Two Women in STEM Articles - NYT & The Atlantic

Women in Cryptocurrencies Push Back Against 'Blockchain Bros' - NYT

"Women always question if they're qualified," one female cryptocurrency investor said.  "But look at these clowns around us."

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the U.S., where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM, as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife, and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

So what explains the tendency for nations that have traditionally less gender equality to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do?

According to a new paper published in Psychological Science by the psychologists Gijsbert Stoet, of Leeds Beckett University, and David Geary, of the University of Missouri, it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And typically, that path leads through STEM professions.

The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.

But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this disparity between boys and girls in showing science to be their best subject. (The most gender-equal countries are the typical snowy utopias you hear about, such as Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Turkey and the United Arab Emirates rank among the least equal, according to the Global Gender Gap Index.)

The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.

What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields such as science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. Stoet and Geary posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at.

“Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,” they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose STEM professions because they offer a more certain financial future than, say, painting or writing.