We know that women students and staff remain underrepresented in Higher Education STEM disciplines. Even in subjects where equivalent numbers of men and women participate, however, many women are still disadvantaged by everyday sexism. Our recent research found that women who study STEM subjects at undergraduate level in England were up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism. The main perpetrators of this sexism were not university staff, however, but were men STEM degree students.
I’m not even involved in a STEM job any longer but I still see tons of STEM employed men spewing manosphere bullshit all the time. I’m also starting to see more and more well educated, articulate women parroting it. These women also tend to be overwhelmingly conservative in their political positions, too. Especially well educated white women.
“Town square debates”, which anything like this is, tend to be driven by emotions and instincts. Those men may be better to their friends and acquaintances. Those women may too be parroting it simply because that position signals their belonging to some group.
My point is that being well-educated is less important here than it would seem, because it’s not about being correct.
In my experience the technology related fields are greater perpetrators than the base sciences. Though there is still an image problem for things like math (the not tech, engingeering or finance version) and a problem with people outside the field having sxcist expectations about those in it, I genuinely think the environment itself to be very inclusive.
