Do girls and women shy away from math & science since they are solitary vs social careers?

Question

"Girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view science as a solitary rather than a social occupation", according to a University of Michigan psychologist. "Raising girls who are confident in their ability to succeed in science and math is our first job," said Jacquelynne Eccles, a senior research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the U-M Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

"But in order to increase the number of women in science, we also need to make young women more interested in these fields, and that means making them aware that science is a social endeavor that involves working with and helping people."

Have you or women/girls you know been reluctant to pursue math, science or engineering careers because you thought you would have to work alone? In addition, have you heard girls and boys told that math and science were difficult?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050511134757.htm

Answer 1

I have yet to read the article, but I must somewhat disagree that science is a non-social subject area. I worked in a zoology research lab for about a year, and most laboratories require that a person socialize and collaborate with a large number of fellow lab workers. In our lab, we attended weekly meetings to keep everyone up-to-date, and researchers rotated giving presentations on their own particular individual projects. (Since I was a minion doing lab upkeep, I watched presentations rather than gave my own.)



Non-research labs, of course, don't really run this way. Testing urine in a hospital lab all day can be isolating. (The thought of ending up doing this is one thing that scared me away from studying bacteriology.)



In any case, the 'social' aspect offered by lab jobs is a different kind than one finds in teaching, for example, where a teacher works with a new group of students every semester/school year, or in nursing or social services work. Teaching provides something different every day, whereas lab work ... does not, especially since projects often take a long time to finish and gather results from. And science demands monumental patience and is often so separated from its social / human applications that it takes a certain type of person to feel like his/her toilsome work is an accomplishment every day. I like the daily gratification of planning and teaching a class rather than laboring over a project from which I will gain only perpipherally useful information that will only make up a tiny portion of an enormous scientific puzzle.

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Yes, it was a great article. I agree with it entirely. The general public still upholds the image of scientist-as-loner. I think it may have something to do with our individualistic "hero/genius" representation of scientists and discoverers. Giving recognition to a whole team makes it seem, in a competitive society, like nobody "won." We want to get right to the point and find out who won.



"Young women (around the age of 20) were more likely than young men to place a high value on occupations that permitted flexibility and did not require them to be away from their family." Why on earth are college-aged girls who are probably not even dating anyone seriously choosing their areas of study based on some imagined future picture of "family life"?



"The women also valued working with people. Even though young women had higher college GPAs than young men, young men were more likely to have a higher opinion of their abilities in math and science, and in their general intellectual abilities." Funny. I notice this gender difference in self-opinion in many different settings and age groups. We are all still very cautious about encouraging girls to have "too high opinions of themselves," though it appears from this article that boys already do.

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susanflorence, I liked your post a lot. And I'd like to add that this reducing and essentializing is the nature of all psychological research on gender, race, or anything (note that this professor's area is psychology/sociology). We in the language arts field take issue with psychology-based gender studies, as well, because they only work based on two problematic premises: (1) that we can reduce the concept of 'gender' to the two 'opposing' genders: men and women; and (2) that differences are biologically inherent and natural in males and females _because_ of their gender and no other circumstances. Of course, the implication is that it is possible to find biological/natural explanations for social phenomena like what fields of study people go into or 'how men and women talk,' like the work of Deborah Tannen attempts to explain (which I very much disagree with). My other problem with psychology is, as you mentioned, the very nature of 'studying' the human being. It is impossible to study any person in a natural, unaffected state (the subject is always conscious of being studied), and equally impossible for anyone to get inside another person's head. People are simply not entirely "themselves" when they are being studied. I'm reminded of one language arts study by psychologists Linda Flower and John Hayes that was eventually useful for proving the value of 'process' in addition to 'final product' in writing, but whose method was quite ridiculous. Flower had writers of various levels sit down and write an essay while hooked up to a tape recorder. The writer was instructed to *say what s/he was thinking* while s/he was composing the essay. How in the hell can a personal verbalize everything s/he is thinking, especially while distracted with completing a writing task? People often do not even *think* in language; sometimes there are no words to match thoughts.



So. You see my point. We gain much that is useful from scientific/psychological study, yet we must not forget its limits and should always combine or compare it with viewpoints from other disciplines, especially the humanities.

Answer 2

I think it has a lot to do with how it is done. In school I was abused by the other students. Being a foster child I didn't have the clothes or the things the other students did.

My teacher said I was just wasteing the tax payers money I would grow up to prostitute or sell drugs.

So I left the high school.

After flunking out of high school and flunking math.

I later after waiting tables decided to go back and get my GED. At adult night school with a bunch of other people who had experienced the same treatment.



Then started VOTECH and after much testing found I had a lot of skills in math, and accounting. I graduated as an accountant and started working for a construction company as an accountant. After experience they make 35 to 42,000. per year. Then worked up to assistant manager.

Now without any help I have purchased my house and almost have it paid for. I drive a nice car and have a good income.

That proves anyone can do it! So if they tell you your dumb and can't learn. They are wrong you just need a different environment. Never let them put you down or say it cannot be done.

Answer 3

Social sciences in general require more memorization which is certainly not everyone's cup of tea. Meanwhile, physical sciences often involve concepts very difficult to master and intuit, again the stuff of nightmares for many people. I am a successful phycisist, but I could NEVER be a good biologist or psychologist. I've seen the thick thousand page paperbacks and would rather take my own wisdom teeth out without anestaesia than slog through THAT. BTW, I have close friends in psychology and there is a LOT of gunk in psychology that seriously needs to be taken care of. You guys really need to go back to being a real SCIENCE!

Answer 4

I think that part of the problem, at least in the sciences, is that the job hours are simply not very family friendly. There are plenty of bright young women with an interest in science, but if they are going to prepare for a career that demands an 80 hour workweek (and the tenure track in many sciences does), they basically have to forfeit parenthood. American companies take a very short-term look at profits, and are unwilling to let a worker take a reduced schedule for a few years. Even in other high-stess careers, such as law or medicine, after internships are over a person can choose a slower-paced (35-45 hrs. week) position. I'd love to see both feminist groups and father's rights groups help to pressure companies to offer more flex-time or part-time schedules.



I do think that part of the answer might be that women prefer the "people professions". However, there are also plenty of opportunities for working with people in math and science, if you know where to look. Many of these positions are in consultant or "translator" roles - working between the clients and the engineers, for example, or in academics. Of course, the problem with academic positions is, again, that they often require a huge number of hours worked during prime childbearing years. This should not be underestimated - only 4 percent of high school senior girls polled say that they do NOT plan on having any children.



EDIT: I take exception to the post that claimed that men and women are "the same" cognitivly. They are not. Ask a neurobiologist. Women DO often desire to raise their own children, as well. However, I think that our society would benefit from having more bright young women able to contribute to the sciences and maths, and it's worth finding out what's keeping them from doing it. Since there IS a gap between the number of female science majors in college and the number of females in high-level science and math positions, let's explore that.



EDIT 2: The average age at which an American woman has a first child is 25. Clearly, *some* college women are thinking about family life in the near future, others might not be.

Answer 5

the popular image of the scientist is the lone eccentric in the ivory tower. could the same not be said about eccentric lonely writers? the vast majority of books have one author on the cover.



careers in science can be very social too. research requires the coordination of many people, and computer programmers work in pairs to monitor each other's mistakes. open source projects such as Linux, BitTorrent, and Mozilla Firefox take it a step further: their partners and teams are a collective intelligence in the millions. How's that for being social?



even if a career involves working with and helping people, it doesn't mean that everyone automatically becomes best friends.

Answer 6

No, actually a lot of studies have been done in this area. A lot of it has to do with early on in school, boys answer questions in these field more than girls do and they don't accel at answering them... It is one of the ups to gender education.



Part of it is that children are raised differntly, boys still get sports stuff from birth and girls soft fuzzy dolls. We raise our children very differntly from birth.



If a boy picks up an insturment (a very mathmatical thing) a father is more likely to talk him out of it and hand them a football than a woman is to hand her daughter a football. If a boy like science as a kid it is okay, but a girl is pegged as a dork from day one in school, it follows us as far as HS and by the time we hit college we are socially taught that science for girls is bad, but okay for boys.

Answer 7

I love math and science. I can stay home all day and watch the science channel or doing problems in an old math book (yeah i'm a geek) It all depends on what you were introduced to as a child. I was always taught to lean towards science. And to me it's more interesting than anything else.

Answer 8

THIS LOOKS LONG, BUT IT'S A QUICK READ.... I PROMISE.



Forgive the impatient sound of my reply, please, but I am so, so, so fed up with discrimination against women, I can't see straight. Studies, studies, studies, and what do they know? They set their premise BEFORE the study is made, which is a HUGE no-no in reseach, then they fit the subjects and the answers to their premise. Then they get published and sometimes famous, and it's all greed and ambition.



Women and men are cognitively the same; I don't want to spend all day here, but speaking of studies, there have been so many that prove that if a girl is reared with brothers and a strong father, an absentee mother, she pretty much joins the male acculturation; somewhat the same with boys--although this culture so favors men, that they still get all the "male" messages from advertising, school and on.



I mean look at your quote--it says that women will do math and science, if they can be moms. As if all women were altruistic, wanted to be caregivers, and all that was needed was to appeal to this INNATE NEED of women to stay home and take care of the family--if one takes the thought to its completion.



Right! This study seems, to me, to have been written by some very conservative professor, who buys not just one, but most, if not all the stereotypical ideas regarding women. If it makes them think that they're helping others, then they'll do it. INDEED! What a stereotype! As if there weren't as many men who care to help others (lawyers, doctors, policemen, firemen, paramedics, nurses....), and as if there were no women who were out for the fame and the glory and the buck!



The math prob is simple; it's been this way for too long. Too many people have written that it's more difficult for girls. Their teachers think it's harder for them. Well, call someone a sissy, long enough, and that person may become one. Girls sense where they belong in culture, even more than do men, because as the oppressed, they have to be certain--for survival--not to overstep boundaries that may cost them.



Think of it this way. Girls couldn't study to be doctors or lawyers. Those were men's jobs, and plenty of studies were written addressing the ineptitude or lack of natural inclination in women for these subjects.

Wrong! Women fought to get rights to study in these fields; they fought teachers who marked them more severely than they graded their "entitled" white males, and here they are, thank goodness!



Free the children! Let's educate all boys and all girls equally and without prejudice, and we'll get our scientists our mathematicians among the female students, and we'll get our caregivers among the male students (and vice versa, of course).... The point is, It will be done by choice and love of the nature of the work, not by pre-conceived notions of what's male and female, so researchers can get published.....

Answer 9

Young girls and Women are still being told the real girls don't do math. Those classes are still being taught by Knuckle dragging Neanderthals that are tenured. If a female is Intelligent she is frequently called a man. Same old same old.... But there is Encouraging news..... Women are going into these fields more frequently and are succedding at it!

Answer 10

Audio editing most assuredly is science, as is operating a radio station. If anything, you had better be able to get along with EVERYONE if you want to do these things. Girls and women are reluctant to pursue those careers because they're taught through social cues that it isn't what they do.



Edit to Juniper: Trust me, it's all societal pressures. Those of us who don't give a flip what others think of us will do what we damned well please, "neurobiology" aside. That's a cop out, and I frankly take offense at THAT. That and the "women desire to raise their own families" junk. I personally can't stand children (too loud) and would rather have a cat.

Answer 11

I don't find this true at all. I belong to a science-y organization at my school, and the majority of students involved are girls. I've never thought that I'd not like something because I would be working "alone".

Answer 12

I've always been interested in maps, and I have occasionally considered becoming a cartographer. I decided against it because:



a) I'm terrible at math. It involves more math than you'd think.

b) I like managing creative teams.



So, yeah, it makes sense in my case. However, there are plenty of other scientific fields that involve teamwork. Who's ever heard of constructing a dam alone?