STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, four disciplines of professions that are and have been dominated by men since, well, forever. School girls and college women avoid them in huge numbers. My daughter will start her final semester in chemical engineering at Tennessee Tech next month; at freshman orientation she was one of four women declaring that major among a few dozen men.
Yet in preparatory education, boys and girls report they like math and science in equal numbers (of STEM subjects studied).
It’s when the school day ends that the differences emerge. Forty-one percent of the parents with boys surveyed said their children show the most interest in technology/computing activities outside of school, compared to 18 percent of parents with girls. Meanwhile, 45 percent of parents with girls report that their children show the most interest in art outside of school, compared to 10 percent of parents with boys.My daughter was was a nationally-awarded artist in high school. She earned a 4.0 the term just passed, her courses were:
- Mass transfer,
- Process design,
- Biochemistry,
- Reactor kinetics
- Intro to Greek (taken for honors-diploma requirements)
This is "Pegasus," one of her works, done in pointillism, art that consists solely of dots. In the entire work, there is not even one drawn line. Nothing but dots (except for the black background, which is a matte sheet).
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