Technology Diary: Affirmative Action and STEM

Posted by on Oct 31, 2013 in Technology Diary | One Comment

As someone who is fascinated and a student of race relations, I often relate things in this course back to parallels or the intersectionality  of the issues that  people of color face. One hot topic affecting people our age (especially as of late) is affirmative action. Obviously for a general college admissions policy, women are not considered an underrepresented class, as they greatly outnumber men enrolled in school. But when one looks at specific degree programs or specific fields of study, such as science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM), women are severely underrepresented.

To my knowledge, there are no major explicit affirmative action policies to place women in STEM fields both in school and in the workplace, however off-record policies probably do exist (a woman that is applying to a prestigious engineering school that has an almost identical academic record to her  male counterpart, I would argue, has a higher chance of getting in). This then begs the question of why don’t these policies exist, and why aren’t we having the debate?

After doing some research I found some authors debating the topic but nothing really substantive. As a strong advocate of race based affirmative action, I think that gender based affirmative action is absolutely justified and needed in STEM fields. If and when this does happen, it might be interesting to see how the debate will be framed and if gender based affirmative action will be met with the same amount of resistance as raced based.

Here are the articles I found on the issue:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-kantor/troubleshooting-girls-in-_b_3623630.html

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/30/breaking-the-bias-against-women-in-science

1 Comment

  1. Myrna Hanna
    October 31, 2013

    Jonah, I totally agree with this. I’m an engineering major at city college and even there it’s crazy how few girls there are in that department. I looked into this as well and I agree that their argument isn’t very solid. So many papers have been published in science journals regarding this topic and how women are automatically assumed to be less competent, because it’s a typically male dominated field. I mean if it is statistically proven that women don’t pursue careers in STEM fields because they’re genuinely not interested, then having a form of affirmative action for them wouldn’t really change much. On the other hand, if there’s even a tiny bit of reluctance to enter the field because they don’t expect to receive equal opportunities then this affirmative action would help in that it broadens their spectrum, allowing women to get an equal try at anything they want to pursue. My issue though is that although this form of affirmative action gets the women into the prestigious engineering school, fellowship, etc. how is it going to change the field itself when the women aren’t hired over men for certain jobs or are given the lower paying positions?

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