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why are there fewer women in Stem careers even in more gender-neutral countries?

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why are there fewer women in Stem careers even in more gender-neutral countries?

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It seems that gender gap in Stem careers should disappear in more gender-neutral countries. But actually there are still more men in Stem-related careers than women, even in gender-neutral Sweden.
The reason of it might be "social belongingness". Teenagers felt they would fit in better in subjects that had more of their own gender. But another important factor was “self-efficacy”: the belief that one can succeed in a domain. We to approach domains where we feel we are competent and avoid those in which we do not.

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For one thing, the way we categorize gender is far too facile, explained Alice Dreger, a leading historian of science and medicine, in a 2010 TED Talk. “We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn’t draw the line for us between male and female… we actually draw that line on nature,” she told the audience. “What we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought.”
http://time.com/3672297/future-gender-norms/

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To attract more girls to study Stem subjects at university and enter Stem careers, we need to tackle the stereotypes they are exposed to and encourage them.

Speakezee, a platform that connects academics with non-academic audiences, is working with the Institute of Physics and the Girls’ School Association to send young female graduate Stem students into schools to talk to and inspire young teenage girls to consider pursuing Stem topics at A-level.

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Traditional gender roles and stereotypes: How they can affect children and young people

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Traditional gender roles and stereotypes: How they can affect children and young people

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To get an idea of the expectations that young people have of gender roles and stereotypes, our researchers asked children about the kind of attributes they thought their friends would say is the most important.

For both boys and girls, ‘being good-looking’ is the standout characteristic. For girls, this is particularly notable at a huge 44%, with ‘being caring’ the next most common at 30%.

When it comes to boys, ‘being good-looking’ gained 32% of selections, with ‘being funny’ a close second at 23%.

Almost 1 in 8 of the young people interviewed said that ‘being tough’ is important in boys, compared to just 3% in girls.
https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/news-and-blogs/our-blog/traditional-gender-roles-and-stereotypes-how-it-can-affect-children

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Men are more likely to use authoritative language and more formal speech than women. Males respond more negatively in interactions, as well, whereas women tend to use 'warmer' and more positive words.
Women also use words more emotionally.
A recently study examined 15.4 million status updates made by 68,000 Facebook users and found that words describing positive emotions (e.g., "excited", "happy", "love"), social relationships (e.g., "friends", "family"), and intensive adverbs (e.g., "sooo", "sooooo", "ridiculously") were predominantly used by women. By comparison, male topics were fact-oriented and included words related to politics (e.g., "government", "tax"), sports and competition (e.g., "football", "season", "win", "battle").

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Have you ever wondered why there are more women than men on Pinterest? Or that trolls are more commonly male?

In this post, we'll look at some of the more gender-specific behaviors on social media, the motivations behind such actions and what it means in our wider understanding of social behaviors.

News vs friendships

Research shows that men are more likely to use social media to seek information, while women use social platforms to connect with people. Studies also show that when men do open social media accounts to network, they're more often looking to form new relationships, while women are more focused on sustaining existing ones.

An investigation conducted by Facebook found that female users of their platform tend to share more personal issues (e.g., family matters, relationships), whereas men discuss more abstract topics (e.g., politics). Facebook's research team analyzed 1.5m status updates published on the platform, categorizing them into topics. Each topic was then evaluated on the basis of both gender preferences and audience reactions. The results showed that men and women not only prefer certain topics, but distinct 'female' topics (e.g. birthdays, family fun) tend to receive more likes from other users, while clearly 'male' topics (e.g. sports, deep thoughts) elicit more comments.

We can't infer, however, that women aren't interested in abstract topics enough as to share them. One of the reasons why female users may be more reticent online is negative feedback. Indeed, women receive more abusive comments when expressing their opinions. A telling example is this Twitter experiment conducted by British journalist Martin Belam - Belam created a spoof account in which he pretended to guest-tweet as different male and female celebrities. When he presented himself as a woman, the account received significantly more offensive comments, and even blatantly misogynist ones.

Research conducted by The Guardian found similar - an analysis of 70 million readers' comments on their website showed that 8 of the 10 most abused journalists were women.

Totally HerSelfie

Depending on what men and women like to talk about on social media, their platform of choice will also vary. Female users generally prefer visual platforms, while men gravitate to more text-oriented mediums. Indeed, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram have a larger female user base, while online discussion forums such as Reddit or Digg count more male users.

So why are women more drawn to producing and sharing visual content? Tallinn University sociologist Katrin Tiidenberg believes the answer may lie in the traditional female role in the family - in all societies mothers have been historically responsible for taking family photos. In this sense, Instagram is a modern continuation of a female practice that began with the popularization of photography.

Maybe this can also help explain why women post more selfies than men: the Selfieexploratory project for example analyzed 3800 Instagram selfies from 5 cities across the world and found that the number of female selfies is always significantly higher. A recent study from the Ohio State University even suggests that men who take a lot of selfies tend to have narcissistic or psychopathic personalities.

But it's not just a knack for photography that makes girls strike a pose.

Trimmed up for some likes

All content we post - photos especially - is motivated by a desire to make a good impression on others.

Women and men, however, differ in their self-presentation on social media. For example, women post more portrait photos with direct eye contact, while men prefer more full body shots that include other people. Male users are also more likely to post more outdoor photographs which present them in a more adventurous light.

These differences are even more pronounced among younger users - several studies have shown that teenagers often use gender stereotypes to build their social media personas. For instance, teenage girls are more likely to post overtly seductive photos of themselves, while boys are more inclined to share pictures related to risky behaviors, alcohol or sex. Girls also tend to share more 'cute' pictures, too (think of those puppies).

A Northwestern University study also found that male users are generally more self-promotional on social media and are more likely to show their creative work, like writings, music or videos, online. Almost two-thirds of men reported posting their work online compared to only half of women.

She said: "OMG!!", he said: "Yeah"

Social media data also shows that men and women communicate very differently on social platforms.

Men are more likely to use authoritative language and more formal speech than women. Males respond more negatively in interactions, as well, whereas women tend to use 'warmer' and more positive words.

Women also use words more emotionally. A recently study examined 15.4 million status updates made by 68,000 Facebook users and found that words describing positive emotions (e.g., "excited", "happy", "love"), social relationships (e.g., "friends", "family"), and intensive adverbs (e.g., "sooo", "sooooo", "ridiculously") were predominantly used by women. By comparison, male topics were fact-oriented and included words related to politics (e.g., "government", "tax"), sports and competition (e.g., "football", "season", "win", "battle").

It's even possible to identify the gender of social media users solely based on their writing style. Academics from John Hopkins University analyzed the language of Twitter users and found that women use more emoticons and put increased emphasis on punctuation, included ellipses, repeated exclamations (!!!) and puzzled punctuation (?!). The expressions "OMG" and "lol" are also predominantly used by females, while the affirmation "yeah" is more strongly associated with men.

Congruent with this are the findings of a content analysis of 14.000 Twitter users. Researchers identified the 10,000 most used lexical items (both individual words and word-like items such as emoticons and punctuation) and discovered that female authors write with more personal pronouns (e. g. "you", "me"), use non-standard spelling of words (e. g. "Nooo waaay"), and more hesitant words ("hmm", "umm"). Offensive and taboo words, on the other hand, were strongly among male users.

Men are also more likely to engage in trolling, or aggressive language, online. Psychology Professor Mark Griffiths says that the prevalence of male trolling may be related to the fact that men use the Internet as a way to vent their aggression, something they're not able to do in face-to-face communication, unlike women.

Interestingly, male language also appears to be more possessive - male Facebook users include the possessive pronoun 'my' when mentioning their 'wife' or 'girlfriend' more often than female users talking about their husband or boyfriends, found another research team.

To sum up

Men and women communicate differently in real life, which naturally reflects how they use social media. They post about different things, prefer certain platforms and even use language differently. Some findings might appear obvious, others are unexpected: what strikes you as most intriguing?

The vector images used to create the visuals above are from Pixabay.com. Many thanks to all authors.

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Gender-Specific Behaviors on Social Media and What They Mean for Online Communications

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Have you ever wondered why there are more women than men on Pinterest? Or that trolls are more commonly male? In this post, we'll look at some of the more gender-specific behaviors on social media, the motivations behind such actions and what it means in our wider understanding of social behaviors.

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The way to show their feelings on social media 

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The way to show their feelings on social media 

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In the past decade, we have seen a 28% increase in England in the number of women accepted on to full-time undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem subjects). And in the last academic year, women accounted for more than half of all Stem postgraduates at UK universities.

Although women make up the majority of undergraduates in our universities, just under half of academic staff are female. At senior levels, only a quarter of professors are women, and black women make up less than 2% of all female academic staff.

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Proper men, proper women: Gender roles in contemporary UK society

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Proper men, proper women: Gender roles in contemporary UK society

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It might have seemed obvious that the non-biological differences could be erased more easily. Perhaps this is why there's a widespread general assumption that, in the UK at least, many former social constraints have disappeared, so that women are no longer tied to the home or held back in their careers.Likewise, men can be in touch with their own feelings; show their emotional sides, and involve themselves with their kids in ways that their own fathers were held back from.

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Luigi Guiso and colleagues used the Pisa data to explore gender differences in maths performance. Overall, girls’ maths scores averaged 10.5 points (2%) lower than the mean average for boys, but this difference varied by country. In Turkey, for instance, the gender gap is greater (boys outperform girls by 22.6 points) while in Iceland the gender difference is reversed: girls outperform boys by 14.5 points.

The researchers then classified each country on the basis of gender equality, ie how much they treated women as equal to men. In more gender-neutral countries such as Norway and Sweden the maths gender gap disappeared. They state that if Turkey were characterised by the same gender equality seen in Sweden, the gender gap in maths would be eliminated.

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Proper men, proper women: Gender roles in contemporary UK society

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Proper men, proper women: Gender roles in contemporary UK society

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Most of us have watched enough wildlife programmes to know that nature doesn't provide any simple model for 'proper' female and male roles. (If you're not convinced, look up the various child rearing arrangements of, say, elephants, seahorses and Emperor penguins.)In fact, the term 'gender' originally came into widespread use in the social sciences to refer to those female-male differences which are given by society and perpetuated through upbringing, as distinct from differences which are dictated by biology.
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/proper-men-proper-women-gender-roles-contemporary-uk-society

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1.Research shows that man are more likely to use social media to seek information, while women tend to use social platforms to connect with people.
2. Men do open social media accounts to network, they're more often looking to form new relationship, while women are more focused on sustaining ex

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Gender-Specific Behaviors on Social Media

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Gender-Specific Behaviors on Social Media

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According to research, men tend to use social media to search for information, while women prefer socializing online. Both gender have their own interested topics, and the platform will show different topics to users in terms of their genders. That is to say, what female users mostly receive are distinct "female" topics like makeup and clothing. In contrast, male users are shown more "male" topics like politics and military. They are motivated to watch and film disparate videos due to the gender stereotypes.

Men and women also behave differently when they want to express themselves online. For example, boys are more likely to take risky behaviors photos, but girls like taking selfies and with direct eye contact with viewers. Besides, women always use words more emotionally (OMG, soooo), but men tend to use not so intensive words like "yeah".

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/gender-specific-behaviors-social-media-and-what-they-mean-online-communications

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Current legal protection includes t he Gender Recognition Act 2014,which enable individuals who have transitioned to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate changing their legal gender.
This can be a lengthy and bureaucratic process, with no allowance for those who are intersex-in law, gender is binary.

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Why do so few girls study Stem subjects?

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Why do so few girls study Stem subjects?

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women are underrepresented in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) occupations. They make up 14.4% of all people working in Stem in the UK, despite being about half of the workforce. This is well short of the country’s goal of a critical mass of 30%.

Biological explanations: Boys are better at spatial tasks while girls are better at verbal recall tasks. However, these differences are very small and their link to Stem ability is tenuous.Typically, girls do as well as or outperform boys in Stem classwork but do worse on tests.

Gender differences in maths performance: Overall, girls’ maths scores averaged 10.5 points (2%) lower than the mean average for boys, but this difference varied by country.

Social belongingness: teenagers felt they would fit in better in subjects that had more of their own gender.

Self-efficacy: the belief that one can succeed in a domain,girls on average had much lower self-efficacy ratings in Stem

Gender stereotypes: gendered notions of intelligence are picked up very early and start having an effect on the sorts of interests that girls pursue. For example, girls are more likely to be attracted to a game if it is described as being for children who “work really hard” rather than “really smart”.

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You will no doubt be aware that women are underrepresented in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) occupations. They make up 14.4% of all people working in Stem in the UK, despite being about half of the workforce. This is well short of the country's goal of a critical mass of 30%. Increasing women in Stem is forecast to increase the UK's labour value by at least £2bn.

There is a whole tangle of reasons why the gender gap in Stem exists. One is a pipeline issue - fewer girls than boys choose to study Stem subjects at secondary school and university. Interventions internationally mean the numbers of girls in Stem subjects are creeping up very slowly, but the gap remains surprisingly resistant nonetheless.
Are girls biologically worse than boys at Stem subjects at school?
Biological explanations tend to rely on the fact that boys are better at spatial tasks while girls are better at verbal recall tasks. However, these differences are very small and their link to Stem ability is tenuous.

Meta-analyses consistently show that girls and boys are on average much more similar than they are different across a range of skills. For instance, a meta-analysis of gender differences in mathematics, based on 100 studies and testing more than three million people, found that girls outperformed boys overall in primary school, there was no difference in secondary school and there was only a very slight and inconsistent male advantage for complex problem solving.

Typically, girls do as well as or outperform boys in Stem classwork but do worse on tests. The International Student Assessment ( Pisa) reports on 276,165 15-year-olds from 40 countries who take identical tests in mathematics and reading. In 2015, the average difference between high-achieving boys and girls was 19 points, the equivalent of about half a year at school. But these differences disappeared when factoring in reported levels of self-confidence or anxiety towards mathematics. On average, girls were more anxious about tests than boys were, and this seems to have affected their score.
Are gender gaps socially constructed?
Luigi Guiso and colleagues used the Pisa data to explore gender differences in maths performance. Overall, girls' maths scores averaged 10.5 points (2%) lower than the mean average for boys, but this difference varied by country. In Turkey, for instance, the gender gap is greater (boys outperform girls by 22.6 points) while in Iceland the gender difference is reversed: girls outperform boys by 14.5 points.

The researchers then classified each country on the basis of gender equality, ie how much they treated women as equal to men. In more gender-neutral countries such as Norway and Sweden the maths gender gap disappeared. They state that if Turkey were characterised by the same gender equality seen in Sweden, the gender gap in maths would be eliminated.
Then why are there fewer women in Stem careers even in more gender-neutral countries?
These cultural effects suggest the gender gap in Stem careers should disappear in more gender-neutral countries. Yet we still find a higher proportion of men in Stem-related careers than women, even in gender-neutral Sweden. A study of 1,327 Swedish secondary school students explored why more boys are attracted to Stem subjects at university and more girls are attracted to subjects in the Heed (health, elementary education and domestic) spheres.

This difference was partially explained by "social belongingness": teenagers felt they would fit in better in subjects that had more of their own gender. But another important factor was "self-efficacy": the belief that one can succeed in a domain. We tend to approach domains where we feel we are competent and avoid those in which we do not. Boys and girls both had high self-efficacy in the Heed subjects, but boys chose not to pursue them. The researchers suggest that this may reflect the low social value and rewards associated with careers in these spheres.

In contrast, girls on average had much lower self-efficacy ratings in Stem, despite outperforming boys across school subjects. Even in one of the most gender-neutral countries in the world and despite the evidence of their own marks, girls still seem to be succumbing to the stereotype that girls aren't as capable in these subjects.
Where do gender stereotypes come from?
This is a complicated question, and the answer is: lots of places. Even young children can absorb and be influenced by gender stereotypes, and these can be as detrimental for boys as they are for girls but in different ways. A recent study by Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie and Andrei Cimpian has shown that five-year-old girls are just as likely to say that girls can be "really, really smart" but from six years up they think brilliance is much more likely in boys.

From this age girls are also more likely to be attracted to a game if it is described as being for children who "work really hard" than if it is described as being for children who are "really smart". Again, this is despite the fact that girls, on average, are outperforming boys in these subjects at school. These findings suggest gendered notions of intelligence are picked up very early and start having an effect on the sorts of interests that girls pursue.
How can we attract more girls to Stem subjects at university?
Research from these different perspectives converge on the idea that there is little to no difference in boys' and girls' average ability at Stem subjects. This means that in order to attract more girls to study Stem subjects at university and enter Stem careers, we need to tackle the stereotypes they are exposed to and we need to do this early.

One way to encourage girls is to use appropriate role models. As part of a campaign to coincide with today's International Women's Day, Speakezee, a platform that connects academics with non-academic audiences, is working with the Institute of Physics and the Girls' School Association to send young female graduate Stem students into schools to talk to and inspire young teenage girls to consider pursuing Stem topics at A-level. Professor Brian Cox may be the popular face of physics for mass viewing audiences in the UK, but young girls need individuals they are more likely to relate to if they are to be persuaded not to abandon their Stem potential.

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Bridging the gender gap: why do so few girls study Stem subjects?

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To attract more girls to study Stem subjects at university, we need to tackle the stereotypes they are exposed to early on

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fewer girls than boys choose to study science subjects at secondary school and university

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Megan Perryman from the Let Toys Be Toys Campaign which campaigns for gender-neutral toys told The Independent: “Gender-neutral parenting means allowing your children to play with a range of toys and wear the clothes they feel comfortable in. Many parents raise their children this way, whether they refer to it as ‘gender neutral’ or not.

“In the last few years, however, parents have been increasingly rejecting the stereotypes being sold by big business and are encouraging their children to think for themselves.”

For any parents considering raising a child in a gender neutral way, Megan suggests: “Just let your child enjoy their childhood- if a girl likes dolls that’s absolutely fine as long as she doesn’t feel it’s her only option. A range of experience is healthy for all children. As is an appreciation of difference.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gender-neutral-children-meet-the-new-generation-of-parents-with-a-gender-neutral-approach-to-a6986791.html

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In Britain, gender identity has been problematic in several aspects of society. According to Scotto and Minear (2018), in workplace, individuals regularly experience negative treatment and transphobia related to their gender identity, and only 20% of Stonewall’s top 100 employers have policies focused on trans employees.