What We’re Reading: Women and STEM education
From the Associated Press: Since the ratification of the 19th Amendment nearly a century ago, women have broken numerous societal barriers and are leveling the occupational playing field in areas that were once considered “male professions,” including law and medicine.
Our current economic environment has hurt many job sectors and forced companies to lay off workers. Senator Coons and many others agree that, in order to improve our economy and ensure its future success, we must invest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, which has always been at the heart of American innovation.
Women are currently still lagging behind men in earning higher degrees in the profitable STEM fields. Fortunately, women are making steady strides, thanks, in part, to an increased push by secondary education teachers to encourage girls to pursue careers in these fields.
With two-thirds of all undergraduate degrees and 60 percent of master's degrees now going to women, many believe it's only a matter of time before that trend influences the upper echelons of the STEM fields.
Already, statistics from the Council of Graduate Schools show that women, overall, earned slightly more than half of the doctorates handed out in all disciplines in the United States in 2009 and 2010. When it comes to the STEM fields, women have been most successful in medicine and biology – and least successful in engineering, math and computer science.
But experts hope that, too, will change. A recent report from the American Association of University Women notes that, 30 years ago, the ratio of seventh- and eighth-grade boys who scored more than 700 on the SAT math exam, compared with girls, was 13 to 1. Now it's 3 to 1.