Is it possible that greater freedom leads to greater career-based sex divergences, as women seize opportunities to chose paths that align more with their interests?
New research suggests that in countries where women have more economic freedom to pursue their preferred careers, they’re less likely to study in STEM fields.
A study published last week in Psychological Science, authored by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary, posited that “life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects.”
In other words, women in countries with less gender equality are more likely to engage with STEM subjects as a means of putting themselves in a better financial situation.
Summarizing their research, Stoet and Geary said they found “girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled.”
Breaking down the research in The Atlantic, Olga Khazan noted, “the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries.”
The researchers, according to Khazan, “posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at.” And it turns out that often isn’t STEM.
There’s a longstanding argument advanced by women’s advocates that deep-rooted social conditioning explains the dearth of females in STEM, sprouting campaigns to encourage their participation in those fields. And it’s not easy to disentangle the variable of social pressures, but it’s also possible that most women just prefer not to study STEM fields, even in countries like the United States, where they receive much encouragement to do so from a young age, and where gender stereotypes are aggressively challenged. (This is a good read on persistent gender disparities in Sweden, by the way.)
That’s not at all to suggest women should no longer be encouraged to study STEM — it’s never easy for the women who have the aptitude and interest in a male-dominated field to pursue it, and such support is surely helpful. But if it’s true that women are more likely to choose against STEM if they have more equality and more freedom to choose, then advocates for their cause should perhaps consider accepting those preferences rather than seeking to modify them on a large scale.
