women Archives

New Trump laws will support women in STEM fields

President Donald Trump has signed two bills aimed at increasing the number of women who pursue entrepreneurial endeavors and space-related STEM careers.

“Currently, only 1 in every 4 women who gets a STEM degree is working in a STEM job, which is not fair and it’s not even smart for the people that aren’t taking advantage of it,” Trump said in remarks during the signing. “It’s unacceptable that we have so many American women who have these degrees but yet are not being employed in these fields. So I think that’s going to change. That’s going to change very rapidly.”

The Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act authorizes the National Science Foundation “to encourage its entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.”…Read More

Women in Technology Scholarship

StudySoup is offering a $1,000 Women in Technology Scholarship to an outstanding female student who is planning a career in the field of computer science and/or computer programming. The scholarship is open to any woman ages 18 or older who is attending high school and will be attending college in the next year, or who is currently attending college as an undergraduate or graduate student.

Betsy DeVos: Fierce hostility to public schools should be a disqualifier

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An uptick in the hiring of women for tech jobs

There are signs that tech companies are hiring more women, but women still appear to make up far less than half of all new hires in the industry, The New York Times reports. In the year ending in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the net change in the number of employees in the computer industry was 60,000. The net change in the number of female employees was 36,000 — or 60 percent of the net change, according to the bureau’s data. Yet it does not necessarily mean that the tech industry hired more women than men. The bureau’s figure is a net change, meaning the numbers reflect new employees and those who left. More men than women probably left their jobs — because there are so many more men working in the tech industry…

Women gain in some STEM fields, but not computer science

A few weeks ago, I wrote about ways to get more women interested in computer science, The New York Times reports. One of the points that came up frequently in my reporting is that some other STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have actually been quite successful attracting more women. A report this week from the National Science Foundation lays out these trends nicely. As you can see, a majority of bachelor’s degrees in some STEM fields — psychology, biosciences, social sciences — were actually given to women in recent years. And women’s participation in these fields has also risen, on net, since 1991, even if there has been some erosion in biosciences in recent years. Women receive less than half of physical sciences degrees, but they earn a much higher share than they did two decades ago…

Bringing Women and Minorities to IT

Women earn 57 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the country, and 52 percent of all math and science undergraduate degrees, Government Technology reports. But in computer and information science, women represent only 18 percent of all undergraduate degrees. And the trend starts early: Females constitute 56 percent of all high school Advanced Placement (AP) test-takers, but represent only 19 percent of AP computer science test-takers. There’s growing evidence that this gender gap is hurting the nation’s economy. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that between 2010 and 2020, there will be more than 1.4 million computing-related job openings nationally, but at current graduation rates, only 30 percent of those positions can be filled…

Why are there still so few women in science?

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications, The New York Times reports. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts. The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women…

Young women will find engineering inspiring, not intimidating

Equality and diversity within engineering have been a hot media topic recently, with figureheads such as the president of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), Barry Clarke, speaking out in an effort to evoke action where it’s needed – in government, The Guardian reports. Even transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin, while heralding the virtues of HS2 at the ICE, called for more young people to pursue a career in engineering. That said, the workplace has clearly matured into a very different environment since women like Tina Amirtha – who recently wrote a column in the New Statesman criticising her male colleagues’ attitudes toward her as a female engineer – joined almost a decade ago. Whilst some would argue that females have to persevere with confidence to – in the words of Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg – “sit at the table”, the industry is changing. It has changed…