I am at workshop this week, and had an interesting sideline conversation today. We both agreed that there was culture-induce inequality of the genders in STEM fields, but the fellow I was talking with disagreed with with me on how to fix things.
I was saying if a department had zero female faculty, then they should make an effort to encourage women to apply. I was not saying that they should be given less stringent requirements or that a lesser qualified female candidate should be preferred over a more qualified male, but that they should simply make an effort to seek out qualified candidates.
He was arguing that we should address the cultural influence not at the faculty-hiring level, but at the elementary school level. While I think that there is much that can be done in elementary school, this would never be enough. A girl could be taught to love math in the third grade, but by the time she made it through the gauntlet of media aimed at middle schoolers, there is very little chance that the elementary school efforts could outweigh other influences.
If we're going to make an effort to level the playing field for men and women in STEM, it needs to happen at every level. We cannot focus only on faculty or other employment nor can we only dedicate our efforts to primary or secondary education. The efforts go hand in hand: without role models, girls may think that certain jobs are unappealing. Without efforts in schooling, there will not be a population of women with the interests and tools to pursue STEM fields.
But these aren't the only areas that influence girls' choices to pursue math-y fields or not. TV shows, movies, toys, magazines, advertisements, parenting choices, religious communities, political parties, news, and books all shape the way we think about ourselves, how we contextualize our existence in the world.
Any time a mother says to a daughter: I'm not good at math, ask your dad, the daughter's expectations are adjusted; it's now okay not to be good at math. Worse yet, she's taught that it's okay to deprecate yourself, which lowers self-esteem and propagates negative cultural influences. Now, it's totally legitimate for many women not to enjoy math or not be skilled at it, but for the sake of your daughter, your own skill doesn't need to enter into it. Instead, a mother could say: Oh! This is important, but it's your dad's responsibility to help with math homework.
Since the influences are so broad and diverse, what can we possibly do? When do we intervene and how much? In most cases, I don't think we need a broad campaign; we just do what we can where we can. If we're on a hiring committee, we seek out qualified candidates. If we're an elementary school teacher, we make sure to present the material without gender (or other) biases, and teach all students that they can excel. If we're a manager, we assign tasks simply based on the ability to perform them. This applies to all areas of bias, be they gender, ethnic, orientation, religious, or something else.
The idea here is that popular culture and media pushes individuals in a certain direction: women need to conform to certain standards of beauty, families need to be constructed a certain way, boys should be good at math and sports. When we see something that feels wrong, we just need to push back in whatever ways we can and hope that our efforts offset the influences we deem to be negative.
The frustrating thing about the conversation today was what felt like a willful misunderstanding. He asked things like, So do you think that a certain percentage of the faculty in a department should be female? No; it's silly to set numbers in advance. If things are grossly unbalanced (like the specific case I was actually talking about with zero female faculty in a reasonably large department), then the department should make an effort to hire women. He then objected that you shouldn't fight an inequality with the inequality of hiring under-qualified women. What bothers me about this argument is that it assumes there aren't qualified women; there are, you just have to look a little harder for them, which is what I was proposing. He then shifted the focus to contrasting elementary school initiatives vs. faculty hiring efforts and eventually even went so far as to compare recruiting females to recruiting people with blue eyes in an effort to question what constitutes diversity.
I think it's common for men to feel threatened by the idea that women should be more actively recruited. It's natural: it implies that they're less desirable, which isn't the case. The reason I bring this up isn't to shame a particular person (I intentionally included no names), but to highlight an area that can be improved. I don't think everyone should agree with me, and I do think that he's right in some ways: women are just people and should be treated as such. The problem is, that until they're actually treated as people in all facets, we can't pretend that everything will just be okay if teach elementary kids to like math and science. There are so many factors at play that we need to make an effort to change culture; it doesn't happen naturally.
And in the effort to change to that culture, I think we need to be a little more careful about they way we converse about these issues. I know I get defensive and other people do too; I think this is the first thing that can change, because as soon as it does, we can stop talking past each other and actually get some stuff done.
