Women in STEM Face Workplace Discrimination

I recently attended the panel discussion, When You Picture A Scientist, Who Do You See? The hour long conversation centered around four female scientists, including Dr. Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 Nobel Prize winning co-inventor of CRISPR gene editing.

These renown leaders shared some of the discrimination and difficulties they faced in their respective workforces and discussed ways to increase and advance diversity and inclusion in the scientific community. Dr. Raychelle Burks, an associate professor of Chemistry at American University, was one of the panelists who mentioned how the main problem in our current generation is not the lack of hiring more women and people of color into STEM fields, but the low retention rate and lack of support within the workforce. While some significant measures have been made in recruiting a more diverse and inclusive range of applicants, the toxic work culture has not changed. Recruiting more underrepresented individuals into the science community without changing the actual work environment is basically setting well-qualified constituents up for failure. Often, the negative gender stereotypes, male-dominated workforce, and aggressive domain drives women out and makes many women, especially women of color, feel isolated, excluded and marginalized.

For example, women make up 40% of the undergraduate math degrees and 37% of undergraduate STEM degrees in the United States. However, women make up only 28% of the overall STEM workforce. The gender gaps grow even more drastic in the highest paid and fastest growing careers like computer science and engineering, where women hold only 25.8% and 15.7% of these jobs. While women make up 80% of the healthcare workforce, only 21% of them hold top leadership positions, such as healthcare executives and board members, and only 33% of them make up doctors. The higher the leadership position, the more lucrative the job, the more significantly underrepresented women become. The stereotypes of what a scientist, physicist, or engineer looks like not only drives an exclusive culture but also signals to women that they don’t belong in STEM.

As an aspiring physician, I know that the journey to becoming a doctor is incredibly strenuous and time-consuming. After four years of undergrad, I will have to undergo four years of medical school, three to eight years of residency, and several more years of a fellowship program if I want to specialize. That means my medical journey will take around 15-18 years to complete. And that's before I even start working as a full time physician. Not only is the medical journey itself difficult, the gender disparities within medicine make the process unnecessarily more challenging. A 2017 NYT article highlights some of the difficulties of being a woman in medicine:

"Female physicians are more likely to cut back professionally to accommodate household responsibilities. Among young academic physicians with children, women spend nine more hours per week on domestic activities than their male counterparts, and are more likely to take time off when a child is sick or a school is closed...Female physicians are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population. They earn significantly less than their male colleagues. They’re less likely to advance to full professorships — even after controlling for productivity — and they account for only one-sixth of medical school deans and department chairs.”

Despite the increasing number of women in medicine, female doctors often have to bear the additional burden of childcare and household chores. I've had countless conversations with my female pre-medical friends on how they’re going to balance being married and having children while still pursuing ambitious career goals. Personally, I’ve taken out the option of becoming a full time surgeon due to the taxing hours, long and cutthroat training process, and male-dominated environment. Instead, I’ve chosen to pursue a field with more work-life balance, such as pediatrics or primary care (although I've always loved working with kids and preventative medicine). The unequal work-family balance is even more accentuated in a field that can already be physically, mentally, and emotionally draining. The intentional choice of having to cut back on my professional aspirations and limit my field of interest comes with being a female in medicine. But it shouldn't have to be.

Although significant progress has been made in increasing the number of females who pursue STEM majors, the low retention rate of women in the STEM workforce hasn't changed. By assuming that women, especially women of color, can only be successful in lucrative STEM fields and medicine if they are unnecessarily resilient, hard-working, and perseverant is wrong. We have to think about what we are asking these individuals when we place them in a workforce that has always been designed to work against them. Rather than asking women to be more assertive, we need to be questioning the systems of power that shrink their voices and diminish their value.

By encouraging more women to pursue medicine, especially specialized fields that are male-dominated and male-focused, the workforce must shift in parallel to accommodate and ensure the success of females in STEM. That means correctly acknowledging their contribution and crediting their work, including more mentorship programs for females in medicine throughout their careers, increasing leadership positions for women in administration, eliminating gender-based violence, closing the gender pay gap, providing credit for household and childcare duties, and reframing rigid stereotypes and gender biases associated with doctors, engineers, and scientists. Without a cultural, organizational, and institutional change that truly supports women within the medical industry, women will continue to question whether or not they should pursue their dreams and passions simply because of who they are.