Gender Equality Index vs Women In STEM, by Country – The Gender-Equality Paradox in STEM [OC]
Posted by dolm09
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Gender Equality Index vs Women In STEM, by Country – The Gender-Equality Paradox in STEM [OC]
Posted by dolm09
21 Comments
Source: Gender-Equality Paradox – [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719)
Tool: [https://chartz.ai](https://chartz.ai/)
Pretty much shows a tendency where, the less gender equality, the more women in STEM.
Interesting how the trend is non-existent until ~25% (or as high as ~30, depending on how you look at it – the countries in that range fit both patterns). So the take-away is that ~15-25% is the “natural” participation by women in STEM, and it’s pushed higher in sexist countries?
It’s not really a paradox. The more egalitarian a society is the more women can afford to study what they really want vs. what they have to/need to to get ahead in life.
I don’t know the source of this specific data set, but this concept has been debunked in the past: https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/women-stem-innate-disinterest-debunked.html
If we took the data as correct I also think there is some correlation effects. Seems like there is a big cluster of Muslim majority nations on the bottom right, and I wonder if something about the shared values and culture encourages both the gender gap as well as pursuit of stem or women. Once you take that cluster out the inverse relationship is much less visible.
It’s only a paradox if you assume that the Global Gender Gap Index is a valid metric of gender equality.
This doesn’t account for cultural differences.
I would like to see the trend for every country as they have gotten more egalitarian.
For example, in Finland % of women in stem and equality have increased in time. Is there similar trend in other countries?
I wonder why these countries in particular.
This is a pretty small subset of all countries
kinda interesting paradox here: in countries where women have more freedom of choice, fewer go into STEM -they often pick other fields they enjoy. but in places where options are limited, STEM becomes one of the safest paths to a stable career, so the share of women there is actually higher
I wonder if the definition and nature of a these “STEM jobs” is the same across the range. Like, in Switzerland, I imagine the bulk of STEM jobs will be software devs, engineers and researchers and such, while in Algeria greater proportion of them might be like math teachers and other fields where women might be naturally more prevalent.
Bottom right corner is interesting. In Turkey it could probably be explained by urban vs rural divide. There are lots of women doctors, architects, software engineers, biologists, lab techs, etc. However, this is limited to families with the means to provide an education for their daughters. In many lower-income families female labor force participation is low. So Turkey doesn’t really have a problem with empowering women with high-skill jobs, the opposite is the problem. Labor force participation rate is extremely low for vocational and low-skill jobs. And of course, the fact that number of women in parliament is low must be a huge blow to the gender gap index.
The actual stats aside, please start your axes at 0
Where are China and India on this chart? Whoever made left the two of the biggest sources of STEM graduates.
Is this data accurate?
Ireland is listed as having just under 25% of STEM graduates being women on this chart and yet when I look up how many STEM graduates are female in Ireland I see the number 40% being used a lot which seems a lot more realistic from what I’ve experienced here. The ~25% seems to be the number of women working in STEM fields, which is not what that axis is labelled as, and while it’s quite low right now I expect it will see a big increase in the coming years due to the push for more women in STEM we’re having and also the rise in the number of young men who are pursuing trades instead of doing traditional higher education
The equality in the Nordics, is generally much better than countries like Algeria, Tunisia etc.
You need to adjust for that as well. Otherwise you’ll end up with a very biased comparison.
Gender **GAP** index. So it’s a gender INEQUALITY index, higher is worse. Data is beautiful, but your caption of it is not.
Aren’t those so called relatively gender equal countries all from the west for now? They are not free from certain types of biases. From my observation, despite women having better rights and protection at workplaces in the west, western countries seem to have certain strong cultural tendencies to label STEM subjects as masculine, especially computer science. I’m from South Korea and despite it being a country with lack of female engineers(frankly, women in general) at workplaces, computer science and chemical engineering are perceived as the most preferred and women friendly STEM majors among women. You’ll see quite a lot of them in IT companies and secondary battery labs. The opposite is true for western countries, especially the US, as they seem to see them as much more male dominated fields. As for the middle east, while middle eastern women face discriminination in many areas in the society, one thing about them is that they usually grow up in strictly gender segregated environments and it leads them to label subjects and professions less by gender. There should be decades of further observation to see if any of those countries with high STEM participation among women actually show “decline” in female participation with further economic development.
What are you using point color strength to indicate? For a plot like this, often correlating point size to n_grads can be helpful for visualization.
Iceland apparently has 45% women among stem graduates, which would put it off the scale to the right. And they have a gender gap index of 0.926, which would put them off the scale to the top. I’d like to see a full plot with all countries. More data, better confidence.
This chart looks biased.
Women dominate medical fields, biological sciences, pharmacy, psychology , Social Science etc. All of which are science.
How these institutions like the UN and feminist orgs bias it is they often count only Engineering, Tech and Math as “STEM” .When it isnt. Sciences are also STEM.
So in STEM women are bulking into the S part, while men are bulking into the TEM part. So there are plenty of women in STEM, they are in the S part (sciences). —-Now do we have a problem with the lack of boys going into the S part of STEM (biology, pharma, medicine, nursing, radiology , psychology etc etc) of course not!
We already have hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at girls to encourage them into Engineering and Tech. While we dont encourage boys into biology or nursing or other sciences. Fasttrack quotas in tech etc. Its unbelievable.
When certain careers are dominated by one sex then there has to be others where the gap is reversed. So if biology, medicine, nursing, psychology are all dominated by women , there has to be other careers that are male dominated like tech or engineering. So you have balance both ways or nothing. Im just sick of this utter bullshit lying.