STEM WOMEN BY THE NUMBERS
WOMEN IN THE STEM WORKFORCE
In 2011, the U.S. Department of Commerce released a report on Women in STEM and found that though women make up roughly half the total workforce in the US, they hold only 24% of STEM jobs in 2009. This number did not change since a similar report in 2000. The study noted that women who held a STEM degree was less likely to stay in STEM for employment compared to men with a STEM degree.
In the workforce, the report found that while the pay gap between men and women were smaller in STEM fields than women in non-STEM fields, the authors of the report found that women in STEM earn on average $0.86 for every dollar a man in STEM earns.
The authors of the report found that if they broke the STEM workforce down by field, the distribution of those in STEM subfields differed between the genders. The most significant difference they found was that a very large proportion of STEM women were in the physical and life sciences compared to their male counterparts. In addition, engineering was a much less common choice of field for women compared to men.
Source: Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation, Department of Commerce, 2011
Source: Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation, Department of Commerce, 2011
Source: Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation
PRE-COLLEGE GIRLS
The preceding statistics and figures are not engendered out of isolation. Though our site is focused on the college level, we take a brief look at the pre-university level. The National Science Board (NSB) released the Science & Engineering Indicators report in 2016, in which they found that at the kindergarten level, boys and girls are equally adept at math. In fact, other social factors were more likely to cause disparities between groups of students, such as family income, racial or ethnic background, and parents’ highest degrees. Another report indicated that there is no measurable difference between male and female students in fourth- and eighth-grade over the course of 13 years (1990-2003).
The NSB finding seemed to hold for 15-year-old students, though there was a very small, statistically significant discrepancy between male and female students’ algebraic ability at the highest level of achievement. However, when comparing the highest-level math course enrollment at the grade 11, girls are enrolled at a higher rate than boys, with 71.2% of all girls enrolled in Algebra 2 or higher vs 66.7% of all boys. Girls were also enrolled in science classes at a slightly higher percentage than boys with 81.3% of all girls enrolled in a science class and 78.9% of all boys enrolled. A very small percentage of these 11th grade students took either an engineering class (2%) or a computer science class (6%). Here, the report found some gender disparities: 3% of male students took an engineering course, contrasted with 1% of female students, while for computer science classes 7% of Grade 11 boys and 4% of Grade 11 girls took a computer science class. Indeed, the latter statistic is mirrored in the AP computer science A test, where it was found that only 19% of the test takers were female.
If you are interested in reading more about pre-college girls in STEM please, go here for additional resources.
WOMEN IN COLLEGE
The trend discussed above continues at the undergraduate level. While women receive roughly half of all science and engineering bachelor degrees (50.3%), they are underrepresented in fields such as computer science (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%), and mathematics (43.1%).
The American Association of University Women (AAUW) paints a different picture in their Why So Few?: Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics report in 2010, claiming that first-year college women are significantly less likely than men to declare a STEM major. The discrepancy with the National Girls Collaborative Project figures is due to the subfields that the former includes under the STEM umbrella. (Some organizations will include social sciences under the science and engineering umbrella.) They are in agreement on statistics based on specific subfields such as computer science, engineering, physical sciences, and mathematics.
According to the STEM Attrition: College Students’ Paths Into and Out of STEM Fields report released by the Department of Education in 2013, of students who left a STEM bachelor degree program, women were more likely to switch their major to a non-STEM major than to drop out of college than men. The report found that for women pursuing an associate’s degree, they were more likely to switch out of STEM fields (43%) than men (29%).
The National Science Board found that between 2000 and 2013 the proportion of women who earned science and engineering bachelor’s degrees relative to all degrees remained constant, however, the percentage of women who earned bachelor degrees in computer science, math, physics, engineering, and economics declined.
If we delve into engineering, including computer science (when a computer science major is offered as part of the engineering school), we see that the proportion of women who are enrolled in a particular engineering major varies by engineering field. The following chart is found in the Engineering by the Numbers report released by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) in 2015. Environmental engineering reached gender parity with 49.7% of bachelor degrees awarded going to women. Biomedical engineering is also above average in terms of female to male graduates in 2015.
Overall, the report found that of all undergraduates matriculated in an engineering program, 21.4% were women. Similarly, 24.1% and 26.1% of students in master’s and doctoral degree programs were women. The proportion of women who have earned an undergraduate degree in engineering has remained roughly the same between 2006 and 2015. In 2015, 19.9% of bachelor degrees, 25.2% of masters’ degrees, 26.1% of doctoral degrees went to women.
Source: Why So Few?: Women in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, 2013, AAUW
Source: Society of Women Engineers
Source: Society of Women Engineers
Source: Engineering by the Numbers, 2015, ASEE
Source: Engineering By the Numbers, 2015, ASEE
POST-COLLEGE: ACADEMIA
In the Science & Engineering Indicators Report in 2016, the National Science Board found that while graduate enrollment grew in most STEM fields, particularly in engineering, and biological and social sciences, women continued to enter graduate programs at low rates in certain fields. That is, women were underrepresented in engineering (24%), computer science (26%), physical sciences (33%), and economics (37%).
A well-known phenomenon known as “the leaky pipeline” wherein women drop out of STEM fields at higher proportion than their male counterparts at every stage post-college, as depicted by the graphic below. Research is still being done in this area to find what strategies would be most helpful in retaining women.
CONCLUSION
While women are underrepresented in STEM fields, the proportion of women varies by subfield. The trend seems to begin at the beginning of or before college, especially for fields that are typically dominated by men. Furthermore, efforts can be made throughout 2- and 4-year degree programs to retain women. These research-based efforts are described in the following pages.
Learn more about how women become underrepresented in STEM.
Learn more about what you can do in the classroom.