When I Told My Relatives That I’m An Engineering Major, They Basically Freaked Out And Nagged About

When I told my relatives that I’m an engineering major, they basically freaked out and nagged about how as a female, I shouldn’t pick something so “macho” and that I wouldn’t be able to handle the workload. The same thing happened to my female classmates.

More women in a STEM field leads people to label it as a 'soft science,' according to new research

When women make up more than 25% of graduate students in a discipline, men—and to a lesser extent women—become less interested in pursuing that discipline, and salaries tend to go down.

One factor that influences the use of the labels “soft science” or “hard science” is gender bias, according to recent research my colleagues and I conducted.

Women’s participation varies across STEM disciplines. While women have nearly reached gender parity in biomedical sciences, they still make up only about 18% of students receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science, for instance.

In a series of experiments, we varied the information study participants read about women’s representation in fields like chemistry, sociology and biomedical sciences. We then asked them to categorize these fields as either a “soft science” or a “hard science.”

Across studies, participants were consistently more likely to describe a discipline as a “soft science” when they’d been led to believe that proportionally more women worked in the field. Moreover, the “soft science” label led people to devalue these fields—describing them as less rigorous, less trustworthy and less deserving of federal research funding.

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