Sexism in STEM?

A Look at the Current Gender-Related Concerns Surrounding STEM

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Kai Dennett, PaperClip Staff/Writer

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, what do all of these things have in common? They are all part of STEM. For those of you who don’t know what STEM is, STEM is a field dedicated to the four disciplines that were previously listed. Many high profile people are hoping on the STEM bandwagon. According to Forbes, President Obama claimed that in 2015 the U.S. government pledged over $250 million dollars to STEM funding. In the past, the STEM field has been thought to be sexist against females but a study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in The United States (PNAS) shows that instead, STEM has recently been sexist against males.

A recent study from PNAS showed that women are being hired at a two to one ratio over men regardless of the competency they have for the job. Researchers went to 371 STEM colleges and universities while surveying hiring tendencies. Subjects would be shown two applicants both equal in competency, the only difference being that one was male and the other was female. These tests showed that subjects would hire the female over the male two times for every time the male was hired.

I met with Elisa Dhanger a junior at Portsmouth High School ( PHS ), an active member of the STEM community, mentor of a junior robotics team, and member of PHS’s own robotics team. I asked her if she had ever heard about this sexism issue: “I have heard ‘Oh well you’ll get into college easier because you are a woman going into a field where there are marginally less women’ or ‘You’ll get in easier because they have to fill a quota’ and that really annoys me with the fact of having to fit a quota because that is where a lot of problems are stemming from.”

After I asked her about what her general thoughts about the problem: “It can be really difficult to find ways to combat sexism that doesn’t end up causing you to lose skill or all these things because all of these statistics and colleges trying to combat that. They are trying to combat the fact that for decades now women have never been in STEM at all.”