The Issue:
STEM leaders are making some of the biggest advances in our society. They're solving things like global warming, making medical breakthroughs, and creating the technologies that are changing our lives. These are the things we use every day that make our lives better. And with half the population being female and with a continual growing Hispanic and African-American population, along with other minority groups, it is necessary to diversify STEM fields. However, females are rarely encouraged to pursue math and science because of cultural and racial bias that math and science are "male" fields. It's stereotypes like these that inhibit, create gender disparity in STEM fields, and that diminishes their likelihood of cultivating interest in math and science.
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According to Debbie Sterling, an Engineer at Stanford, in a recent study that tested boys and girls around the world on the same science subjects, the girls out-performed the boys in most countries, but not in the U.S. Therefore, it is not a biological factor that accounts for the level of female engineers at only 11% of all engineers in America, but a cultural factor. In fact, a large and diverse body of peer-reviewed research presents recent evidence on the social and environmental factors contributing to the disparity between the numbers of men and women in STEM fields. These findings are organized within this area:
Social and environmental factors shape youth achievements and interest in Math and Science, and because of this, there is continuing bias in the STEM community. |
The foundation for a STEM career needs to be laid early in life. However, instead of telling the future youth generation that they can dream and act upon those dreams, we limit them as young children, before they can even talk. For example, the toys parents bring their children are the foundations of their dreams. This is where youth minorities decide to have low-grade jobs because society puts a cap on their success and opportunities before even stepping into the workforce. But research demonstrates that small improvements in establishing a broader overview in STEM fields, with problem-solving games and mind-boggling puzzles, can enable minorities to realize that aptitude improves with experience, and can create "growth mindset" individuals who can defy negative stereotypes of them in the STEM fields.
The figure on the left comes from a study done by the Women of Engineering Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The graph on the right is the result of an experiment done at Microsoft, explaining why there is a gap between males and females in STEM fields.
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