Study: half of black and Latina women scientists have been mistaken for admin or custodial staff

Controls???

  • Men?
  • Women in non-STEM fields?
  • Regression analysis to control for confounding factors?

I believe with all my heart the women face more bias and adversity than men in STEM fields. But I find the lack of proper controls and rigor in the study to be totally annoying.

This piece tries to pigeon hole why women drop out, but I think they missed a few reasons I've witnessed many times now. 1) Women seem to tend to "drift" more into the STEM fields, not receiving the guidance and direction of many of their male counterparts. It could be argued to be a lack of specific mentorship, but the issue might be a deeper sociological problem. Many women seem to know they want some kind of post-college education, but they seem more likely to wander into fields they don't know much about, and they seem more likely than men to make a choice of field that's simply a poor fit for their personal style. And then: 2) There's a fair number of women I've met who've gone to graduate school basically because they aren't married yet. This particular sub-set are usually pretty obvious because they show little to no interest in science anywhere in the process. And they drop out of the field so soon after grad school (particularly as soon as they were married) that it becomes pretty clear that this was their plan the entire time. They basically use graduate school as a professional/personal holding pattern for a few years. I'm not sure what to do about this issue. It's a non-significant number of women, from what I can tell based on personal experience, but it's not a very gender-flattering thing to talk about, so I can see why people kind of what to ignore it. I think it might be a big factor in some of these studies though. I suspect it's a result of the fact that there's a deficient in qualified, serious female applicants to many professional schools. And so professional school, desperate to try to do the right thing, wind up taking any qualified candidate they can find, even if they strongly suspect their professional interest is, shall we say, less than serious.

/r/TwoXChromosomes Thread Link - vox.com