The Gender STEM Paradox, and Its Implications for Future Technology

A few months ago, one of my friends Lukas wrote a nice post about the STEM gender paradox. The paradox is this: in countries where women are relatively empowered, women are less likely to choose math and science subjects and are consequently less likely to enter math and science professions. For example, Finland and Norway score the highest in the Global Gender Gap Index (which measures things like female economic participation and political empowerment), yet have one of the lowest proportions of female STEM graduates in the world (~20%). Conversely, in Algeria – a country with a notoriously bad track record for women’s rights – over 40% of STEM graduates are female. Figure 1, from a paper by Stoet and Geary (2018), illustrates this more comprehensively:

Figure 1: The STEM Gender Equality Paradox 

Source: Stoet and Geary (2018)

Why is this?

One touted explanation for this paradox is that men have a natural aptitude for science, and this absolute advantage leads to their disproportionate representation in more gender-equal (and developed) countries. In less developed countries, this natural advantage may be masked by information asymmetries in University admissions and greater inequalities in education access from the outset. Nonetheless, as countries develop, these imperfections slowly recede and a natural gender bias re-emerges.

This idea, sadly, has some precedent. In January 2005 Lawrence Summers – Economics Nobel laureate and then-President of Harvard University – received heavy backlash after claiming that lack of female representation in STEM could be caused by ‘natural differences in high-end aptitude’ between the genders, prompting a media storm and his eventual resignation two months later.

Needless to say, there is very little evidence to support Summers’ view. In looking at numeracy test scores across 67 countries and regions, the Stoet and Geary paper found that girls performed just as well or better than boys in most countries, and in almost all countries girls would have been capable of college-level STEM classes had they enrolled in them.

A better explanation, put forward by the authors themselves, suggests that men have a comparative but not absolute advantage in STEM subjects. In all countries except Romania and Lebanon, the researchers find that boys’ best subject was science and girls’ best subject was reading. That is, girls performed just as well or better in science – they just happened to perform even better in reading.

Moreover – and here’s the kicker – the researchers find that the more gender-equal the country, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject. This completes the explanation: as countries get more gender-equal, boys’ comparative advantage in STEM increases, widening the STEM gender-gap at University.

Stoet and Geary also put forward another explanation that invokes life quality pressures. In less developed and more gender-unequal countries, women face greater economic and life risks. As a result, those fortunate enough to obtain a tertiary education are more likely to choose STEM subjects, under the (generally well-founded) belief that these are more likely to lead to a secure and lucrative job.

The authors then argue that these financial considerations become less burdensome as countries develop, giving people greater freedom to pursue their true interests. One of their findings supports this: even when girls’ ability in science in school equalled or excelled that of boys, they nevertheless tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. This explanation has a strangely uplifting implication: it’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science; it’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.

Outstanding Issues

I find both these explanations unsatisfying. At its heart, the life pressures explanation rests on the idea that men are naturally more interested in science than women – an idea with very little intuitive appeal. Indeed, by invoking the idea of an ‘interest gap’, all we seem to do is pass the buck on to another, no-less tractable problem.

Likewise, the comparative advantage explanation relies on the idea that greater gender-equality leads to more pronounced relative advantages for women in non-STEM fields. Again, there is no obviously intuitive explanation for why this might be the case.

More fundamentally, though, both explanations seem to overlook a large elephant in the room. In emphasising a benign sorting process based on interest or comparative skill, both explanations conveniently side-step the numerous structural barriers that prospective female STEM students face in countries we otherwise consider relatively gender-equal. These barriers are extremely well-documented: in recounting her experience as a woman in STEM, Ellen Pao describes the accumulation of micro-aggressions as like “a thousand tiny papercuts”. Given the pervasiveness of these barriers, any explanation which stays silent on them seems patently incomplete.

Why Does This Matter?

If progress towards economic growth and gender-equality comes at the expense of equal STEM gender-ratios, this has a number of unsettling implications. First, gender STEM ratios today are likely to heavily influence the gender composition of tech companies tomorrow. This matters because – as recent research shows – algorithms routinely inherit the biases of their creators. I like the example Lukas gives: many ‘smart’ heating systems take the metabolic heartrate of a middle-aged man as the default, making the entire algorithm geared towards maximising the experience of this demographic. If more women were included in the design process, this unfair gender-bias may have been noted earlier and rectified.

We can push the envelope further. As Yuval Harari and Jamie Susskind recently argue, the commodification of personal data is likely to progressively shift power towards tech companies away from traditional sources of authority, like nation states and religious institutions. The future leaders of these companies are likely being educated today – in STEM lecture halls marked by a conspicuous absence of females. If we care about the continuation of patriarchal power structures, we need to take the STEM paradox seriously.

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References

• Lukas’ blog post: https://lukasfreund.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/gender-equality-and-stem-gaps/
• Stoet and Geary (2018), ‘The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education’

For a great discussion of the implications of tech on the future of politics and power, I would recommend:

• Harari (2015), ‘Homo Deus’
• Susskind (2018), ‘Future Politics’