There are not enough women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics jobs, the White House tells us. And they, along with feminists, assure us that sexism is one reason why women don’t enter STEM fields.
“There are many possible factors contributing to the discrepancy of women and men in STEM jobs, including: a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields,” a U.S. Department of Commerce study claims.
Women need to choose STEM jobs, the White House assures us, because they will earn more and the so-called gender wage gap is smaller.
But what’s keeping women out? Is it that some male scientists wear tacky shirts?
This week, instead of cheering for the women involved in the European Space Agency’s comet landing, feminists erupted in outrage over a tacky bowling shirt worn by one of the scientists involved in the project.
If you’re not familiar with the story, it goes like this: The ESA landed a spacecraft on a comet, and just as the Internet and every person fascinated by space and the unexplored cheered, feminists jumped in to ruin the day.
Matt Taylor is just your average comet scientist. He’s brilliant, obviously, he likes food, breathing and being apart of things most people can’t even imagine – like landing a spacecraft on a comet. He also likes comic books.
For his birthday, Taylor’s self-described close pal Elly Prizeman – a woman – made him a shirt featuring scantily-clad women in a comic-book style. He was wearing that shirt the day the spacecraft landed on the comet.
Astrophysicist Katie Mack wrote on Twitter that the shirt wasn’t “appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM.”
The backlash was so fast and so loud that Taylor offered a tearful apology for wearing a shirt that his friend made him for his birthday.
And the feminists cheered.
What they didn’t realize is that their outrage could really damage women looking to enter STEM fields, as University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds noted in USA Today.
“It seems to me that if you care about women in STEM, maybe you shouldn’t want to communicate the notion that they’re so delicate that they can’t handle pictures of comic-book women,” Reynolds wrote.
That sentiment was echoed by at least one female space professional, who tweeted: “”Don’t these women and their male cohorts understand that *they* are doing the damage to what/whom they claim to defend!?”
Thinking about the whole situation another way, women pushing for more women in STEM decided to focus on clothing instead of science, something they routinely call out men for.
