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.