To the Science and Math Teachers,

Why are your male students over-represented in STEM? Do you ever wonder why you

female students work harder, while your male students are goofing off? Why can’t you fix this?

Dear teacher, this is due to the nature of the science itself. A long, long time ago, when

Pythagoras and Newton (and oh so many others) came up with our science and math systems,

women were not in the “room where it happened”. Sandra Harding, a feminist theorist focusing

on women in science explained a theory on why women are not in STEM in the same rates as

men. She theorized that since women were not involved in the creation of science, it remains

biased towards men on this fundamental level. Everyone’s viewpoints are needed to create an

equal field, since some viewpoints will have information that others will not. Now hope is not

lost for the women in your classes, but a lot more work than just painting STEM pink will be

required. Make STEM accessible to women by any means required, but also change STEM at a

more fundamental level to be inclusive of everyone.

A major factor in the accessibility of STEM is the sheer rigor required of these classes.

Now you can’t make your fields any easier, but you can understand that your female students

may not be used to this level of rigor. From the article “Removing Barriers” a student talks about

how if they missed a day a school, they freaked out about how they were going to fall behind,

and then fail entirely. Support your female students. Tell them that they are doing well. Tell your

male students that they are doing well. Let them know how they can improve. I want to bring up

a specific field here, Computer Science. Being in an entry level Computer Science class with a

female professor, I will be the first to tell you that so many of the men in there think they are

programming gods. Please, bring your female students up. From another article entitled

“Anatomy of an Enduring Gender Gap”, we see that “Men also enter college with higher levels
of confidence in their computing abilities compared with women; in fact, even men not intending

to major in the field exhibit higher computing confidence than women who plan to major in

computer science” (Anatomy) For so many of these students, these entry level classes are

formality, but for so many others this is their first contact with that STEM field. Encourage

collaboration and pair work, which can make the difference in helping people, primarily women,

who haven’t been coding since birth, “catch up”.

But here’s the main thing, women shouldn’t be the exception to the male only rule. This

culture around STEM is going to exist for a while, and we need to prepare women for it. There is

an inherit cause to this hatred, and men’s egos are not a small part of it. Address that STEM is

fundamentally biased, and talk about this in general groups. Inform men about this. Include them

in these discussions, and don’t have them behind the closed doors of women only clubs and

groups. STEM is not likely to change anytime soon, but working now to include more women

into the conversation will help tremendously.