Respecting both is key to bringing girls into the sciences.

By Susan E. Matthews

When deciding what college to attend, I wouldn’t even consider an all-girls school, despite my mother’s encouragement. I refused to believe that my life had been even a little bit different because I was a girl — though years later as a woman in science, I’ve rethought that assumption.

I knew that my mom had to do gymnastics while the boys in her elementary PE classes had played basketball. I also knew that in her first job, as a computer scientist for a small company, she had been asked to answer the phones when they were between secretaries because she was the only woman in the office. As far as I was concerned, this sort of discrimination was a thing of the past, not something affecting my life. I felt like I was in the clear.

But we are not quite in the clear. We may value girls more, but there are still gaps. One of those gaps exists in the sciences — itself an area that we do not value nearly enough. While I did go to a co-ed school, studied science, and worked in a biogeochemistry lab, I’m in the minority. In 2009–2010, women represented less than a quarter of all students in secondary or post-secondary education studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) topics nationally. This disparity has led to great debate over the reasons for the discrepancy. In early February, in a piece addressing the validity of recent findings, two researchers wrote in the Guardian that to resolve this issue, we could continue to insist that young women make up the difference themselves, by finding their own mentors and paving their own way. But beyond individual industry, we can change our institutions. As Chris Chambers and Kate Clancy argue:

The broader societal constraints that lead so few girls to consider themselves “science people” by middle school derive not from whether we push them into science, but what we value in girls as a culture Continue reading →