A MATTER OF CHOICE?

One of the best things about our so­ci­ety is that there is a real will­ing­ness to right his­tor­i­cal wrongs, if nec­es­sary with proac­tive mea­sures that would not be re­quired in an ideal world but that can be jus­ti­fied by the ur­gency of the need to rec­tify an im­bal­ance that may not only be un­fairly hold­ing back a cer­tain group of peo­ple but per­haps even so­ci­ety as a whole. How­ever, I sus­pect that at the same time this is also one of the worst things about our so­ci­ety. As the ex­pres­sion goes: “It’s com­pli­cated!”

An ex­am­ple of this is to be found in this month’s mag­a­zine. To co­in­cide with In­ter­na­tional Women’s Day on March 8, on pages 10 to 15 there is a se­ries of ar­ti­cles and in­ter­views that focus on the fact that, de­spite years of pro­mo­tion and ini­tia­tives, women re­main un­der­rep­re­sented in tech­ni­cal and sci­en­tific - known as STEM - sub­jects. In cer­tain tech­ni­cal fields, such as com­puter sci­ence or telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, fe­males do not even make up 20% of de­gree stu­dents.

It seems there are mul­ti­ple rea­sons for this and a num­ber of hy­pothe­ses have been put for­ward to ex­plain the deficit, from cul­tural pres­sures ex­erted on girls from an early age to young women being put off by the mas­culinised en­vi­ron­ments to be found in such sub­jects. I’ll leave it to you to read the fea­ture and make up your own mind.

Per­son­ally, I can’t help won­der­ing that it might just be the case that many girls and young women choose not to do these sub­jects. It is not that they are blocked or dis­cour­aged from doing these sub­jects so much as they sim­ply don’t fancy them and would pre­fer to in­vest their time, ef­forts and re­sources into al­ter­na­tive areas that they find more at­trac­tive.

To pick out two quotes from the ex­perts con­sulted in the fea­ture in this mag­a­zine, Jose­fina An­toni­juan, vice-rec­tor of so­cial re­spon­si­bil­ity and equal­ity at Cat­alo­nia’s Poly­tech­nic Uni­ver­sity, says “fe­male un­der­rep­re­sen­ta­tion is un­fair and must be re­versed”, while ed­u­ca­tional re­searcher Mireia Usart says “it is very dif­fi­cult to con­vince those [young women] who are not at all at­tracted to this [tech] world”.

This made me think of my daugh­ter, who is 19 and this year began study­ing fash­ion de­sign. She has al­ways been a cre­ative per­son with a strong artis­tic bent who en­joys mak­ing things, and so her de­ci­sion made a lot of sense. She says she loves the course and she spends a lot of her free time ei­ther draw­ing or on the sewing ma­chine. She may be study­ing a sub­ject tra­di­tion­ally as­so­ci­ated with fe­males but there is no sug­ges­tion that she was cul­tur­ally pres­sured into it. Nor was she dis­cour­aged from choos­ing a more tech­ni­cal or sci­en­tific sub­ject, rather those areas do not seem to in­ter­est her much and I have no doubt that she would be mis­er­able if she was forced to do com­puter pro­gram­ming, for ex­am­ple.

It’s not that there aren’t women in STEM, and the num­bers are ris­ing all the time, al­beit slowly. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if at some point in the fu­ture par­ity be­tween the gen­ders in this area may be reached, it just might take longer than some peo­ple would like. Surely the key is not to force young women into these sub­jects but rather to clear the way for them to study what­ever they like, whether sci­en­tific or not? The ar­gu­ment about the neg­a­tive ef­fects of cul­tural pres­sure on women , or men for that mat­ter, can work both ways.

Opin­ion