What's different between female STEM workers and those in other professions?

Many studies of women in STEM use men as a referent group to women: how do women compare to men in CS with regard to retention, attitudes, discrimination, etc? While there's certainly benefit to using men as a referent group (and it's far, far better than no referent group at all), there's a threat to validity that we tend to overlook when studying women in CS: how much of what we see is an artifact of CS culture versus that of our wider society?

Triangulation using different referent groups is a good way to get around this issue. I've talked before about differences between women in CS vs. other STEM fields, differences between women in CS between different cultures, and differences over time/generations. But in every one of these posts, I've really only looked at scientists.

Glass et al's "What's So Special about STEM? A Comparison of Women's Retention in STEM and Professional Occupations" addresses another angle: what's different for women in STEM vs. women in other professional occupations? After all, women are more likely than men to leave other professional occupations such as business, medicine and law [1]. And in all these fields, substantial problems remain at the top: women may make up a substantial proportion of workers, but a tiny minority of those running the show.

The Glass et al Paper

To make the comparison of STEM women and non-STEM women, the Glass et al paper uses longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The longitudinal approach is a strength of the paper. A weakness, however, is that the women participating are a single generational cohort who entered the workforce in the late 80s/90s: "second generation" per my previous post.

Overall, Glass et al found that women in STEM jobs had more in common with women in non-STEM professional jobs -- and that "few differences in job characteristics emerge" overall. This is a rather important finding -- it means that if we work carefully, we can often generalize findings about women in the general workforce to women in the STEM workforce.

Why Are There More Women in CS in Other Cultures?

The rates of female participation in CS -- and STEM in general -- vary wildly from culture to culture. In the US, women currently make up about 18% of undergraduate CS students [1], but over in Qatar, women make up about 70% of CS undergrads [2].

Women in STEM are better represented in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, Portugal, and the Philippines. In these countries, women make up approximately 50% of STEM undergrads [3]. Indeed, well-developed countries like Canada, the US, and the UK have some of the lowest levels of female participation in STEM.

So, what cultural factors lead to fewer or more women in STEM? Per the work of Barinaga, there are five factors [3]:

1. Recently developed science capabilities, resulting in an unentrenched scientific community
2. Perception of science as a low status career
3. Class issues that overshadow gender issues
4. Compulsory math and science education in secondary school
5. Large social support for raising families