Women still underrepresented in STEM work environments

(The Boston Globe, November 03, 2013)

One area where women are still woefully underrepresented is on the boards and management teams of companies in the so-called STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and math. In high school, girls and boys are equally enrolled in science and math courses, according to the US Department of Education. But then they hit college, where women make up just about a third of the students majoring in a STEM field. By the time they’ve arrived in the workplace, the proportion of women working as hardware developers, electrical engineers, or systems managers has nose-dived to 25 percent or less, according to the research group Catalyst. MIT professor Susan Silbey, attempting to explain the brain drain found the female engineers weren’t daunted by work-life balance or lack of confidence, but by what they saw as a negative work environment.