Dispelling Myths so More Women Study Math and Engineering - Building Gender Balanced Business

• With 60% of bachelor’s degrees going to women, you might think there is little cause to worry about how educated American women are compared with their male counterparts.

• But with only 2 in 5 math and engineering degrees going to women, USA Today sees a “logical national goal and an economic imperative” in increasing the number of female students in the subjects. “Because engineering skills are a vital competitive edge in the global economy, the need to boost that number is obvious.”

• While also calling for getting more men to go to college (to avoid “a large pool of disaffected, undereducated males”), the newspaper says that training more women in the subjects is the more immediately promising approach. And thus women and the country must be disabused of thinking that has fostered pernicious myths:

1. Discrimination is not a plausible reason for the low numbers, for they no longer exist in medical or law programs, fields that are not likely to be run by men any differently chauvinistic than engineering school authorities.
2. Female aptitude in math and science is quite comparable to that of males, so disinclination does not spring from inability.
3. The gap is much larger at the university than high school level, with women almost equally represented in secondary classes as men. At matriculation, women are just as ready to be math or science majors as men.
4. To draw more women into the fields, US universities (and women) need good mentors and role models, USA Today cites female scientists as saying.
5. Also, “employers must demonstrate that careers in those fields aren’t incompatible with having a family”.

The USAToday Opinion piece