Stem - Blog Posts
I am obsessed with this whole aesthetic thing people have going with college studying, most especially with STEM. It's so foreign to me because I don't know about anyone else but when I studied for exams my work space looked like someone had ripped apart a book and thrown pages in all directions.
I need to make more friends in STEM so that I can be that normal friend who listens to them complain about some science problem they're trying to solve and jokingly proposes a really simple or mundane solution that they can go Wait, Say That Again to and help them solve this problem cutting-edge experts has been trying to solve for years by "just cutting it in half" or something
One factor that influences the use of the labels “soft science” or “hard science” is gender bias, according to recent research my colleagues and I conducted.
Women’s participation varies across STEM disciplines. While women have nearly reached gender parity in biomedical sciences, they still make up only about 18% of students receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science, for instance.
In a series of experiments, we varied the information study participants read about women’s representation in fields like chemistry, sociology and biomedical sciences. We then asked them to categorize these fields as either a “soft science” or a “hard science.”
Across studies, participants were consistently more likely to describe a discipline as a “soft science” when they’d been led to believe that proportionally more women worked in the field. Moreover, the “soft science” label led people to devalue these fields—describing them as less rigorous, less trustworthy and less deserving of federal research funding.
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