The gender gap in professional fields has been a societal conversation topic for a long time, and only becomes louder and more relevant as the contemporary feminist movement continues.
Siri Terjesen, an assistant professor at the Kelley School of Business with research interest in gender in management, said that careers with gender gaps are an issue throughout the workforce. Terjesen and many other gender-workforce analysts call it a pipeline issue.
“When you h ave a pipeline that’s narrow in the beginning, it’s hard to make it broader in the future,” Terjesen said.
That pipeline begins as early as college when students choose which fields they want to study.
“In many, but not all cases, a major is admission to get to a particular line of work, so it’s difficult but not impossible to get a job without a major in the field,” Terjesen said.
Most of the repercussions of professional fields that are taken over by one gender come from jobs where significantly fewer women are present than men.
“A lot of research shows that the more women involved in the profession, the salaries and prestige can drop,” Terjesen said. Fields like teaching and dentistry that were once controlled by men, but then were broken into by women, became less prestigious over time.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, 75 percent of education majors are women.
“The gender gap is very noticeable in my classes,” sophomore elementary education major Dean Gardner said in an email. “In many of my classes where it’s just elementary ed. majors, I am usually one of two or three guys.”
In fields where males are the minority, the gender gap does not seem to make as much of a difference to the males as it does to women in men-dominated fields.
Jehu Elliot, a senior speech and hearing sciences major, a field of mostly women, said that for him and other men in his major, the gender gap is not an issue.
“It’s pretty mundane, and I’m not treated any differently,” Elliot said. He is usually among one or two other guys in his classes. The biggest effect he says it has on his studies is that in some classes, a research sample cannot be conducted because there are so few males.
However, fields in which women are the minority, the effects on an industry and the initiatives to have more women involved are more prevalent.
The most stark example of this is in the computer sciences field.
Pusateri, a computer science major, says she has felt the gender divide in her major.
At IU, 46 women are currently working toward a B.S. in computer sciences. In total, 307 people are working for that undergraduate degree.
That gap, she said, has caused very few moments of sexism or blatant discrimination, but criticisms and unintentionally sexist remarks do occur.
“It didn’t really get to me, but to some people, it would,” she said about the example she gave the male member of her class. “He probably didn’t even realize he was being offensive.”
She later told her professor about her clothing example. He will use the relationship in the future to his classes.
While Pusateri compares clothing to computer concepts, she said she has seen examples of women doing the opposite. Some attempt to become one of the guys in order to cope with the gap.
“Diversity isn’t diversity if you’re just assimilating to the majority,” she said.
Pusateri said she can already see the career effects of being in the gender minority.
“A lot of people do tell you that they’re looking for women, or that people will be interested in you because you’re a woman,” she said.
Women in technology, Pusateri said, are especially crucial in a field that requires teamwork.
Gone are the days of sitting in the corner and working alone on computing, she said. Now, the technology field is all about teamwork.
“You have to have people skills,” she said, which cannot be fully achieved without working with women.
But what makes this pipeline so narrow in the first place, many argue, are the gender-specific careers that are preconceived at a young age.
“I don’t think it’s a gender thing; it’s whether your mind works that way or not,” senior physics major Megan Hinger said. “I don’t know if it’s a girl or guy thing, but girls seem to be less likely to take a math-focused class.”
According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, women make up less than 20 percent of computer science majors, a large decrease from numbers in the early 2000s. The number of women studying physical sciences (such as physics or chemistry) has increased in the last 30 years, but remains at about 40 percent of the field.
For many fields in which women are the minority, initiatives are in place to foster more female involvement. Many programs for women involvement exist at IU, such as the Center of Excellence of Women in Technology and Women in Informatics and Computing.
These programs are one of the best answers to closing the gender gap, Terjesen said.
“I think we need some recognition that there should be more women in these fields,” Terjesen said of all sciences, including technology, library science, and political science.
