When a highly educated and successful biologist at a prestigious technological university wrote to Scientific Magazine for advice in dealing with her advisor’s southward-wandering eye, she never expected to be told to grin and bear it. Not only did the responding columnist do just this, but she also presented the argument that the biologist should be grateful that she is receiving attention from her advisor, even in such a derogatory way. As if women everywhere should just accept the fact that in order to get a male’s attention, they have to leave a few buttons open or hike up their hemline.
It would be easy to frown at this incident and blame the responding columnist. But the reality is, this mindset has become so prominent, especially in professional fields, that it seems ingrained in our culture.
Though women in virtually all professions face this degradation, it has become particularly apparent for women in STEM fields. Society tends to view STEM fields as inherently designed for men because of the extensive educational background required for success; until the past few decades, women simply did not have access to the same levels of academia that men did. But as women have broken away from the gender stereotypes that dominated society for so long, we now see an increase in the amount of women interested in STEM. From 1993 to 2013, the number of women working towards degrees in STEM nearly doubled, a statistic that would have been unimaginable thirty years ago.
Although we are starting to see a major shift of women toward STEM fields, society continues to struggle to accept it. Maybe it’s because pop culture has never given us a female role model in STEM: From Dr. Frankenstein to Bill Nye the Science Guy, nearly every cultural representation of a scientist has been male.
That’s not to say there haven’t been strong initiatives to promote STEM among women. The organization Girlstart and those like it work diligently to promote STEM education among girls from a very young age. With programs like this, maybe someday society will equate men and women in STEM and every other field. However, these initiatives are few and far between, and as a society we need to move past the place of needing outside help to give children equal educations and opportunities in every field.
Our efforts so far to get rid of workplace discrimination and strict adherence to gender roles have yet to implicate the true culprit: society. We like to scold public figures for grossly sexist comments, but we fail to look at what makes them think it is okay to speak that way.
Rather than highlighting and condemning specific incidents, we need to focus on the customs that forge these actions from a young age. By giving boys and girls equal education in all fields, we can encourage young people to pursue the life path that interests them the most, regardless of what past gender roles may have dictated.