Fewer female students choosing
science majors
By Alice Dembner
The
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
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
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1996