Why We as Women are Not Getting Those Higher Positions (Radeva, Blog 1) – Well-behaved women rarely make (scientific) history

What makes women different than men? Is it because men can think quicker, make inferences faster, and connect data better? Or is it just a gender schema that we have used since the beginning of time that is now so ingrained in us? Since the beginning of time, we have had a viewpoint of men being the independent, strong people while women are the weaker, dependent person. Yet, in modern times, women have been able to achieve the same education and rights as men. So why are there less women in the science fields than men?

Virginia Valian offers some views on why this is seen nowadays. She starts out with how science differs from other fields, which is due to the fewer number of women in the field. Yet as I was reading her explanation, I wondered how come she did not include medicine and nursing in the science fields because I feel like these two fields fall under the science field. I thought it might be because nursing is dominated by females and the medicine field has adapted quicker to women, allowing more women to hold higher up positions in the field. These reasons could be why she thought to not include them under the science field since more women are dominating those 2 fields than the other science fields.

I also liked the discussion about incrementalist and entity theorists. I always thought that talent can grow if you put in enough effort and if people encouraged you to be the best you can ever be. I also think that it is not right how standardized tests have become the measurement of how good you can be at a subject, because what if you are not a good test taker? Or what if there are so many different standardized test that students have to take now that you just do mediocre on all of them instead of doing well on just a few standardized tests? I believe that the culture of having to take standardized tests has become too much in our society and that schools, colleges, and universities put too much emphasis on them. I also have personal experience with having difficultly on standardized tests. Whenever I took standardized tests, I didn’t do so well because I have test anxiety even though if you asked me the same questions in class, I would be able to explain it in depth. This is part of why I do not like the fact that students now don’t really learn the material so they can be more knowledgeable, but rather learn the material so they can pass standardized tests. I also do not understand how teachers do not believe students’ minds can be malleable because if you think about, teachers are there to help guide you in what you are learning. They are there to help you discover the new worlds of science, art, history, and more. By doing this, I do not see how a student’s mind cannot be malleable because he/she learns so much, that their “talent” in a class expands all the time. Overall, I believe that I would define myself as an incrementalist theorists because I believe that people can always learn more, causing their talent to increase. I also believe that each person brings something new to the table, rather than everyone thinking the same way.

In the next section of Valian’s essay, she talks about women in professional careers. She talks about how the encouragement and support that a woman gets while she is studying a subject can influence her decision to pursue a career in that subject. I also believe that how people support you when choosing a career path can influence you. For example, if you had little to no support from your teachers, family, or friends when trying to pursue a career in the sciences, then you would choose a different career in which those people would support you. I think that this greatly influences whether or not women go into the sciences because even though they might be taking more science and math classes and scoring higher in those classes than men in high school, they might not receive the same support in college, causing them to stop taking these classes. Yet, support can also help women go into the sciences. For example, I come from a family of doctors. For generations, there have been doctors in the family. This branch of support (my family) greatly encouraged and supported me in taking higher math and science classes and in choosing a science major. Due to my family being more open to science, this allowed me to get the support for such a major from the closest people to me, my family.

Valian also mentions gender schemas in the essay, which are “hypotheses that are used to interpret social events” (Fiske and Taylor, 1991) and are “similar to stereotypes” (Valian, 32). These gender schemas are part of the biggest hurdle that women have to overcome, such as schemas that say women cannot perform as well as men or that men are more competent than women. What is surprising in this section are the two experiments that Valian talks about. In the first experiment, the researches had both men and women evaluate employees. When the evaluators had information that showed that the women employees were as competent as the men employees, the evaluators still chose the men because they were “more likeable”. So even if the women workers were just as competent as the men, the gender schema of what women are supposed to do interfered and caused those competent women to be less likeable because they were so good at their job. This seems counter-intuitive since employers want competent people working for them. In the second experiment, the results were that men were preferred more than women for the same job, even if the women had more experience than the men. Both these experiments show that gender schemas still exist and that even women adhere to these stereotypes, which is surprising to me since I would think that women would support fellow women in the pursuit of higher positions and better jobs. I believe that these gender schemas come from inherent beliefs and susceptions of what women are supposed to do, even in this modern era.

Overall, I believe that people should adapt more incrementalist theorist’s views of what women students should be and what they should learn. I also believe that support and encouragement of women plays a big role in what women will later pursue in life. Lastly, I believe that the biggest hurdle to overcome for women in the science field would be the gender schemas that have become ingrained in human nature.

Works Cited:

Valian, Virginia. Women At the Top in Science- And Elsewhere. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2007. Print.

Olivia Taylor says:

August 29, 2015 at 2:22 am

I really liked your paragraph about how support and encouragement makes it easier and more probable that a person could secure a job in a specific field. This can help women achieve more in the sciences through encouragement from relatives or other close adults in the field, as you received! But on the other hand, this same encouragement could be the thing holding some women back from STEM. It is true that most women identify more closely with their mother than their father, and because of this they value what their mother models for them more highly. And mothers of this current generation of adults, aged from 30-50, were not taught that they had much chance for success in many of the STEM fields. Because of this they took more jobs in caretaking, liberal arts, and the humanities, and in turn modeled for their daughters what jobs were available to them. This somewhat poisonous cycle may be deterring women from aiming for jobs in the sciences. But if we fix the cycle and help families to encourage all talents and job opportunities for their daughters and sons, things will become far more equal!

Malena says:

August 29, 2015 at 8:16 pm

I agree with you about how being influenced by parents can lead to less women being involved in STEM majors, which leads to a detrimental cycle. From my sociology class, we would classify this kind of social behavior as social construction, which is a set of ideas or practices that humans create and uphold over time. The discouragement and interpretation of what women should be doing is a social construction since we thought of the ideas of what a women should and shouldn’t be doing since the beginning of time. And over time, we have upheld these restrictions on women up to even the modern ages. So I think that in order to fix the small amount of women in the STEM fields, we should tackle the problem of the social construction we have built surrounding females. By changing or removing the construction, we can then build new social constructions that better fit our time, and hopefully that will become an encouraging social construction that will help more women pursue what they wish to do, especially if that is a STEM major.