Encourage women to join STEM by training men

President Obama sees the urgency in encouraging women to pursue STEM fields, but money alone won’t accomplish that task.

Last week, President Obama announced his initiative to increase computer science instruction in classrooms to get more women and minorities in science and technology fields.

While this is a noble gesture, throwing money at schools to push women into fields like medicine, technology, engineering and computer science isn’t going to solve the problem. Women are entering male-dominated fields where men often reject or demean them in the hostile work environments bred by a culture of hypermasculinity.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women make up 47 percent of the U.S. workforce, but women make up only 16 percent of chemical engineers, 12 percent of civil engineers and 39 percent of chemists and material scientists. When you don’t see similar faces in the room, it’s hard to feel accepted.

Sapna Cheryan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington studies why girls in high school are significantly less likely than boys to sign up for a class in computer science, take the Advanced Placement exam in computer science or express interest in computer science as a career.

She found that cultural stereotypes about scientists strongly influenced young women’s desire to take classes in STEM fields. These stereotypes include computer scientists being young men whose genius is the result of genetics, not hard work. She also found that girls felt they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, or risk feeling unwelcome.

Cultural stereotypes about what a “scientist” looks like often follows both men and women into college and future careers. Eileen Pollack, a Yale graduate who studies Physics, described feeling “so much pressure to dress and act like a man” that she became extremely uncomfortable about her identity as a woman. Pollack describes her summer working as a programmer at a lab and having to listen to a “barrage of sexist teasing.”

Pollack may have graduated in the ’70s, but the statistics on women in STEM haven’t improved since her day. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. According to the American Association of University Women, women held 26 percent of computing jobs in 2013, while women held 35 percent of computing jobs in 1990.

You would assume with the concerted efforts to involve women in STEM, there would be an increase in the number of women in STEM fields. This disparity hints at a flaw that money can’t fix. We must change the system by training men to treat their female counterparts as equally qualified, professional coworkers.

Large companies have worked to promote STEM to women, such as Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, who offers unlimited maternity leave to employees. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, proudly endorses that women join STEM fields, telling girls to “be the nerd” and to devise their own inventions. While leadership and support are helpful in promoting certain initiatives like maternity leave, it isn’t enough.

In order to extinguish the culture surrounding women in STEM, we need to create environments that don’t shame women or make them feel unwelcome solely for being women. We need to dispel the cultural expectations that depict men in science and math roles and reshape what a scientist looks like.    

Men make the calls, and until men decide to make the call to treat women like colleagues of equal status, it doesn’t matter how large of a budget our government delegates to pushing women into STEM fields. Human resources departments need to establish better training against sexism, and bosses need to see claims of sexism as legitimate concerns, not empty complaints. Computer science professors should work to call out and curb the boys’ club in universities before it seeps deeper into the job market.

Leaders of companies need to incentivize working in technology or math by openly proclaiming their successful companies as welcoming to women. Our government should direct funding to training men in the workplace on how to treat female coworkers.

Getting women involved in science and technology starts with changing the culture within those fields.  By deflating the male-dominated culture that exists within STEM, we can truly foster an environment that encourages women to pursue their passion.