While I still can’t fully grasp the inequalities I will face in my career in STEM, I’ve acknowledged the mindset and identity I will have to craft in the face of the barriers to come. Instead of being able to read about these events in my history books, I am still part of generations of working women striving for workplace equality. Though I can take my voting rights or my higher education for granted thanks to (the decades of protest resulting in the ratification of) the 19th Amendment and women’s college education finally opening up in the 19th century, my working age will be dominated by the movements and struggles to create an equal world for women in STEM. Yet, despite the discrimination and lesser prospects I anticipate during my lifetime, I’m hopeful for better futures for women in later generations entering the STEM field.
Progress toward decreasing the gender gap has stagnated over the past few decades. But it’s hard to understand why this stagnation remains — particularly when statistics, surveys and studies continue to show that gender diversity increases innovation, pushes economic growth and leads to a more inclusive society overall. Since beginning this mini-series on the gender disparity in STEM, I received an email from Nita Singh Kaushal ’03, founder and CEO of Miss CEO and lecturer at Stanford School of Engineering. When she read earlier articles from the series, she told me that the experiences I described made her feel like “she was reading her own personal journey as an [electrical engineering] grad navigating the tech industry” and that the content would be “not out of place if the articles had been published in the 1960s.”
Women earn only 83% of equivalent male full-time workers’ salaries — meaning that women need to work an extra 44 days to achieve the same yearly salary as men. But closing the gender gap doesn’t benefit women only. Increasing the number of women employed in STEM fields could accelerate U.S. GDP growth by boosting women’s cumulative earnings by $299 billion and adding roughly $5.87 trillion to the global stock market within 10 years. This economic growth, however, isn’t due to increased labor force participation alone. Women tend to invest a larger proportion of their household income toward their children’s education than men; they’re also 14% more likely to participate in job-related savings plans.
Continue reading: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/02/14/opinion-a-better-future-for-her-in-stem/
Progress toward decreasing the gender gap has stagnated over the past few decades. But it’s hard to understand why this stagnation remains — particularly when statistics, surveys and studies continue to show that gender diversity increases innovation, pushes economic growth and leads to a more inclusive society overall. Since beginning this mini-series on the gender disparity in STEM, I received an email from Nita Singh Kaushal ’03, founder and CEO of Miss CEO and lecturer at Stanford School of Engineering. When she read earlier articles from the series, she told me that the experiences I described made her feel like “she was reading her own personal journey as an [electrical engineering] grad navigating the tech industry” and that the content would be “not out of place if the articles had been published in the 1960s.”
Women earn only 83% of equivalent male full-time workers’ salaries — meaning that women need to work an extra 44 days to achieve the same yearly salary as men. But closing the gender gap doesn’t benefit women only. Increasing the number of women employed in STEM fields could accelerate U.S. GDP growth by boosting women’s cumulative earnings by $299 billion and adding roughly $5.87 trillion to the global stock market within 10 years. This economic growth, however, isn’t due to increased labor force participation alone. Women tend to invest a larger proportion of their household income toward their children’s education than men; they’re also 14% more likely to participate in job-related savings plans.
Continue reading: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/02/14/opinion-a-better-future-for-her-in-stem/
