In the early elementary years girls and boys do equally well in tests and grades in mathematics, science, and technology.
As female students progress through school and into college and graduate school, despite their frequently higher course grades they score lower on standardized tests than males do and take fewer advanced courses, which means that they drop out of mathematics, science, and/or technology earlier than males do.
Girls in high school today take a greater number and variety of math and science courses, for example, more girls are taking algebra 1 and geometry today than in 1990. In college too, young women are majoring in math and science-related fields at a higher rate than a decade ago. National data indicate that girls consistently earn either equivalent or higher grades than boys in all points of their academic careers.
Female students tend to score lower than male students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment at ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen. Although the differences are small (from 1 to 3 percent lower), they are statistically significant and have been persistent since 1970. The gap is also greatest at age seventeen.
A gap in the career aspirations of boys and girls in science or engineering exists as early as eighth grade. While high school seniors of both genders are equally likely to look to a career in science or mathematics, male seniors are much more likely than their female counterparts to expect a career in engineering.
A 1998 AAUW report synthesizing the research and reviewing issues of historic concern for girls found several trends that could maintain gender gaps into the future: demographic changes leading to more pronounced gaps among girls based on racial, ethnic, economic, and regional differences, even as the gaps between boys and girls on the whole diminish; the emergence of twenty-first century industries, such as computer science, bio-technology, and environmental science, for which girls may be unprepared; and teacher preparation programs giving insufficient focus to gender-equity issues.
A greater percentage of female high school graduates take science courses today. Girls are more likely than their male counterparts to take both biology and chemistry, and roughly equal proportions of girls and boys enroll in engineering and geology. Physics, however, remains a largely male domain; while more girls enroll today than in 1990, the gender gap here is sizable.
Postsecondary Education
The proportion of women who received undergraduate degrees in science and engineering (45 percent in 1993) remains smaller than the proportion who earned degrees in all other fields (58 percent).
Within the sciences, the field with the highest share of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in 1998 was psychology (73 percent). Women also earned 68 percent of the baccalaureates in sociology and just over half (52 percent)of the baccalaureates in biological sciences.
Engineering continues to be one of the least popular fields for women. In 1994, women earned 16 percent of all baccalaureates in engineering. The proportion of undergraduate degrees in engineering awarded to white women was 11.1 percent; Asian/Pacific Islander women accounted for 2 percent; African American women for 1.4 percent; Latinas for 0.7 percent; and American Indian women for 0.06 percent.
In most science and engineering fields, women earned a higher proportion of bachelor's degrees in 1993 than they did in 1983. In three fields, however-computer science, economics, and sociology-women's share of bachelor's degrees has decreased since 1983.
Among first-year students planning science or engineering majors in 1994, women's grades were found to be higher than men's-47 percent of women and 43 percent of men had average grades of A in high school.
According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), "the proportion of males intending to major in natural sciences and engineering was significantly higher in all racial/ethnic groups than the proportion of females intending to major in these subjects. For instance, the proportion of males intending to major in natural sciences/engineering ranged from 28 percent for American Indian and Puerto Rican males to 37 percent for Asian males. For females, however, the proportion intending to study natural sciences/engineering was much lower, ranging from 12 percent for Mexican Americans to 16 percent for Asians."
Students with disabilities are as likely to choose science and engineering majors as they are to choose other majors. Students with disabilities constituted an average of 9 percent of first-year students with planned majors in science and engineering fields: physical sciences (10 percent), social sciences (10 percent), and engineering (8 percent). Students with disabilities earned about 1 percent (329) of doctorates in science and engineering in 1993.
Employment Outcomes
Women represent 22 percent of the science and engineering labor force, and within science and engineering women are more strongly represented in some fields than in others. More than half of sociologists and psychologists are women, compared with only 9 percent of physicists and 8 percent of engineers.
Women make up 44 percent of academic faculty overall, but only 24 percent of faculty in science and engineering.
A study prepared by the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology found that the glass ceiling for women scientists remains "firmly in place" in both academia and industry. Betty Vetter, chair of the Washington-based commission, concludes that in the scientific workforce, "relative to men with similar credentials and experience levels, women in all of the sciences earn lower salaries, experience higher unemployment rates, are more likely to be employed in temporary positions, and find fewer and slower opportunities to advance, either in rank or toward management, or to obtain security in the form of tenure."