📓 Course: Gender Studies | ✉️ Contact Authors: Shakti Jacota and Cazper Steigstra
Introduction
The field of STEM focuses on establishing a curriculum in four disciplines: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Globally, women only make up 28% of the workforce in STEM fields, a shockingly low statistic for the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs of the future (The Stem Gap, 2020). There are several key reasons for why this is.
Firstly, STEM fields are typically perceived as being fields for only men to work in, and therefore when women attempt to pursue careers in these fields, they are considered to be less competent than men. Because of this, women leave STEM fields at a higher rate than male colleagues (Hewlett et al, 2008). When having evidenced their competency, they are typically disliked and therefore become socially rejected, meaning reward allocations in the forms of promotions and an increase in salary are taken away. A direct quote from the research of Heiman and Okimoto (2007, p.92) in relation to women working in these fields says, “doing what men do, as well as they do it, does not seem to be enough; women must additionally be able to manage the delicate balance of being both competent and communal”. From this, it is evidenced that women who dedicate themselves to a career in STEM subjects must already work much harder than that of men, to prove themselves academically and attempt to feel socially included and supported.
Secondly, there is typically a lack of interest or self confidence in girls to pursue careers in STEM subjects. This can tie into the fact that STEM fields are considered to be ones that men pursue, and this therefore links into the issue of gender roles. Culturally, gender roles influence occupational interest (Low, et al. 2005), and children from a young age believe they cannot pursue particular occupations as their gender is inappropriate (Hartung et al. 2005). Research conducted by Eccles (2006) showed that men and women’s occupational choice is influenced by the value that they place on how much this career can contribute to society. She found that women are more likely to prefer work with a clear social purpose. Following her findings, most people do not view STEM occupations as directly having a benefit on society (National Academy of Engineering, 2008), and therefore STEM subjects do not appeal to those who value making a social contribution (Eccles, 2006). Despite this, certain STEM sub disciplines such as biomedical engineering attract more women due to the fact that they have a clearer social purpose (Gibbons, 2009).
Finally, it is believed many women leave STEM careers because they cannot balance working and family responsibility, but this is more convoluted than it is made out to be. Married women with children in STEM have a disadvantage compared to married men in relation to receiving promotions (Xie&Shauman, 2003). A study conducted by the Society of Women Engineers (2006) found that most women who left their jobs in engineering did this due to family-related issues. After beginning a family, women are generally thought of to be the primary caregiver due to maternal instincts or because of classic societal norms, whilst men can choose how much involvement they want with their families because they are the primary breadwinner (Barrett&McIntosh, 2015). This is incredibly problematic as evidenced by research conducted by Hewlett (2008). He found households who have both parents working in fields of STEM, both having demanding schedules, the man’s career is often given more priority and the woman must leave her job.
We were curious to investigate these issues further, specifically from the perspective of a woman who has been working in the field of STEM, to understand whether she has encountered these issues. Therefore, the question this research paper aims to answer is: What is the relationship between gender and work in the STEM field, from a female's perspective?
We have chosen to interview a senior academic working in the field of robotics, Prof X,1 to inquire into her lifetime experience of studying and working in the fields of technology and engineering. Prof X currently works as a Professor at a prominent university in Europe, and was recently recognized for being amongst the top women in robotics in an annual list compiled by Robohub (Robohub, 2021). Throughout her academic career she has published numerous conference and journal papers, and also served as an expert in her field on committees and review panels.
Alongside her impressive career in academics and in the field of robotics, Prof X is also married and a mother of two children, both now young adults. Throughout her career, she has balanced the role of being a parent whilst following her passion. For this reason, we have chosen to ask her questions about both her experiences being a woman in a male dominated field, and her experiences of balancing this work with her duties of being a parent. Moreover, as a migrant, she is often further considered as being a minority in the country of which she is a national. We were therefore curious to understand if these experiences had any impact on her potential growth in the STEM field.
Family
As evidenced by Xie & Shauman (2013), it is incredibly difficult for women in STEM to balance a career alongside family responsibility. The pressure for a woman to conform to societal roles and abandon her career after beginning a family is something that is commonly seen.
Rarely, women feel able to support their own ambitions by continuing with their careers for a variety of reasons, one of these includes the rising cost of childcare. When asked about the balance between managing her career and family, Prof X explained that when she had her first child she attempted to look after them during the day and work in the evening, but this was not sustainable. Being privileged with having enough money for childcare, she hired a nanny instead. She also explained that throughout her children growing up, she also was lucky enough to be able to afford to send them to private schools which had after school clubs, so her children would not have to be alone at home whilst she and her husband were working. Prof X made it very clear that she does know some women who want to follow a career alongside having a family, but it is just unfeasible to do so due to the rising costs in childcare.
In the UK, the average cost of a place in a part time nursery for a child under two years old is £132 a week (Coleman et al. 2020). Furthermore, the same report evidenced only 56% of councils in England report having enough childcare for parents working full time (Coleman et al. 2020). From this, it is evidenced that the issue lies not only in the earnings of parents in a family, but also depends on the infrastructure of the city one is living in. At the end of the day, the main influences in what determines who can continue with their career is based on their income and their location of residence.
Furthermore, there is commonly a divide in how women feel they must balance their career and how much time they must invest in their family. As evidenced by Heiman and Okimoto (2007), women must work harder than men in the fields of STEM to achieve the same promotions or pay raises. Prof X felt this pressure as well, stating that she “had prioritised work over them” because she felt as if she did have to participate in every work opportunity or cover extra modules requested by her manager to advance in her career. Because of this, she admitted she had put the needs of her children to the side, and sometimes they had to “fend for themselves”.
Ezzedeen (2009) acknowledges that there is a clash in the time when a woman must advance her career and her fertility, leading them to make a choice between the two. Moreover, women are more likely than men to amend their careers in response to parenting (Blair-Loy, 2001). Prof X on the other hand did not feel the need to make a stark choice between having a career and raising a child, and many scholars agree with this viewpoint. A study conducted by Ezzedeen and Ritchey (2009) investigates methods which women can undertake in order to find a good balance between the two, through the use of interviews. Many women agreed with the words of Prof X, with one saying, “I don’t see why you have to give up anything to be all that you can be” and claiming you must be independent and a whole person away from your family. Many men already possess this way of thinking, and the reason why women do not can come down to the societal norms and standards that are placed on them from a young age (Low, et al. 2005). Prof X stated the importance of having a supportive partner from her own experience, and claimed she was lucky that hers was supportive of her ambitions and her career drive. Through the research of Ezzedeen and Ritchey (2009), women they had interviewed additionally said the same thing, in regard to possessing a good social support system.
Finally, when reflecting on the upbringing of her children, Prof X gave some advice, stating that “children grow up fast, and you have the rest of the time for a career. Take your time”. She herself acknowledges this advice could be seen to be anti-feminist, but it is interesting to also compare this to her answer when she was asked if she would do anything differently in retrospect. In regard to managing her career and raising a family, she said she would not have chosen to have done anything differently. Perhaps the importance of each priority shifted for her when she focused on a different aspect, and she was attempting to state that she should not have prioritised advancing her career so much over the care of her children.
Whether or not a woman chooses to prioritise her career over her family comes down to the values in regard to the way the person in question is raised, but also quite importantly, and commonly forgotten, are the resources a person has in order to be able to manage both. As seen from the rising cost of childcare, it is close to impossible for one parent not to have to give up their career to be with their child if there are not enough financial resources to provide daycare for the child (Coleman et al., 2020). Because of this issue, women are generally the ones who are made to give up their careers to focus on their children as opposed to men due to societal standards (Coleman et al., 2020).
Work
Women must work significantly harder than men to pursue a career in the male-dominated STEM field (Hewlett et al., 2008). Women especially face gender-related difficulties mid-career, causing them to often leave the field of work. Difficulties faced are mainly said to be related to feelings of isolation, unsupportive work environments, extreme work schedules and unclear rules about advancement and success (Hewlett et al., 2008)..
The main difficulty that Prof X faced also happened during the mid-career period of her life. Prof X mentioned that in her experience it took a lot longer than expected to be promoted. This especially compared to the rate of how quick and easy her white male counterparts were receiving these promotions, while most of these colleagues had not done as much in the STEM field as she had. She describes the inequality in the promotions offered in throughout her career not as overt discrimination, but rather as implicit. Prof X states that she is unsure about whether this was due to her race, or gender, or both.
When asked how it made her feel to see people that had done less or as much as her getting promoted faster, Prof X described the experience as very frustrating and mentioned that it made her feel bitter. This in turn impacted her energy levels, considering the amount of time and effort invested into her work. She often prioritised her work over family commitments, but for some reason she was “just not getting there, not getting the promotions” (Prof X, 2021).
Several pieces of research convey, especially in the field of academia, that historically women are less likely than men to be promoted to high-rank positions (Cole, 1981), which still seems to be the case even forty years later (Ginther & Khan, 2021). When women do get promoted, it does not happen as quickly as the promotions awarded to men (Wolfinger et al., 2008), echoing Prof X’s experience. According to Wolfinger et al. (2008), this is frequently the case for PhD onward promotions, but under the PhD level there is little to no evidence for gender-based discrimination. A reason that people tend to mention for gender-inequality within academia and the work floor is the ‘multiple role obligation’ of women, combining marriage, parenthood, and work. But data does not seem to support this: women scientists who are married are significantly more prolific than those who are not and married women with one or two children are more scientifically productive than unmarried women and only slightly less productive than women with children (Ezzedeen et al., 2009). Although Prof X mentioned that it is not easy to combine both family life and work in the STEM field, she stated that she prioritised her work responsibility, therefore did not mention this as a feasible reason for the lack of promotions.
Another possible explanation that has been brought forward historically as for why women do not get promoted as quickly and often as men, is that many women are excluded from the activities that allow for full participation and growth (Cole, 1981). The findings of Mengel (2015) have confirmed these findings to still be true. The findings show that these activities are said to mainly be the informal activities that contribute to social networking; therefore, women are less included in the community thus might not make the right connections to climb up the ladder. This reason was additionally one of the likely reasons Prof X raised as to why she was not receiving promotions, as she briefly discussed not being included in the ‘after work culture’.
Nowadays, the ratio of women to men in academia and the STEM field is still low, but efforts are being made to increase the number of women. Prof X mentioned that in the last ten to fifteen years she gets called upon a lot to be part of boards, panels, and seminars to make sure that women get represented, and mentioned that sometimes panels and boards get boycotted nowadays if there are no women on them. She believes this to be effective, as “if you do not see women around in these positions, younger women might be discouraged to pursue their careers in the field”. Prof X also mentions that she often feels insecure about these forms of positive discrimination, and wonders whether she gets asked to participate because she ticks the required boxes, or because of her expertise and opinion.
Suggestions for Improvement
When posed the questions of what should be done to improve gender equality in the STEM field, Prof X had a clear answer: ‘educating men …, men have to be educated that women are equal and men are not different and special’ (Prof X, 2021). The roots of gender inequality lie in the roots of the patriarchal society we live in; Prof X explains that it already starts when we are kids because ‘boys go out and play, so explore the environment, which girls do less so, which apparently affects them later’ (Prof X, 2021). Because of phenomena like these, boys score better in certain aspects like spatial skills, but this can already be fixed through simple training (Hewlett et al., 2008). Therefore, Prof X believes that ‘you shouldn’t get girls to just play with dolls, everybody should play with everything, boys should play with dolls, for example’ (Prof X, 2021).
These deep patriarchal structures within our society in which we see certain tasks as stereotypically male and other tasks as female is also what many feminists see as the main cause of gender inequality. Therefore, the interests of most boys and girls are shaped by the environment around them. To tackle this, we should indeed ‘educate men’ but also make the fields of STEM more accessible to women by making small chances already at colleges and universities, such as changing admissions requirements and presenting a broader overview of the field (Hewlett et al., 2008).
Conclusion
As a professor and one of the top ranked women in robotics, Prof X has experienced the gender inequalities on the work floor and academia. Throughout her career, a personally identifiable difficulty was seeing how fast male colleagues were getting promotions, while not having done as much in terms of research and accomplishments compared to herself. However, there could be many explanations for this and gender inequality in the field in general, the main ones identified on the basis of Prof X’s experience and feminist research are informal activities women are not included in, the expectation of having to combine both family life and work, and the patriarchal roots that still exist within today’s society.
To improve gender-equality within the STEM fields and academia, forms of positive discrimination have been implemented recently and small changes in the work and study environment are proven to help, but according to Prof X, what we really need to make large steps in gender-equality improvement, is ‘educating men … that women are equal [to men] and men are not different and special’ (Prof X, 2021). Therefore, we should start from the bottom-up: tackling stereotypical gender roles and making small chances to improve gender equality.
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