Fewer female students choosing science majors

By Alice Dembner

The Boston Globe

Twenty years after female college students began surging into majors like engineering, computer science and economics that had long been closed to them, educators are seeing signs that the floodtide may be turning. Over the past decade, the pace of change has slowed. In many of the sciences, women are still greatly underrepresented; in a few fields, they are actually losing ground. It’s not what many expected in the 1970s and early 1980s, when women undergraduates, fired up by feminism and a new sense of entitlement, made business their No 1 choice for a major supplanting education. During the same period, biology and other life sciences surged ahead of English in popularity among female students. Today, women earn 55 % of all bachelor’s degrees but only 16.5 % of engineering degrees and 18 % of physics degrees. Women received only 29 % of the undergraduate degrees in computer science in 1994, down from 37 %, in 1985. Economics saw a similar, though less dramatic, decline. Jerry A. Jacobs, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who has studied the patterns, says 30 % of women (or men) would have to change their majors to even out the distribution. Women have hit a similar plateau at the master’s and doctoral levels. “There are certainly a lot more opportunities for women than in the early 1960s,” said Jacobs, “but things are far from equal, and there hasn’t been as much progress as people were expecting.”

Researchers, including Jacobs, aren’t sure what’s behind the plateau. Many are particularly troubled that it is occurring even as educators nationwide focus unprecedented attention on encouraging girls and young women to consider careers in the sciences and engineering. And they worry about the long-term impact on American society if it loses the contributions of talented women and their earning power in key fields. Gender stereotyping is much stronger and longer-lived than most people believe,” said Susan Bailey, director of the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women. “Girls and boys get subtle messages about what is an appropriate choice of major or career.” Bailey and others have studied how young girls excel in math and science in the early grades but lose interest and confidence as they move into high school. The fall-off in interest and performance in certain math-based fields continues into college, with the puzzling exceptions of math (women earn 46 % of the bachelor’s degrees), business (48 %) and biology (52 %). Most of the researchers discount the likelihood of genetic differences, pointing to Ecuador and parts of Eastern Europe where women constitute a much larger % of engineers, for example. (They also note that women’s colleges have a better track record than coed schools.) But they believe that the availability of jobs may play a small role, with change slowing in some fields, such as economics and physics, as the market tightens.

THE NEWS AND OBSERVER

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1996