it has to be accounted for. Social influences provide a hypothesis that appears to be able to explain at least part of what's going on. Free choice alone does not, because absent any influences free choice should lead to an even or almost even split. What other explanations are there? Free choice affected by biological factors of some sort? Extremely speculative at best, way less plausible on its face than free choice influenced by social factors and with considerably less evidence.

But you don't have a hypothesis either. You only say that there must be some social factor. If I ask which social factors could have changed decisively in the last 10-15 years, nobody has a substantial idea. We have had "girl's days" and similar stuff for quite a while. Very probably more today than in the early 90s when apparently more females chose CS than now. In the last ca. 20 years touting STEM for women has been *everywhere*? Could it be that this was overdone and some people refuse to be talked into something they do not feel inclined towards. Again, I think that Datepalm has a very good point here. These are not a hugely attractive subjects for many people. So I think another factor might be that there are now subjects like "web design" or communications degrees focussing on new media that did not even exist in the mid 1990s and maybe of the 5000 potential CS persons quite a few went into such subjects.

Obviously biology did not change in the last 20 years, so this obviously cannot be all that relevant, certainly not for this particular change, but maybe for a baseline.

As there were more than 25% of women in CS in the early 2000s it is also implausible that women refuse to go into CS because there are no fellow women there. If this was a typical mechanism, medicine or law would never have developed into ~>50% female graduates. It might even be that such higher status subjects have become more open to women in the last 15 years so more intelligent people went there instead of CS.

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I don't know much about Big Law in the US. And frankly, I don't care. This concerns like the top 5% in a brutally competitive field and I do not think anyone striving for a good life should go there. If they want to, they are on their own. This is irrelevant for almost all "normal" earners/employees/workers/students.

In any case it has nothing to to with High School or College education not tapping into pools of gifted women, if they have it particularly hard in such a shark pool. Again this is typical for contemporary discussions: Leave brutal, hypercompetitive, hyper-compensated structures in place (that often are overall bad for society because they incentivize bad things like tax evasion or generally redistribution rather than creation of wealth with outlandish compensations) and only look for certain percentages to be fulfilled. Instead of draining shark pools, we strive to add more female sharks. Great for those sharks (or actually not, because it cannot be healthy for body or soul even for the sharks) but this is not "societal progress" for me.

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19 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

The top law schools were close to 50/50 at that time.  You would think over the years that this would translate into more women with equity roles in big law firms.  Quite the opposite.

I am not surprised. There is or was - at least in my German Big4 experience - a lot more pressure on men to act career-orientated and sacrifice family-time for overtime. Part-time jobs, family-friendly client assignments etc were all reserved for women (or so it looked to me at the time), for men it was up or out. One reason why I left: I had no stomach for this kind of career-only thinking. 

In retrospect it seems obvious to me that if your corporate culture accepts "career-retardants" like part-time or extended parental leave only for women, then you'll end up with a lot of male and a few female psychos at the top of your hierarchy. 

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53 minutes ago, Alarich II said:

*snip*

In retrospect it seems obvious to me that if your corporate culture accepts "career-retardants" like part-time or extended parental leave only for women, then you'll end up with a lot of male and a few female psychos at the top of your hierarchy. 

Lol thanks. 

 But there is a deeper point that both Pebble and I are making. It isn't just corporate culture, though that's part of it. It is clients. It is acquaintances. It is every time someone remarks when you meet them that not many women do what you do and ask why you do it.  The point we are making is that it isn't just liking the subject or workplac structures. It isn't just getting the training. It is all the other crap you have to put up with and it is exhausting. 

 

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On the paper my university also has only 22% female computer science students but when I was a first-semester student we had 30% new female entries and this percentage rose with each passing year. When I was recently passing through the faculty and peeked into the bachelor course rooms, I noticed that the numbers were fairly even or that in some of the courses women formed the majority. Considering that the old master and phd graduates keep on harping how lucky 'we' (guess they meant the male bachelor students) are, even they seemed to notice that gender barriers soften up a little given enough time.

Can't say much about hostile work environments given that I'm neither a woman, nor going into business. Aside from aforementioned older students 'appreciating' the female company our campus environment is, I dare say, pretty open-minded. It also helps that we have several vocal female lecturers and regular 'Girl's day''s and other events to attract female students to STEM subjects. When I shortly enrolled in another university to catch up a course my university wasn't offering that semester and that I needed to for my bachelor, the atmosphere there was noticeably different. The lecturers were your stereotypical geneatric old white men who had repeated the same lecture for decades on end and were just waiting for retirement by now. They also noticed the increase in women in the course (though there were far fewer than at my university to be seen). And... they appreciated it with absurd scenes like the one where one said he would only put his Powerpoint online if "one of the pretty girls asks him nicely". The student body reacted with a combination of stunned disbelieve and careful indignation, but despite our protests he kept playing this game for minutes in which he shot down the boys' attempts to dissuade him until one of the girls was fed up enough to stand up and ask him. It was such a ridiculous scene that it still makes me mad and embarrased for my own gender...

So yes, I'd say I can understand that our society can only move on when scenes like this will be unthinkable. Still, I'm optimistic that society is on a good way (reactionary backlash aside) and that given enough time the gender inequality will be overcome by the next generations as long as we as a society stick to the values of an open-minded society in which sex and gender should not be treated as obstacles.

Of course for the whole STEM department and Computer Science in specific we do have the problem of very few new enrollments. At least in Germany I partly blame our education system. There is the certain bias that CS is only something for geeks and math cracks and students are too scared to really delve into the possibilities, preferring to remain a user only. It's not helped by the fact that we have only very few computer science teachers, or at least teachers who actually got a CS education before being put in front of a class. Among the entire CS Master students at my university there are only 13(!) who study it with the intend to become a teacher. In addition to this, for the past three years our chair for computer science education remained empty because they couldn't find a single lecturer to replace the one who left. This is utterly ridiculous. We seriously have to do something in this department so that more teachers can show more students that CS is nothing to be afraid of.

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30 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

But there is a deeper point that both Pebble and I are making. It isn't just corporate culture, though that's part of it. It is clients. It is acquaintances. It is every time someone remarks when you meet them that not many women do what you do and ask why you do it.  The point we are making is that it isn't just liking the subject or workplac structures. It isn't just getting the training. It is all the other crap you have to put up with and it is exhausting. 

 

In the first 4 years out of law school, my sister worked for 3 different firms and seemed unhappy at all of them.  While she would never outright say so, it was clear a lot of her frustration had to do with her treatment both by the partners/bosses (to be fair, one that she complained the most about was a woman) as well as the clients.  I remember one time I was visiting and she was going to be late because she was relied upon to drive a client from Orlando to Tampa.  Anyway, she now works for a (female) federal judge and is the happiest I've seen her in her adult life.

Political science is trending female.  The program I'm currently in, both in terms of faculty and phd students, is majority women.  The big discrepancy is in minority women, and non-international minorities in general.  Literally, in the two programs I've studied at I can only think of one non-international minority among faculty or grad students (an African-American woman who, incidentally, would be my chair if she didn't leave last year for a better position).

Also, the link above speaks to the OP - while there are more poly sci women students overall, there are very few that specialize in political methodology.  I think the point raised earlier in this thread has some validity - studying methods is boring.  If I had to focus on political methodology I would change career paths (not to mention while I can adequately fake thorough understanding of most cutting-edge methods, the skills required for application are over my head).  However, it is clear there is an unspoken bias there too.  Despite my department being majority female, there is still implicit denigrating of women colleagues among some of my cohorts and faculty based on what can only be their gender.  This is particularly the case when it has to do with methodological questions, which is an extension of the "women aren't good at math" stereotype.

Finally, I am all for blaming the education system for not producing women that want to pursue STEM fields, I'm just not sure what reforms one would suggest?  In my experience, women undergrads tend to take school much more seriously than men.  There are almost always a handful of highly hard-working and ambitious female students that invariably end up at the top of the class.  Such students are not hard to identify, and their pursuits have always been highly encouraged by myself and colleagues.  I'm not saying there isn't something we can do to steer them towards STEM, or there isn't specific bias in such fields (Poly Sci isn't really a STEM field so I wouldn't know), but what are the solutions?

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