The gender-equality paradox: why don’t women choose STEM careers?
by Carolyn Moynihan, MercatorNet:
Remember James Damore, the young Google engineer who was sacked last August for resisting the company’s gender equality programme? Damore wasn’t against having more women in tech, he just did not believe the present male-female imbalance is owing to sexism and can be rectified by changing men’s attitudes. The sexes tend to have different work preferences because of their biologically based differences, he maintained.
At the time we noticed an article at Family Studies by David C. Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who takes an evolutionary approach to sex differences and whose research supports Damore’s basic contention. Last week a paper about that research, written in conjunction with Gijsbert Stoet, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University, was published in the journal Pyschological Science.
The paper, “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education” (STEM) delivers findings that most policy wonks and gender studies professors will not want to hear: the more gender equality a country has (think Sweden, Finland, Iceland), the less likely women are to choose maths and science professions.
Conversely, countries with the most female college graduates in STEM subjects were among the least gender equal countries (for example, the United Arab Emirates).
According to Stoet and Geary, Olga Khazan reports in The Atlantic, that could be because “women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And often, that path leads through stem professions.”
The psychologists examined data for 67 countries and found that in most of them girls were as good as or better than boys at science, and in nearly all countries would have been capable of college level maths and science. Yet, all efforts.to the contrary, there is a large gender gap in STEM professions in the West — especially in engineering and computer technology.
Why?
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