At this point, the Left can almost be defined as the ideology which regularly features policies which, when implemented, are guaranteed to provide results that are the reverse of those predicted.
Adriana Kugler, who teaches economics at Georgetown, recently published her research on the gender-gap in STEM fields. She found that STEM recruitment efforts that stress the gender-gap in STEM actually serves to discourage women.
“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field…”
“Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it’s not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields,” Kugler says.
Many of the common explanations for the lack of women in STEM don’t hold up under investigation, Kugler explained to Campus Reform. While previous research suggests women are less “resilient,” or more negatively impacted by “bad grades,” Kugler says there’s “no evidence” to support that.
Likewise, the claim that women do poorly in STEM solely because it’s male dominated isn’t supported by evidence either, Kugler says, noting that an aspiring female computer scientist won’t necessarily be turned away from knowing that the field is male dominated.
The trouble begins when the media and recruitment efforts capitalize on that preponderance of men, since it “sends an additional message to women that they don’t fit into those fields, and that they don’t belong there.”
“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field, that they won’t fit into the field. That’s what we find,” Kugler told Campus Reform. “It’s very well intentioned, but it may be backfiring.”
It’s not really that hard. If you write “here there be dragons” on a map, some people are going to believe you. And a disproportionate number of those people are going to be women.