Women and Confidence

I realize that the New York Times is a terrible thing to link because it restricts your access unless you've paid for it, but regardless, if you haven't read 10 articles this month or if you pay for NYT online, then you can follow this link to an interesting article: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/opinion/brooks-the-confidence-questions.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

The most interesting part I found was this: 

"For example, a study by the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education found that, when working in groups, highly accomplished male students gravitated toward the technical tasks, while highly accomplished female students gravitated toward the administrative tasks."

As a female in a very male-dominated workforce, things like this are super-interesting to me.  Why aren't there more females in engineering?  Is it solely because socially, we've been taught that girls are nurses/teachers and boys are engineers/mathematicians?  Or is there something else happening?  

One of the arguments I've heard to support the lack of females in STEM careers is that females are less likely to self-evaluate their skills as positively as males.  Males are NOT inherently any better than females at doing math, which is especially evident at younger ages.  But when interviewed, girls PERCEIVE their ability as inferior.  Which is HUGE when it comes to choosing a career later in life.  And I'm sorry for not including references here, but I can send them to you if you ask.

I was lucky enough to have middle school and high school math and science teachers who encouraged me in my mathematical and analytically abilities, without whom I probably would have chosen a different career path. 

My graduate adviser brought up the lack of confidence issue specifically with me, because she said it seemed like I didn't think/know that I was doing a good job.  She was right: I was struggling and felt like my knowledge was inferior to the other grad students I worked with (specifically the male colleague I worked closely with, whose "natural" coding/computational abilities far outshone mine).  But she assured me that I was, in fact, excelling.  And she said that it wasn't uncommon for a female student to feel that way when a male student who achieves at the same level feels more confident.  

There are other issues at play here of course.  They include societal pressure, the desire of a female to make a wider impact in the world on an emotional level, inability to "identify" with technical skills, desire to use verbal communication skills, the perception that you won't ever get to work with people in a STEM career, the perception that technical careers are less flexible for family-rearing, being intimidated by the male-dominance/culture (a lot of females drop out of STEM college programs, especially computer science, because of this), etc.  Some of these work off of a natural difference between males and females, and some revolve around mis-information.  

I think it's complicated to be sure, but definitely something to look into.  It has certainly been getting better, and there are TWO other female engineers in my department out of about 40 (this is a lot, guys!), both of whom are younger than 35.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn that 10 years ago there were none.  So generationally we seem to be addressing that issue, albeit slowly.  

In my graduate lab at the time I graduated, there were 3 females to 5 males among the grad students.  Which is almost at 50%, and practically unheard of.  I think in total across the rest of the mechanical engineering graduate program, there were around 10 other females (out of hundreds of grad students).  But it's unsurprising that the females would congregate in my lab as opposed to others, given that our adviser is also female and openly seeks to mentor younger females to pursue STEM careers.  

For those of you who aren't familiar, it's important to note that mechanical engineering is much worse than other engineering disciplines.  Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, for example, are probably at around 30-40% of females enrolled in college.  Which, to me, sounds HUGE.  Mechanicals are down between 5-10%.  

And yes, I did tend to take on the administrative tasks when working in a group in my undergrad classes.  It depended on the group, of course, but more often than not that was the case.  I enjoyed taking notes, delegating tasks, and organizing.  And the boys hated it.  So, there was that.  As grad students, our social gatherings were very largely organized (and attended) by the females.  And that's just how it is.  Women and men are inherently different beings, and have different desires, likes, and skills.  We should definitely do the best we can with education and mentoring programs, and debunk a lot of the myths associated with technology careers, which will increase the number of females in STEM careers.  Maybe we will never have a perfect 50/50 split in engineering fields, and I think that is okay.