Dr Manasvi M Kamat
The discrepancy in the ratio between men and women enrolled and/or working in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) stream is globally known as the ‘STEM gap’. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report prefers to call this phenomenon the ‘gender-equality paradox’. The Forum hypothesises that as countries become wealthier and have a higher index of gender equality; women are less likely to get admitted to STEM education.
The various reports released by the government indicate that there are large disparities that still exist between men and women in STEM education and careers across India. Gender disparity is the highest in fields like engineering, computing or mathematics while it is least in the life sciences and medicine. Globally, is found that only one in five countries achieves what is classed as ‘gender parity’ with women making up half of total researchers and only a handful of them working in science, with distinct regional variations.
It is found that women are attracted to science at school and actually make up the majority of science graduates. Even at the Master’s level women are in the majority but there is a dramatic drop in numbers at PhD level, and the discrepancy gets more still at research and employment levels.
While the STEM gap is slowly narrowing, women still face an uphill battle to achieve equality in many countries. The number of women earning degrees in STEM fields at the US increased by 10% from 2015-2017 while the increase in women in STEM careers was around 6 %. Challenges are abound in retaining women in science research too. It is also found that less than 8% of the women in US enrolled in these courses opt for a PhD while in the UK, the gender gap has increased for computing, ICT, and maths.
The modern digi-tech industry is a gift to the world by the US. In this booming industry of the current years the gender disparities within the world of employment exist. In the US for instance in the year 1950, men made up over 60% of the workforce and even though women comprise almost half of the workforce now there exists a wages gap where women aged 25-34 earned 89 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts as per the Pew Research. Comparatively as of 2018 less than a quarter of India’s female population were engaged in the workplace with a figure that is half of the female participation numbers across the globe.
In the EU, 41% of scientists and engineers are women and less than a third of researchers are women in Hungary, Luxembourg, Finland and Germany. This gender-parity is further carried in employments as well. Across Europe as a whole the men domination of scientists and engineers in the high and medium high-technology manufacturing is as high as 83%.
According to a UNESCO report of 2015, only 28% of the world’s researchers in STEM are women and in India they comprise only 14%. As per All India Higher Education Survey Report of 2017-18 for UG in science the men to women enrollment ratio is 51:49 and only 29% of female students in India are enrolled for BTech course. For UG programs in engineering and technology the men to women enrollment ratio is 71:29 while for PhD in engineering it is 75:25%. The only solace is in respect of UG in medical sciences, where the men to women enrollment ratio are 39:61 and for PG in sciences the gender-parity ratio is in favour of women to the extent 60%. Since Indian women are better represented in health sciences as opposed to engineering and information technology, and if these numbers are translated in increased workforce participation through a policy, there will be a tremendous transformation of our healthcare systems.
If we go by the recent report published the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the ‘comparative advantage’ of women in reading is the primary reason why they are outnumbered by men in STEM. Thus in a quest to explain some of the above observations, researchers across-the-board realised an interesting phenomenon about men having a basic liking for STEM, making them excel in it while the forte of girls remains in reading. For some especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the gender parity in science is a legacy of their membership of the Soviet Union and its satellite bloc. The female participation in science was actively encouraged very often in government-funded facilities. Others like the Nordic countries lead the world in gender equality with ambitious welfare and social policies helping women at the workplace.
Economists, Thomas Breda of the Paris School of Economics and Clotilde Napp of the French National Center for Scientific Research also find support in the findings of the NAS. Around the world it was found that among the students who were better at math than at reading, 68% were boys and 32% were girls. According to a publication in Psychological Science by Gijsbert Stoet, at Leeds Beckett University and David Geary, at the University of Missouri, it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom and more than often, this path leads through STEM professions.
The above studies partly explain why men are more likely to join the STEM fields. The other reasons could be gender discrimination of women in scientific fields and societal norms influencing career aspirations of women. Cultural stereotypes like marriage and maternity pose severe barriers for women’s entry into the STEM-related educational pursuits. With the WEF estimating that approximately 90% of future jobs, and the fastest growth in jobs will emerge from the STEM fields, continued exclusion of women from STEM is unacceptable and economically unsound. Efforts are needed at a global and local level to attract more women talent to the STEM subjects but also the job-front as well. Needless to say that the workplace policies on pay, sexual harassment, flexi-schedules for working mothers need to be modified to encourage retention of more women STEM professionals.
