What We Seem to Be Telling Women to Think About Themselves

There’s lots of stuff about “the war on women” these days or those who battle over exactly what a woman can or cannot do with her own body when she is pregnant. Given the passion on both sides, it is exceptionally unlikely that there will ever be a meeting of the minds, an American consensus if you will, on these issues. The passion is born of what is sacred to the individual concerned, and logic and compromise simply do not exist in that space. What we can look at, however, is the underlying statistics behind where women think they belong in a society where scientific and technical expertise are becoming increasingly vital to our country’s ability to compete in the modern reconfiguration we call global economics.

The March 23^rd FastCompany.com, after examining a number of related studies, provided a statistical path about how society’s message to women essentially changes their self-perception as life progresses. In the primary and secondary years of education and since 1992, girls take more science and math classes than boys, get higher grades in those classes and even test higher in IQ tests. If these early life trends have statistical significance, it has to be that females have an intellectual edge and innate abilities over their male counterparts in these logical and complex areas of intellectual pursuit. But we typically envision scientists, mathematicians and engineers as men not women, and in fact, in a room full of 25 trained and practicing engineers, only three of them will be women. And when I say “we,” that pronoun most definitely includes how women feel about themselves.

While 29% of male college freshmen indicated a preference for a major in one of the above job categories, only 15% of female freshman suggest that this would be their choice. Even when women graduate with degrees in these fields, according to FastCompany.com, only 20% actually use their specialized degrees in their chosen careers. Women with these degrees are more likely move into financial or consulting work (where there is much less of a social stigma against women), leaving the hard science and engineering to men. At time when we desperately need that level of expertise for national survival, we need to take a hard look at this anomaly and understand exactly what it means and where this negativity came from.

The key transition in negative self-perception in women seems to manifest itself during the harsh years of puberty, where girls discover a need to be attractive, and perhaps where being a science whiz doesn’t fit that paradigm. The numbers seem to confirm that theory. While 72% of girls feel confident about themselves in the sixth grade, by the 10^th grade, that statistic drops to a sad 55%, a phenomenon that does not track for boys.

But that terrible statistic is nothing compared to looking at two test results, reported by FastCompany.com: the first, a standardized academic test, produced a 20% lower score for girls in these delicate years (and no change for boys), when they were asked to identify their genders on the test versus when that question was not asked. Wow! And on another self-assessment test, that same disparate result occurred in girls (and not boys) when they were informed before the test that males were better as this task than girls. What are we doing to ourselves? Why can’t a sophisticated and modern society get over sexual biases on job pursuits? Do nurses have to be women? Secretaries? We know the statistics in these latter career choices heavily favor women, but in a world where we are supposed to rise against such gender assumptions, it seems that society refuses to change the message we are sending to our daughters and sisters, and except for a brave few, our daughters and sisters are buying into that view of the world.

While theoretically, American colleges and universities graduate enough students in these critical fields, the number of engineering, scientific and mathematical jobs that go begging at any time in the current economy remains in the hundreds of thousands. If the women who trained for such careers actually felt good enough about themselves to work in them, think of how much more competitive the United States could be. Can we afford to let obsolete stereotypes tarnish our future? Think about this one for a second to see whether you have this bias as well. Picture a hot, really hot, sexy woman… who is a mechanical engineer (the lowest category in number of women). If you have trouble with this vision, you are part of the problem! And think of how confident she would have to be to live in that world.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we need to wake up before stupid simplistic slogan-directed solutions and ancient stereotypes take us so low that we simply cannot recover or compete in a modern world.