That post about women in maths

[kazaera]

So, hi, I'm going to talk about women in maths, stats, physics, computer science and engineering.

This is the part where people generally go "Oh, of course. The number of women in those subjects is abysmally low. It's due to the way women are socialised to dislike/not be good at/think they aren't any good at maths."

Except. Not quite.

Comments

[bard_linn]

I have to wonder how much money and career goes in to it too. Over here, at least, schooling is EXPENSIVE. A lot of what I decided to do depended on finances. I interviewed with one school and really liked them, really liked the staff, really liked the superintendent (any superintendent who goes out and actively tries to raise money for their district so we can do stuff gets bonus points from me) - but they paid 10,000 less than the job I took and were an hour from my house, which made commuting iffy at best. I love my job, but I really liked that place too.

Honestly, I would go mad if I had to sit and just work on a problem day after day. I need some interaction. I'm an intervert, but I would feel like I wasn't getting anything accomplished if I had to keep trying the same problem over an over again.

I know one thing I noticed was number of female students in Ed-Math Undergrad > number of male students. I'm pretty sure it was the reverse for pure math/applied math.

[kazaera]

Ouch, I can imagine. Schooling's less expensive here, at least for EU students, and I was lucky enough that my parents could pay for my undergrad and Master's. And now I have a scholarship

[bard_linn]

(Well, there is SOME innate ability towards math(s) in terms of wiring - they've seen that in studies. But not as much as some people like the point out.)

In NJ, you have to take 10 math courses to get a teaching degree in math. Not that I /use/ it at all, but you do have to do it. So maybe? And if you're a teacher, it's really, really hard, I would imagine, to transfer to academia later.

[dyxlisa]

I know nothing about math and women, but I think it's interesting that in my medical school classes the number of women are growing, so generally every class has more women than men. Medicine though is sort of a weird field in that it's a scientific/research field where you absolutely need to have good people skills, but until fairly recently it was totally dominated by men. This really doesn't have anything to do with what you're talking about but it's the only personal knowledge I have that's remotely relevant! In any case, I'm just happy now that people don't automatically assume I'm a nurse, though there are still some stereotypes that annoy; for example, why supervisors seem to assume every female medical student is friends with every other female medical student, while not assuming the same for the males, is kind of hilarious and annoying.

[tinni]

Well, when I was going through engineering - I got the impression that the reason there were so few women in engineering and why so many women dropped out of engineering was because women had more choices. I mean, what I would witness is this, men who were struggling with engineering would stick with engineering because they could't really figure out what they would do instead. A lot of girls (we were all girls back then) would simply switch out to a degree they were better at. Most of the time it was a non-STEM degree. But that was here in Australia, were switching between degrees once you get your foot into university is easier. I don't know if this reasoning would apply else where