14 DAY TRIAL // Two psychological scientists from Cornell University carried out a research that explained why women are so underrepresented in math-intensive fields, like physics, electrical engineering, computer science, economics, and chemistry, and apparently it's all a matter of will.
This is actually a relatively old question, who has been given many answers, more or less controversial, but none that was correct, concluded the two scientists, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams.
They gathered all the available data and concluded that the main factor for women choosing a math-intensive domain was their choice, both freely made and constrained by different factors.
How come in the top 100 US universities only 9% to 16% of tenure-track positions in these fields are held by women, when girls' grades in math from grade school through college are as good as or better than boys'?
Also, women and men earn comparable average scores on standardized math tests, even if in the top 1% of tests like SAT-M, there are twice as many men as women.
The two researchers found out that sex discrimination was no longer an issue, on the contrary, women tend to be slightly favored when it comes to being invited to interviews and to be offered tenure-track jobs in math-intensive STEM fields.
After analyzing every theory, Williams and Ceci concluded that the problem was that women actually chose not to get involved in math-heavy domains, or even if they did, they dropped out once they started.
Ceci said that “when you look at surveys of adolescent boys and girls and you say to them, 'What do you want to be when you grow up,' you never see girls saying, 'I want to be a physicist or an engineer.'”
He added that this doesn't mean the girls/women are rejecting science, it's just that they are more likely to be a vet or a physician.
Several studies of college students found that women are more interested in organic and social fields, while men are more interested in systematizing things, and this tendency is visible on the labor market today, where over half of new medical doctors and biologists are women, and in veterinary medicine, women represent over 75% of new graduates.
Another phenomenon is that women drop out of math-heavy careers paths, and it's very often because they are unable to balance childcare with the huge workload required to get tenure.
So young male professors are more likely to have a stay-at-home wife or partner, who takes care of the children.
“You don't see nearly as many men with doctorates in physics saying, 'I won't apply for a tenure-track position because my partner wants to practice environmental law in Wyoming and I'm going to follow her there and help take care of the kids,'” said Williams.
And even if it might not seem fair “I don't think we should try to persuade a woman who's going to be a physician, veterinarian, or biologist to instead be a computer scientist,” she adds.
On the other hand, women should be able to have a career and a family at the same time, and Williams says that “universities can and should do a lot more for women and for those men engaged in comparably-intensive care-taking.”
This could prove to be very helpful in any field, not just in math-intensive domains.
This research appears in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.