Free To Choose Stem:: Data and Reflections On Girls and STEM Careers

Free to
choose
STEM:
Data and
reflections
on girls and
STEM careers
By Pamela Cosman
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Boys and Girls Going Into STEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
A Surprising Look Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
A Surprising Look Across Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
A Surprising Look Across Socioeconomic Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Believing in Difference Can Produce Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Imposter Syndrome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
I Killed Another Houseplant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Helping People, Helping the Planet—Really! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Passion? What Passion? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Beware of Wild CATs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Signing Off . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
FREE TO CHOOSE STEM: DATA AND REFLECTIONS ON GIRLS AND STEM CAREERS 1
INTRODUCTION
W
hen my oldest son was in 7th grade, he joined the San Diego Math
Circle, a weekend club for middle school and high school kids. Math
Circle prepared kids for math competitions, and taught math topics
not normally seen in school—voting theory, abstract algebra, computational
complexity, fractals and Sierpinski triangles. Sophia1 was a math whiz in my
son’s class, and she was perfect for Math Circle. I told Sophia’s Mom about
it, expecting an enthusiastic response, but she just rolled her eyes at me
and said, “You talk to her.” I was raising four boys, but she apparently knew
something about girls that I didn’t know.
So, I gamely talked to Sophia. I described the various topics, the occasional
candy treats, the details of time and place, the two 15-student teams that
had gone to Las Vegas to compete in ARML, the way math relay races work.
And at the end of all this description, Sophia had one question for me, and
one question only: How many girls are in it?
Of course, I’d always known about the gender gap in Science, Technology,
Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. I had three degrees in electrical
engineering and was an engineering professor. But here I was, face to
face with one element of the self-reinforcing nature of the gender gap.
A top-notch math girl didn’t want to join a fabulous math club—because
there weren’t enough other girls in it.
I found this reluctance deeply discouraging. I want more girls to go into

STEM careers. This short book is meant for young women going into STEM,
and for parents of girls who may be thinking about STEM, as well as those
not thinking about it. Social science research on gender in STEM is a great
deal richer and deeper than it was 40 years ago, when I started high school.
I want to transmit some things I’ve experienced myself as a female engineer,
and other things I’ve learned from reading research papers, as well as from
my own research. It amounts to a great deal of accumulated understanding
I hope can be of some use for STEM girls starting on their educational and
career pathways, and for their parents.
Before I go farther, I should perhaps say why I want more girls in STEM.
People sometimes ask: Why does it matter what girls go into? If girls
are freely choosing other fields, why is the profession they choose a
problem? I’ll give a few quick answers:
1 Names of friends in this book have been changed.
• There’s a shortage of STEM professionals in the United States. So, I want
more girls to go into STEM careers, just because the United States needs
more STEM people overall. It’s not that I want boys to stop going into STEM
careers. I don’t. I want the boys to stay in. I just want more girls to go in, too.
• STEM jobs are high-paying and tend to be secure. I want women to have
economic strength and job security. People often complain about the
“gender wage gap,” saying that women earn 80 cents for every dollar that
a man makes. But these numbers are computed based on all women and
men workers across all types of work, so a big chunk of that gap comes
from women choosing careers that pay less. One way to close the wage
gap is to have more women choose to become engineers or chemists,
rather than choosing to go into traditionally female-typed occupations.
• The career and salary website, PayScale, recently did a survey [1] of
250,000 Americans who have at least a bachelor’s degree. The survey
found that “Fields that lead into high-earning or high-meaning jobs did
see a larger portion of respondents that had no regrets about college.”
Humanities was the field most regretted—more than 20 percent of
Humanities majors said they regretted their choice. English was the single
most regretted major. Computer Science (CS) and Engineering majors
had the lowest level of regret, with just four percent of CS majors and
eight percent of Engineering majors saying they regretted their major.
Since roughly 70 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in English go to women,
and only about 20 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in CS and Engineering
(in the Unites States) go to women—a lot of women are going into the
most regretted major—and less women are going into the fields that
come with the least regret.
• When we ask what’s wrong “if girls are freely choosing other fields,” we
have to think about what it means to be choosing freely. Clearly, no one
holds a gun to a girl’s head and forces her to declare a major in some
female-dominated field, rather than in mechanical engineering. But in
wealthy Western countries, girls are subject to a relentless barrage of
influences pushing them away from STEM. From the pink aisle in the toy
store, to the little girl told not to examine bugs or plants because she will
get her dress dirty, to the negative presentations of socially inept and
fashion-challenged scientists on TV, to the guidance counselors who don’t
suggest engineering careers to girls, our society is an immersive soup of
experiences that push girls away from STEM careers. By the time a girl is
18 and starting college, in what sense is she making a free choice?
• Women entering STEM change the actual technical work done in those
fields. For example, Dr. Bernadine Healy became the first female head of
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1991, and she made a policy
that NIH-funded clinical trials had to include both men and women, if the
condition being studied affected both sexes. This mandate turned out to
be extremely important, because women metabolize some drugs very
differently, for example. The assumption that pharmaceutical doses that
are correct for men can simply be scaled to women’s body weights can
be very damaging for women. In engineering, men design safety devices
like seat belts and airbags with men in mind, initially causing much higher
death rates for women. So, while the biology or engineering work women
and men do is often equivalent, it is wrong to say that a scientist's or
engineer's gender never makes a difference to the actual technical work.
• Women entering a STEM field not only change the actual technical work
done in that field, they also change workplace culture. For example,
women entering surgery have changed the way hospitals offer their
surgeons various options of taking more calls, thereby earning more
money; or taking calls less often, and earning less money. The fact that
these tradeoffs now exist benefits everyone; male surgeons have more
work-life options, too. In my own Electrical and Computer Engineering
department, I’ve seen changes, as the number of women faculty went
from one (just me) to seven. The women faculty are much more likely
than the men to show up to events that support students (for example,
a meet-and-greet with students, or an event to congratulate graduating
students), and events that help departmental morale (staff appreciation
lunches, faculty coffee hours).
This book contains summaries of research studies,2 and my reflections on

them, as well as anecdotes of my own personal experience. I recognize that
I am trained as an electrical engineer, not as a sociologist or psychologist. I
hope that this book can be useful with that perspective, not attempting to be
some definitive work of psychology or sociology, but rather as the reflections
of a female engineer who knows some of the bumps in the road for a girl
going in to STEM. And who, like any civil engineer in road construction, is
trying to smooth out those bumps.
2 Chapter 11 presents one of my research studies. All the other studies summarized were not done by me.
BOYS AND GIRLS GOING INTO STEM
I
n 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, speculated
that one reason why there might be relatively few women in high positions
in the science world was because of “intrinsic aptitude issues.” These remarks
provoked an uproar, and Summers was eventually forced to leave his position
as Harvard president. Was the uproar justified? Let’s look at the concepts in
play here.
Aptitudes (what people are good at) and preferences (what people like to
do) are key factors for many young people in choosing careers, and these
aptitudes and preferences can be affected, to varying degrees, by biological
factors and social factors. Of course, aptitudes and preferences are not the
only determinants of career choice. A person can have tremendous natural
talent for, say, flying an airplane; and a tremendous desire to do it, but she
may lack the money to pay for lessons. So, that career option seems out of
reach. But focusing here on aptitude and preferences, we can interpret the
“intrinsic aptitude” of Summers’ remarks as being aptitude determined by
gender-related biological factors.
BIOLOGICAL FACTORS
Strength Height
Psychological Factors
?
Aptitudes
Reproductive Needs… Preferences
Parental
SOCIAL FACTORS ?
Inﬂuence Advertisements Job
Discrimination Choice
Societal
Expectations Role Models...
It’s easy to see gender-related biological factors playing a role in
certain non-STEM fields. A basketball player needs to be tall; height
is a biological factor that affects a person’s ability to dunk. And while
both men and women have a distribution of heights, men are taller on
the average. Height or strength may also affect a person’s preference,
because people usually like what they’re good at. A firefighter needs
to be strong to carry a person out of a burning building, so physical
strength is a biological factor that confers aptitude for a firefighting
career. And clearly, social factors are at work, too. Firefighters are
mostly men, so it would be rare for a girl to find a woman firefighter as
a role model; and lack of role models is a social factor. When we think
about how gender affects one’s choice of a career—such as firefighter
and basketball player—it is clear that both biological factors and social
factors are involved. It is also clear that some biological factors (like
height for basketball, and upper body strength for firefighting) stand out
as obvious.
What about for STEM careers? Summers began his remarks by introducing
three possible hypotheses that might account for the disproportionately
small numbers of women at the top of science and engineering fields. The
first was the “high-power job hypothesis”—the idea that women might shy
away from careers demanding long hours and tremendous commitment. This
hypothesis is, by itself, a very complex question—playing out differently in,
say, law or chemistry; medicine or civil engineering. The second hypothesis
was the “issue of intrinsic aptitude,” which lacked supporting evidence. That
is, there was (and is) no evidence for STEM aptitude differential between
the sexes, based on biological factors alone, when they are disentangled
from social factors. His third hypothesis lumped together socialization and
discrimination during job searches, which are vast sub-fields of research
encompassing a myriad of different components.
Summers stated that, in his view, the importance of the three hypotheses
ranked in that order. This statement was remarkably odd, given the
complexity of the issues; the insufficiency of research on so many aspects;
the absence of evidence for intrinsic aptitude difference; and the lack of
data on the relative importance of all the factors. And as we will see in
Chapter 6, believing in difference can produce actual difference—promoting
beliefs in difference can have huge consequences. So, the uproar about
Summers’ comments was justified, because whatever the intent behind
them, they were unscientific and prejudicial. And while people are entitled
to hold their own wrong opinions, Summers was making a statement in
his capacity as president of a major university, a statement that was
uninformed and damaging.
Another bizarre and unsupported statement appeared [2], in which
Stuart Reges, a computer science professor at the University of
Washington, opined in 2018 “…my honest view is that having 20
percent women in tech is probably the best we are likely to achieve.”
Where does this 20 percent come from? A few paragraphs earlier,
Reges pointed out the percentage of women graduating with computer
science degrees in the United States was roughly 20 percent, in 2018.
Presumably, he got the number from that statistic—taking the 2018 U.S.
value—and elevating it to the status of “best we are likely to achieve.”
But why should one take the percentage of graduating CS women in the
United States in 2018, as the “best we are likely to achieve"? Why not
choose the number for a different time or place, such as the percentage
of women graduating in CS in the United States in 1984 (37 percent);
or the percentage for India in 2015 (40 percent); or perhaps, the
percentage for Malaysia in 2001 (52 percent)?
I think that both Summers’ remarks in 2005, and Reges’ writing in 2018,
include statements based far too much on gut instinct and simplification of
the issues. And I suspect this simplification represents how a lot of people
think about these issues. As we will see, gut instinct can be utterly wrong
on these issues, and ignoring real complexity can be really damaging.
In the next three chapters, I will summarize three trends about gender
in STEM I found very shocking. The trends give some hint of the amazing
complexity of the underlying social factors. These frankly counterintuitive
results were important for me to realize that my own gut instincts were
wrong, and that there is great deal more to learn than I had any idea of,
even after three decades as a woman in engineering.
A SURPRISING LOOK AROUND THE WORLD
I
n 2011, Professor Maria Charles, a sociologist at UC-Santa Barbara,
published a paper entitled, “What Gender Is Science?” Charles had
studied the patterns of women's participation in STEM fields around the
world [3]. She found that (surprise!) women earn the majority of STEM
bachelor’s degrees in more than 20 countries.
When I’m presenting on gender in STEM, I ask people to guess which

countries are on that list. Audience members typically guess Russia, and
other countries from the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine; also some
Asian countries, such as China or Korea. Most people are then shocked
to hear that Iran topped the list, with 68 percent of the STEM bachelor’s
degrees going to women, even while women made up about 49 percent of
bachelor’s degrees overall. Women in Iran are overrepresented in STEM!
After Iran, the next dozen countries on that list are: Oman, Saudi Arabia,
United Arab Emirates, Romania, Algeria, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Kyrgyzstan,
Italy, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Panama. Of the whole list of countries
where women earn the majority of STEM bachelor’s degrees, the only
wealthy Western country is Italy. It is striking that the countries are, for
the most part, both less affluent ones, and majority Muslim. I was shocked
when I first read this paper. When I discuss this with groups, most people
are very surprised. Why should wealthy countries have fewer women going
into STEM careers than many poorer countries? And socially conservative
Muslim societies, not usually thought of as being champions of women’s
rights—why would they have women overrepresented in STEM?
If we first consider the question of less affluent countries, Professor

Charles lays out many reasons. Personal economic security and national
development are more central concerns in developing societies, and girls
may be sharing in those personal and societal concerns. Affluent people
can afford to study subjects that don’t lead to secure or high-paying jobs.
In the United States, and some other affluent Western countries, college
is viewed as a time for identity construction and self-realization, rather
than purely career preparation and economic betterment. Self-realization
can often mean focusing on expressing yourself, figuring out your essen-
tial male/female self, and finding gender-conforming things to do. Wealthy
countries have both more choices in high school—such as art, drama and
languages (which means girls can opt out of STEM classes)—and also
more college choices created for girls (home economics, early childhood
education, gender studies). Also, in a more consumer-oriented, affluent
society, a company will sell more stuff (books, toys, etc.), if boys and
girls play with different things. You have only to look at the “pink aisle”
in the toy store to see how companies sell items tailored to girls. Poorer
countries may not have such a selection of products.
What about the second question: Why do conservative Muslim countries have
more women in STEM? Professor Charles provides some reasons. Some jobs,
such as serving in the military, or as a religious leader, might be open only to
men, leaving more STEM jobs for women. Another reason has to do with what
is felt to be an appropriate environment for women who work. In the United
States, if you are a criminal attorney, you might meet with many different
clients during a day, and you would go to different places, like courtrooms
or prisons. The courtroom is a confrontational environment, a prison might
be unsafe, and some of your clients might even be criminals! A conservative
society might view such circumstances as unsuitable for a woman. On the
other hand, if you work as a software engineer, you are going to the same
place every day, and you are working with the same six coworkers every day.
That work is not confrontational—it’s pretty safe, and nobody in the office is
a criminal. So, the socially conservative viewpoint might be that the software
company is a good, safe place for a woman. From the socially progressive
viewpoint, this attitude is patronizing, but it certainly helps illustrate what
may culturally construct the gender of STEM.
I asked two Iranian women engineers what reasons propel girls into STEM
degrees in Iran, and without any hesitation they both gave the same answer:
It’s because of single-sex education. Single-sex education predominates in
Iran at the K-12 level. When a girl is in a classroom without boys, she is free
to enjoy math and science, and to do well in them—without concern that
she might be appearing less feminine, for instance, by overshadowing a boy.
This rationale carries through for having all-girls high schools and all-women
colleges. It is a reason why the Girl Scouts are on the right track in working to
create STEM experiences for girls without having boys around. Boys are great,
but there’s a place for all-girl education.
When I asked the same question of two other Iranian women engineers, they
mentioned single-sex education, but also spoke about mindset. In an extensive
series of research articles and books, the psychologist Carol Dweck has detailed
the concepts of fixed mindset versus growth mindset. People with fixed mindset
believe their own attributes, such as intelligence and personality, are fixed
intrinsic traits. These people are more likely to avoid challenges, give up when
hitting obstacles, and ignore useful criticism—because they believe that it is their
fixed attributes that prevent them from doing well; therefore effort is of no use.
In contrast, people with growth mindsets believe that such traits can be improved
through effort; so they embrace challenges, respond to obstacles by putting forth
more effort, and welcome feedback as a way to learn. For these reasons, it is
important that children, especially girls, are given a growth mindset message.
For example, getting praised for effort, rather than for innate brilliance.
One Iranian woman engineer said that she never encountered the concept of
“not being good at something,” in the sense of “not having aptitude for some-
thing,” until she moved to the United States as an adult. As a child, there was
no discussion and no concept of, say, being good at math—or not being good
at math. The only concept was of working hard at math, or not working hard
at math. In her childhood, it was as if the concepts underlying fixed mindset
did not even exist. Her parents and teachers only discussed schoolwork and
future goals in terms of learning, effort, setting goals and growing.
While I don’t know if this attitude is widespread in Iran, I found her story
intriguing. And I keep hearing things—like the Iranian woman engineer's
architect mother, who told her to avoid architecture and do something more
mathematical—because architecture is “too artsy.” Or the fact that the only
woman who ever won the Fields Medal (often considered the Nobel Prize
of Mathematics) was Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian—that suggests many
aspects of Iranian culture are very supportive of girls pursuing STEM careers.
I think it is valuable for parents, and for young people considering careers,
to be aware of these differences among countries for several reasons:
• These data showed me that my gut instincts on this subject can be totally
wrong. My unthinking assumption was that there would be more women
in STEM in more affluent countries, and also in ones with more legal and
social equality between men and women. But that intuition was flat wrong.
• For someone who has a sneaking suspicion significant biological factors

explain why women are underrepresented among STEM majors in U.S.
universities, the simple fact that there are more than 20 countries around
the world where women earn the majority of the STEM bachelor’s degrees
undermines that viewpoint. Human biology is identical in Iran, and in the
United States—so gender-related biological factors influencing STEM
must be the same in Iran and the United States. When Iran has 68
percent women STEM graduates, and the United States has far fewer,
that’s not biology; we have to chalk it up to social factors. It is helpful
ammunition against someone who says that biological factors are the
main reason for the gender gap; and if you’re that someone, your
intuition is incorrect.
• It is good to get a glimpse of the remarkable complexity of the situation—
the factors are related to economics, religion, social roles, K-12 educational
structures, family expectations, consumerism, mindset, and many more.
I wonder what would happen if Professor Reges were to teach computer

science for a year in Malaysia, where women outnumber men in computer
science and information technology [3,4], or if he were to do a sabbatical
at an Iranian university. Would he still think that 20 percent is the best a
society is likely to achieve for women in technology?
A SURPRISING LOOK ACROSS TIME
T
he percentage of women graduating from medical school was below 10
percent in 1970, but it went rather steadily upward for the next several
decades. Ever since 2005, the percentage has been hovering around
50 percent. The curve for women’s law school graduation rates is fairly
similar. For both medical school and law school, the graphs of percentages of
women from 1970 to 2010 look like fairly simple upward arcs. When I show
such curves to people, they think it’s good that men and women now have
roughly equal representation in law school and medical school. Also, no one
is surprised; people already know that the numbers are nearly equal.
Most people with whom I’ve discussed these statistics think that women’s
degrees in the sciences, similar to those in medical and law school, are
following a simple upward arc toward the 50 percent mark; perhaps, just
taking a bit longer to get there. But that is not the picture at all. Rather,
the trends are all over the place. To give a few examples, biology is hitting
60 percent; chemistry, 50 percent. Engineering is mostly just rising to 20
percent (although bioengineering and environmental engineering got to
about 40 percent); and then, became rather flat, with no improvement, for
a couple of decades.
And then there is computer science (CS). The graduation gender ratio in that
field has been acting out a total weirdness unlike anything else. Women’s
percentages of B.S. degrees in CS experienced a rapid rise in the 1970s;
peaked at about 37 percent in the early 1980s; and then, experienced a slow,
30-year decline to about 18 percent in 2015—roughly half of the peak level
from the early '80s. Most recently, the numbers seem to be improving again.
In a fascinating article [5], Clive Thompson presents several hypotheses

for the decline. First is the idea that, in the early days of CS, nobody
had personal computers at home, so boys and girls would arrive equally
unprepared for college CS classes. Everyone had an equal shot in this
upstart new discipline. Then, in the 1970s, personal computers started
arriving in homes, and parents would park them more often in the son’s
room rather than the daughter’s. Johnny would play around a bit with
programming, and he would arrive at college better prepared than Lisa to
take CS 1. Perhaps some professors noticed the higher average starting
level of the students; and they adjusted the course content a bit higher
up, preventing Johnny from getting bored, but leaving Lisa a bit behind,
and more likely to drop the major. Perhaps other professors did not adjust
the course level—but the girl noticed that she was relatively unprepared,
so she got discouraged and decamped for linguistics.
A second hypothesis has to do with movie portrayals of people in STEM

fields. Movies such as Tron (1982), War Games (1983), Revenge of
the Nerds (1984), Weird Science (1985) and Back to the Future (1985)
portrayed science as being mostly done by geeky white males. And some-
times, with dangerous consequences for humanity. Not an appealing vision
for girls thinking about STEM careers.
Other hypotheses that Thompson puts forth are about bias—conscious or

unconscious—among professors and fellow students during this time period
(teachers that didn’t call on women, classmates who made prejudicial
remarks); and about the “capacity crisis,” or weeding-out effects that went
on, when demand for CS spots outstripped supply.
A hypothesis Reges put forth [2], for explaining the decline of women in
CS after 1984, is that women react more strongly to economic downturns,
leaving fields like CS for more recession-proof areas. And men react more
strongly to economic booms, flooding in rapidly to a field when there’s an
uptick. The United States went through a recession 1980-1982, when it
experienced an unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent—the worst since
the Great Depression. So, if this theory is partially correct, that recession
could have caused some of the downturn of women majoring in CS. (Note,
that this Reges is the same Reges as in Chapter 2, who said that “having
20 percent women in tech is probably the best we are likely to achieve,” but
who was also fully aware that women constituted 37 percent in college back
in the 1980s. Weird.)
I recall my college years from 1983 to 1987, as a time when it seemed

everything was going to change in terms of women’s roles in society. To be
sure, there were always going to be a few Neanderthals, lurking in caves
here and there, who would oppose women’s progress. But overall, I recall a
sense of optimism among women in engineering and computer science, even
a sense of the inevitability of progress.
So it has been a source of great surprise and disappointment to see that

engineering has made very modest gains; and computer science declined
for 30 years. This decline is another result which most people don’t know
about. While older folks working in computer science are often aware of
the decades-long decline, young people entering CS seem to think that
the current level of about 20 percent is the way things have always been;
or perhaps, represents a slow improvement over the past. Adults outside
of CS, even those who are in neighboring fields such as engineering and
math, tend to be very surprised, when they hear about these data. They
assume, incorrectly, that CS along—with all other STEM fields—is making
steady progress—just like medicine and law, only a bit more slowly.
As with the data from different countries, the data across time does not
support a biological basis for the underrepresentation of women in CS. If the
percentage of women, over the course of 40 years, can go from 20 percent
up to 37 percent, and then back down to 20 percent; then, that is evidence
for social factors, so again this ammunition is useful. The good news is that
a great deal of research is available about what makes people drop out of a
computer science major, and how to modify the introductory courses to help
underrepresented groups succeed.
People have studied a great many aspects—such as choice of programming

language, classroom culture, active learning techniques, peer instruction,
working in groups, graphical interfaces, inclusion of robotics, peer mento-
ring, and so forth. And various efforts are working. The numbers, and the
proportion, of women in CS is on the rise again—and it is dramatically
higher in some schools. For example, both Carnegie Mellon University
and Harvey Mudd College have made massive changes in their curriculum
and culture. Fully half of the CS graduates at Harvey Mudd were women
in 2017—thanks, in large part, to a radical redesign of the introductory
courses. The redesigned courses had several different tracks, including one
labeled “green,” aimed at novices, in which the application examples were
drawn from biology. After a couple of decades of puzzlement, people have
finally figured out a bunch of approaches that work.
A SURPRISING LOOK ACROSS
SOCIOECONOMIC LEVELS
A
friend recently lamented that her 16-year-old daughter was not interested
in STEM. Olivia got A’s in math and science, definitely had a good head for
it, and had nothing against those fields. But Olivia just wasn’t interested in
STEM as a career. Her love was theater. Mom was a medical doctor and Dad was
a scientist; and they both thought that science would have been a wonderful road
to success for their bright and hardworking daughter, an easier road than acting.
When I probed Mom about Olivia’s activities, a puzzling picture emerged. She
had been in 20 children’s theater productions over the years, had nearly a dozen
years of dance lessons under her belt, and quite a few years of private voice
lessons. Considering the parents’ interest in STEM careers for their children, that
well-resourced family poured a formidable amount of time and money into that
child, since she was a small tot—to further her aptitude and interest in…a career
in acting! Mom was pleased that at least Olivia’s younger brother was interested
in STEM.
In 2018, researchers at the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis

published a paper [6], Gender Achievement Gaps in U.S. School Districts,
detailing their comparative study of the performance of boys and girls on
tests of math and of English/Language Arts (ELA). They looked at 260
million test scores for children in grades 3 through 8, in about 10,000
different school districts across the United States. For each school district,
they created a composite score of socioeconomic level. Then, they looked at
how the gender gap between boys and girls on the test scores changed, as a
function of the socioeconomic level.
The paper has a plot in which the x-axis shows the socioeconomic score of the
school district, and the y-axis shows the achievement gap between boys and
girls. For English/Language Arts, the data came out that girls have better scores
on average than boys do. A regression line fit to the data was very nearly
horizontal—showing that the better performance of girls was happening rather
evenly across all socioeconomic levels. I already had a vague notion that girls
did somewhat better than boys in ELA, so this result did not surprise me.
The math result amazed me. The researchers found that boys outperform
girls in math in the more affluent school districts, but that girls outperform
boys in the poorer ones. There is a correlation of 0.43 between the socio-
economic score and the gender gap score, showing a very solid direct
relationship. The study involved millions of individual test scores, and ten
thousand different school districts, so this result is very significant.
The researchers considered various possible explanations for these findings.

One of them is that affluent families, like Olivia’s, have time and money resources
they can pour into indulging and amplifying a child’s aptitudes and preferences.
Perhaps it starts because the parents themselves have gender-conforming plans
for their kids—Jake should join the robotics club and science summer camp;
whereas Emma should take piano lessons, and go to summer camp for fashion
design. Or perhaps the children pick up gender-conforming ideas from the wider
society around them; and the affluent parents jump on those ideas, indulging
and intensifying them. Either way it starts, the way it proceeds is the same:
Jake gets construction toys like Lego, K’Nex, and Erector sets, and goes to the
science museum; later, he joins the robotics club, the science bowl team, and
takes coding classes. Emma follows a different path—involving dolls, fashion,
music lessons, art classes and domestic animals. Over time, the children
strengthen certain skills, and since people usually like what they are skilled at,
the children’s gender-conforming preferences grow stronger—in parallel with their
gender-conforming skills.
A second explanation is that in wealthy families, men have higher educational

attainment and earn more than women, on average; whereas in poorer families,
it is the reverse: women have higher educational attainment and earn more than
men, on average. So, affluent families could have a reasonable expectation of
greater return on investment for activities that promote boys’ learning; whereas,
the opposite would be true in poorer families.
I sometimes think about Olivia’s family. At what point along that journey
of dance lessons, voice lessons and theater productions did her parents
realize they launched Olivia on an unchangeable trajectory? Reinforcing
and amplifying the gender-conforming interests of a four-year-old can have
long-term consequences. And for a parent such as myself, who would prefer
the kids to choose a STEM field, how does one balance the development of
a love for the arts with the gentle push toward a future STEM career? I am
writing this paragraph with the background music of my oldest son strum-
ming the ukulele and singing. I took him to science museums, put him in
math summer camps, and bought him science and construction toys. He also
had years of piano lessons, switched to a cappella when he went to college;
and since then, has plunked around on the ukulele. It is a pleasure for me
to listen to him, beginner uke-player that he is, because I’m his Mom. I’m
happy that the music lessons took root for him. But I’m even happier that he
has a master’s degree in computer science.
BELIEVING IN DIFFERENCE CAN
PRODUCE DIFFERENCE
W
hen high school boys and girls who are all getting the same grade in
math (say, an A) are asked to rate their own mathematical ability,
the boys on average will rate themselves higher than the girls do.
They are all getting A’s, but the boys will think they are God’s Gift to the field
of mathematics, whereas the girls just think they’re pretty good at math.
Likewise, among students getting B’s, the boys will think they’re pretty good,
and the girls will think of themselves as rather mediocre.
Where cultural stereotypes exist that one group does better than another,
it’s a fact that members of the group ‘supposed to’ do less well will think
of themselves as doing less well, even when they’re doing great. These
self-assessments on math ability have an impact on careers, because (after
controlling for actual ability) high school students who assess their own ability
as being higher are more likely to enroll in a high school calculus class and
to major in a STEM field. If you need to think of yourself as “pretty good in
math” to major in STEM, then it might be that boys with A’s or B’s in high
school math will choose STEM majors, along with girls who got A’s, but not
the girls who got B’s. It’s unfortunate that, for girls, such a discrepancy exists
between actually being capable in math—and thinking of yourself as capable.
This example is but one of how believing in difference can actually produce
difference. Because a cultural stereotype exists that boys are better at math,
girls tend to assess their performance as lower than it actually is, and to
self-select out of STEM careers as a result.
In a famous study, Shelley Correll administered a test to undergraduate

students in which she showed people, individually, pictures that had patterns
of black and white blocks [7]. The test subjects were asked to say whether
there was more black or more white in some area of the picture. Correll told
the subjects that people who had good “contrast sensitivity” would be likely
to answer correctly. The secret was the picture contained the same amount of
white and black, so no answer was actually right or wrong. Further, the test
did not actually measure contrast sensitivity—a fictitious ability that Correll
had just made up. After the test, Correll told each subject that they got about
60 percent correct. The interesting part, and the point of the study, was that
one group of subjects was told in advance that boys were better than girls at
contrast sensitivity. The other group was told that there was no difference.
After the test, the students were asked how well they thought they did, and
whether they would like to work in a field that requires contrast sensitivity
skills. For the students who were told that boys were better than girls, there
was a gender difference in how well they thought they did. Girls thought their
scores were not good, and they didn’t want to work in a field that needed
contrast sensitivity, whereas boys thought their scores were good, and they
might consider working in such a field. In the other group, there wasn’t any
gender difference. Remember, all subjects were told the same fake score of
60 percent. So, with this study, Correll showed that believing in a difference in
ability (in this case, believing that boys have better contrast sensitivity skill)
could lead to a difference in self-confidence and interest (girls think they’re
doing badly at it, and don’t want to pursue that field)—even when there is
zero actual difference in ability.
Another example where believing in difference produces difference occurs with

stereotype threat. That term refers to the predicament in which individuals feel
at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their group, so they actually
do worse on some physical or mental task. For example, in a study of first-year
college students with strong math skills, women did 20 points worse on a math
test—after being told that women do worse (threat condition). However, there
was only a two-point difference when they were told in advance that there’s no
difference (non-threat condition).
There have been more than 300 studies on stereotype threat since 1995,
and it’s been shown to apply to all kinds of different groups. Even white
men can get in a stereotype threat situation if they think, for example,
that their math performance will be compared against that of Asian men.
Many possible mediators cause the lowered performance that occurs
under the threat condition—for example anxiety, negative thoughts and
mind-wandering.
As a woman in electrical engineering, I’ve definitely experienced that stereotype

threat feeling, when I’m worried about confirming negative stereotypes. There
was a time when I was the only female professor in my department, which
definitely felt like a burden, like I had something to prove. Back then, if I were
to screw up, it might have been very discouraging for the girls in class, because
I would have been their only female professor. There were times, standing
in front of a class, that my brain had some bad moments—with thoughts of
Spontaneous Professorial Combustion. I’m sure that, on occasion, I have had all
of the above: anxiety, blood pressure swings, negative thoughts about screwing
up, and mind-wandering. Of course, I've told myself, quite reasonably, that
most professions have their episodes of anxiety and stress. Imagine a lawyer
litigating a higher profile case than before, a teacher meeting with a hostile
parent, a pilot with too many warning lights blinking red, or a surgeon
encountering bleeding in the operating room. I just had to do my best to
shove any negative or distracting thoughts away, and go on teaching the class.
It wasn’t just students that I worried about. If I didn’t publish lots of papers,
it might confirm another faculty member’s secret suspicions that more
women shouldn’t be hired. So, in these various ways regarding teaching and
publishing and generally doing well at my job, the stakes for doing well felt
very much higher for me than for my male colleagues.
But we all have many facets to our lives, and it is easy to think of ways in
which my gender made the stakes lower for me than for my typical male
colleagues. For example, I won a teaching award, and I published lots of
papers—and as a result, I got a series of accelerated promotions. I was
delighted to have the recognition, but the extra salary did not represent a
desperately needed increase for my family. My husband has a good job, and
he makes more money than I do. Most of my male colleagues do not have
spouses who make more money than they do. In fact, many of my male
colleagues have stay-at-home wives; so for them—publishing more papers,
and progressing rapidly through the professorial ranks—is the only thing that
puts bread on the table and pays the mortgage. In this respect, the stakes
have been lower for me.
I point it out, not because stereotype threat isn’t real. It is, and I’ve felt it.
But at the same time, I want to acknowledge that it’s a complex situation.
I think that the past three chapters should convince us of how misguided
Reges' speculation that 20 percent is the about the best we can expect to
reach for women in technology, as well as Summers' speculation that
biological factors are more important than socialization and discrimination, in
determining which women reach high levels in STEM fields. We can condemn
the statements as being unscientific, because of the high level of uncertainty
surrounding the issues. But in addition, we can condemn the statements
as being damaging, because of the problem that believing in difference can
produce difference. Believing these statements can discourage people, or
cause them to perform less well. If a girl, or her parents or teachers, believes
that “intrinsic aptitude” is rather important to determining success in a STEM
career, and that boys have the right genes for this intrinsic aptitude—then, the
girl might be tempted to give up and choose a different career. Or her parents
or teachers may steer her elsewhere. Why try so desperately hard, when the
deck is stacked against you from birth? And if you believe that there’s a differ-
ence in intrinsic aptitude, that belief alone can work to create a difference.
Believing in one’s inferiority can make it more challenging to do good work.
Now if a statement is definitively true, then the fact that it is damaging may
be something we just have to live with. But when it is untrue; or the truth of
the matter is not yet known, because it’s an enormously complex and insuf-
ficiently researched area—then the fact that the statement is damaging is
relevant, and it’s irresponsible to make the statement. So, let’s be careful
about the messages of differences that we spread.
A friend told me recently of her sister-in-law expressing pride and pleasure

that her little girl, in 2nd grade, had gotten a perfect score in math. In the
presence of the child, the mother enthused about how bright the daughter
was, and how it was all the more remarkable “because girls aren’t as good
as boys at math.” No doubt the mother meant well, but she surely did not
have any idea how damaging it is for the girl to overhear that remark, and
how she was lowering the chances for perfect math scores in the future.
IMPOSTER SYNDROME
I
was a confident student in high school, getting straight A’s. But when I
went to college, my confidence and self-esteem took a major hit.
At Caltech in the early '80s, the ratio of men to women was 6 to 1. And the
ratio was far worse in electrical engineering. I felt I didn’t belong, and there
were a few people who actively contributed to that feeling. People who told
me, directly to my face, that I didn’t belong at Caltech, and that I’d only
been admitted because I was a girl, which I came to suspect was true. I
developed a bad case of imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people can’t

internalize their accomplishments. The term was coined by researchers
Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. People with imposter syndrome
are convinced they are “frauds,” and they don’t deserve the success they
have achieved. It comes with feelings that everyone else is smarter, that one
does not belong where one is, and that one’s success is not due to any actual
talent. Any proof of one’s own success is chalked up to something else:
• good luck
• charm
• being in the right place at the right time
• affirmative action policies
• having connections
People with imposter syndrome come up with many things to tell them-
selves, to explain away their success, such as:
• It’s only because they like me.
• I was in the right place at the right time.
• I just work harder than the others.
• It’s only a matter of time before I am found out.
• Someone must have made a terrible mistake (to hire me…to admit me to
this school, etc.).
• I don’t really understand the material; I’m just good at taking tests.
The phenomenon has received quite a bit of study over the years. While it’s
not considered a psychiatric disorder, as classified by the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) of the American Psychiatric
Association, it’s definitely a cognitive distortion, in which people are not
seeing reality correctly. Some prevalent studies found that 40 percent of
successful people consider themselves frauds; and 70 percent of people feel
like imposters, at one time or another.
In terms of demographics, this syndrome is particularly common among

successful women, high achievers, African-Americans, Hispanics, other
members of minority groups, and first-generation professionals. Lots of
famous people are members of this club:
• Albert Einstein: “I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”
• Meryl Streep: “Why would anyone want to see me in a movie? I don’t

know how to act, so why am I doing this?”
• Maya Angelou: “I’ve written 11 books—but each time I think, Uh oh,

they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re
going to find me out.”
• Charles Darwin: “But I am very poorly today, and feel very stupid… One
lives only to make blunders.” (1861, two years after, On the Origin of Species)
• John Steinbeck: “I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability…For

no one else knows my lack of ability, the way I do. I am pushing against
it all the time. Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but
when it is done it slides into mediocrity…” (1938, while writing The Grapes
of Wrath)
In college, I believed that I had some ill-defined, “test-taking ability,” that

allowed me to answer test questions correctly on, say, electromagnetics—
but which had no connection with being smart—or with understanding
the electromagnetic theory underlying the test questions. I thought of
myself as a homing pigeon, which can find its way home precisely. But no
one makes the mistake of thinking that the homing pigeon is some kind
of navigational and cartographic genius—plotting paths using sun angles
and trigonometry, or perhaps having mastered the theory underlying the
Earth’s magnetic field. Even when I was getting A’s, I thought I really did
not understand anything, because I did not know how to derive every
equation. I was a fraud. A human homing pigeon. And sooner or later, this
truth would come out and I’d be exposed. And that would be awful on so
many levels.
My Dad was so proud of me—My daughter, the electrical engineer! If we’d

go to the grocery store, buying a quart of milk, he’d have to share this
information with the cashier. Do you know what my daughter is studying?
She’s studying electrical engineering! I couldn’t bear to think how he would
feel if all my accomplishments would be stripped away, and it would be
exposed that all those years he’d been saving money to put me through
college—I wasn’t learning what I was supposed to be learning.
When I was accepted to an electrical engineering Ph.D. program, I was

terrified that I was now more likely to be exposed. As a teaching assistant
(TA), you run a discussion section, and you’re expected to answer student
questions. I did a great deal of preparation for each section; and I somehow
managed to answer questions, and carry the deception on a little longer.
In my 3rd year of graduate school, I went to a workshop on imposter

syndrome. I had not heard the term before. Interesting, but it doesn’t
pertain to me. I knew that I was the real McCoy, the real imposter!
When I got my faculty job at UC-San Diego, the stakes for getting exposed
became so much higher. Now I was teaching the classes. The State of
California was paying my salary; so in some sense, I was now defrauding
the taxpayers. For each one-hour lecture, I put in 40 hours to prepare,
reading every textbook on the subject. Trying to avoid being unmasked was
exhausting, all-consuming work. For many years, I was the only woman in
the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department. If my fraud was
exposed, I imagined how awful it would be for all women students—if the
sole woman professor went down in flames. And for my Dad, in his late 80s
and 90s, with bad cognitive decline. He couldn’t remember what he had for
breakfast, or the names of all his grandchildren, but he always remembered
that I’m an electrical engineer. Dad even wanted to share that with the guy
in the hospital pushing his wheelchair.
I shared my fears with almost nobody. Someone might say “Oh, don't be
ridiculous, you’re great!” I found that response about as useful as telling a
new mother suffering from postpartum depression, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,
you’re healthy—and you have a healthy baby!”
Eventually my perceptions shifted. I can’t pinpoint exactly what did it.
Getting papers published, winning a teaching award, getting my first grant,
getting tenure, learning more about imposter syndrome—those things were
all part of it. But it took more than a decade.
Why is it important to know about imposter syndrome?
Imposter syndrome can have many serious bad effects. Some people drop
out, change majors, or change careers. Maybe they don’t seek promotions,
or they don’t put themselves in the running for awards. They constantly fear
being exposed as an imposter. It is very stressful, and it takes lots of time to
over-prepare to avoid "unmasking." People experiencing this syndrome have
distorted reactions to success and failure: lack of pleasure, when successful;
and feeling confirmed as a fraud, when unsuccessful.
Why is it important, in the context of this book about girls going into STEM,
to discuss imposter syndrome? Women being a minority in most STEM fields
can lead to feelings of not belonging, which can lead to imposter syndrome.
I have spoken to groups of high school girls about imposter syndrome
several times, and some of the girls tell me that I’m describing exactly how
they feel. One girl said “Wow—I get straight A’s in school, but I always feel
like I don’t know anything.” It’s important for girls to know that they are not
assessing themselves accurately, and that plenty of other people fall into this
imposter trap, too.
What to do?
• Awareness: Learn about it, and be willing to talk about it. Some people
think, “That other person has impostor syndrome, but I’m a real fraud,”
after they learn about it. Know this reaction is common. Think about
people you know who have other cognitive distortions (e.g., depression,
anxiety disorder) at either clinical, or sub-clinical levels. Realize that
cognitive distortions come in many different shapes and sizes.
• Share your thoughts and feelings: Be a safe listener when others

share. People should realize many people are in the same boat.
• Monitor your self-talk: If a little voice in your head sometimes

tells you what a terrible job you did on something, right after you
finish doing it—know that little voice is not always right, and it’s not
always your friend. That internal script may be hurting you. Monitor it.
Consider shutting it down.
• Make a list of strengths: Write down what you’re good at. Ask others
for input. If you’re giving supportive feedback to someone else, don’t
say things like “I think you’re awesome!” It's too generic, and you won’t
be convincing. Instead, be specific and detailed in saying what you think
someone’s strengths are.
• Accept that perfection is unrealistic and costly. Life is not mistake-

free. The idea that if you’re not the female Isaac Newton, or the
African-American da Vinci, then you’re a fraud, is absurd. We must reject
that notion. Embrace concepts of “progress” and “good enough.” Evaluate
whether you are overpreparing.
Especially for girls in STEM, we have to check in with them in a very individual
way. We must spread awareness about imposter syndrome; talk about strengths;
discuss realistic self-assessment; learn whether they maybe have distorted
perceptions of how they’re doing; and discover if they’re holding themselves to
impossible standards of perfection.
As an engineering professor, I had to decide it was okay not to prepare for

every single possible question. It was okay to say, “Great question, but I
don’t know the answer. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” That was a break-
through moment for me, when I could decide it was okay to say that, to feel
that saying it did not mean I was a fraud as a professor. The lecture wasn’t
perfect, but it was good enough.
And now I will stop polishing this chapter on imposter syndrome. It’s not
perfect, but it’s good enough.
I KILLED ANOTHER HOUSEPLANT
R
ecently, I was at a seminar where a lawyer was presenting to a room
full of senior faculty. The presentation had to do with being a successful
negotiator, and had nothing to do with math. But then she mentioned
something about statistics, and said, as an aside, “I always hated math.” I
thought, I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time someone says that. Every
week, someone says it, or a variation:
• I was never good at math.
• I could never understand math.
• I always hated math.
And the someone is almost always a woman. You don’t hear men say it.
Why do women say it? I think there’s a social need, at times, to say some-
thing self-deprecating. A woman might say she has a terrible memory. Or
that she has just killed another houseplant. And isn’t it wonderful that you
have such a green thumb?
But there’s something else going on here, beyond just the general need to
be self-deprecating. It’s specific to math (or science), and it’s asserting their
femininity. You never hear women say, “I always hated art”; or “I always
hated literature”; or “I always hated music.” A woman never claims to be
totally disengaged from those huge branches of human thought and endeavor.
Growing up in Los Angeles, I internally experienced this tension between

femininity and math. Four decades ago, I lied about my math grade. Of
those 7th graders who fib about math grades, I’d guess that most are
afraid of the parental wrath that accompanies a failing grade. So, you say
you got a B, praying to the U.S. Postal Service gods for slow mail delivery,
because the arrival of the report card will reveal the awful truth. However,
this one was not my lie. My math grade was a solid A, and my concern
had nothing to do with parents. It had to do with femininity, and with
my social standing in junior high, which was precarious enough already.
There was no need to make matters any worse. I told my friends I got a
C. I was also getting A’s in all other subjects, but math was the one where
I felt the need to lie.
Recently (2019), I asked a group of high school girls interested in science
and engineering whether they would feel comfortable letting classmates
know that they enjoyed math, or that they were getting an A in it. Most girls
were fine with it, but several girls shook their heads. It is definitely still an
issue today, the same as way back then.
When women say, “I always hated math,” it sends a destructive message to

all the girls within earshot, a message that it’s really quite okay for a woman
to be completely disengaged and turned off from this particular huge branch
of human thought and endeavor, maybe even a message that she’s a more
feminine woman because of it. And, equally unfortunately, it sends that
same message to all the boys within earshot, too.
Returning to the concepts of fixed mindset and growth mindset from Chapter 3;
when anyone says, “I was never good at math,” it also sends out a pernicious
message of reinforcement for fixed mindset. That adult is implicitly saying:
There are two kinds of people in the world…those who are born good at math
and those who aren’t. And I’m in that group of people who are not good at
math. The real story is that there are two kinds of people in the world, those
with growth mindset who believe that they, like anyone else, can read books
and ask questions and put forth effort and thereby learn math, and those with
fixed mindset who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world, those
who are innately good at math—and those who aren’t.
So, here’s a simple rule: Don’t ever say it. Even if it is true, do not say it.
And if you hear your friend or sister or aunt say it, quietly ask them to stop
doing that. You can all find something else to be self-deprecating about. Go
with the terrible memory. That one is perennially useful. Or perhaps, create
one that does double-duty—as self-deprecating, and also turning gender
norms on their head: I am such a terrible cook. It’s really sad that fish
sticks are my go-to meal. Even a frozen pie always seems to end up burnt
to a crisp. Or if that’s too much for you, use the neutral houseplant. Oh, it’s
awful…I killed another houseplant.
HELPING PEOPLE, HELPING THE
PLANET—REALLY!
C
ar ignition systems, gun sights, reconnaissance airplanes, space lasers,
missile guidance systems…if you were forced to label these terms
as being either “boy words” or “girl words,” you’d make the choice
everyone makes—boy words. But what about these: Helping an injured child
walk, ensuring everyone has enough to eat, helping an elderly couple live
comfortably in their home, reducing the social isolation of a deaf person.
Now you might think, “girl words.”
Of course, engineers are engaged in all of the above, the "boy concepts" and
the "girl ones." But I would wager that most people, when asked what engineers
create, would readily come up with a list that includes cars, weapons, airplanes,
computers, cell phones. It would take longer for people to come up with cardiac
pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, magnetic resonance machines; and
all manner of hospital equipment, solar panels, irrigation systems and weather
monitoring stations. The vehicles and weapons come quickly to mind; whereas,
perhaps devices for healthcare, energy sustainability and food production do not
come to mind so quickly.
If you look at which sub-fields of engineering women go into, it is not a surprise

that women have strikingly higher participation rates in bioengineering and
environmental engineering, compared to other areas. While for both men and
women, a range of motivations exist among those who choose an engineering
career, I suspect a higher proportion of women than of men subscribe to the
motivations of wanting to help people and/or help the planet. And a higher
proportion of men than women might have goals of playing with cool technology,
seeking fame or fortune, and having stable, well-paying jobs. In addition to those
goals of helping people and helping the planet, I also think the perception exists
that, within engineering, much of the “helping people” and “helping the planet”
takes place in bioengineering and environmental engineering.
For some people, even putting “engineering” together with “helping

people” seems discordant—so thank goodness the newer bioengineering
and environmental engineering fields came along to show people that
engineers don’t all spend all their time trying to devise better ways to kill
people. If you look at various definitions for the term “helping profession,”
you will see things similar to this one from Wiktionary [8]:
A profession that nurtures the growth of, or addresses, the problems of a
person's physical, psychological, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual well-
being—including medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, psychological counseling,
social work, education, life coaching, and ministry.
But why is an electrical engineer who designs a cardiac pacemaker, less

of a “helping professional” than the cardiologist who implants it? And why
is the mechanical engineer who creates a prosthetic leg, less of a helping
professional than the physical therapist who teaches the kid to use it? And
why is the computer scientist who develops a computer game to teach math
to children with ADD, less of a helping professional than the regular class-
room math teacher? And why do we have to stick with these examples from
healthcare and education—to define helping professions? An elderly New
Yorker is immeasurably happier, because she can regularly videochat with
her 12 grandchildren, who are spread from North Carolina to California.
She’s safer; and also emotionally better off, because she can call for help
with the cellphone in her pocket, if she falls. What about the helping profes-
sionals (engineers) who designed and built those devices?
We can help people and the planet in innumerable ways; and we do a

tremendous disservice, to girls in particular, when we present engineering
and physical sciences as not being helping professions.
Recently, someone offered a prize for engineering research that constituted

“ethical engineering.” This award provoked a minor volcanic eruption within
my engineering faculty "email-o-sphere." What did they mean by ethical
engineering? It is the same kind of problem as defining whether engineers
“help people.” We quickly discarded the notion that the prize is meant to
reward research conducted in an ethical manner. If the prize were meant
merely for, say, sharing credit appropriately, avoiding falsifying data,
eschewing bribery, and not harassing students, I am happy to say that
most of us would qualify.
So really, the prize has to be meant for engineering that has some ethical
result, that “helps people,” rather than for engineering conducted in an
ethical manner. But how does one define "ethical manner"? Does it come
back to healthcare, education, saving the planet? Do only faculty and their
graduate students who do research on prosthetics and solar cells need
apply? What about people who study communication devices? Is that not
ethical? Indeed, few inventions in the history of the world have helped as
many people as the cell phone. But that is not what pops to mind when one
thinks about “ethical engineering.”
Returning to girls in STEM, we need to change this perception. It calls for
change at multiple levels. One aspect that must change is for girls interested
in healthcare as the definition of helping people, they should know that every
STEM field connects with healthcare—not just biology and bioengineering.
Within engineering, electrical engineers make cardiac pacemakers, medical
imaging equipment and biosensors. Mechanical engineers make prosthetics,
robots for precision surgery and exoskeletons, so paralyzed people can walk.
Civil engineers create new buildings or retrofit older buildings, so that they can
be accessible to people with disabilities. Nanoengineers make nanoscale devices
that can bridge gaps in the spinal cord, providing just the right scaffolding
so nerve cells can grow across. Outside of engineering, computer scientists
make computer vision systems that would let blind people know exactly what’s
around them. Mathematicians do statistics, crucial for understanding and
stopping epidemics, improving public health, and pretty much everything else.
Physicists have the biophysics field, applying knowledge of math and physics to
such biological processes as how nerve cells communicate, or how changes in
DNA can convert healthy cells to cancer cells. So, if a girl’s definition of helping
people is healthcare, then she should know that pretty much all branches of
engineering, as well as math, physics and chemistry can get in on the act.
But we should also work to broaden a girl’s understanding of helping

people beyond just healthcare. The people who make the major advances
in ending world hunger, developing clean energy sources, solving climate
change problems, providing clean drinking water around the globe, and
developing a second home for humanity on another planet are going to be
STEM practitioners. Through a STEM education, the potential is there to
help people in a very, very, big way.
PASSION? WHAT PASSION?
I
n high school, I spent a year volunteering in a hospital emergency room
to see if I liked it (I did). I spent hours in a courtroom to figure out if I
liked litigation (I did not). By the end of high school, I’d narrowed my
career choices down to four:
• Neurosurgeon (well, some kind of doctor, but neurosurgeon sounded cool)
• Electrical engineer (my Dad was an electrical engineer)
• Physicist (because astrophysicist sounded cool, too; and maybe I could be

an astronaut?)
• Writer
My first quarter in college, I took a course on economics (utility functions!

supply-demand curves! Woo!), and I loved it. I took a class on environmental
engineering (wastewater treatment using countercurrent flow—one of the
coolest concepts ever!), and I loved it. An undeclared freshman is supposed
to narrow down, figure out a focus, and declare a major. But by the end of the
first quarter, my list of possible majors had, well, expanded.
Meanwhile, over in Normalsville, my roommate declared she was majoring in

biology. She’d known, apparently since toddlerhood, that she wanted to study
vision. She wanted to get a bachelor’s degree in biology, do a Ph.D. studying
vision, do a postdoc, and then get a faculty position—studying vision. That
was her passion. And that is exactly what she did: B.S. degree, Ph.D., postdoc
at NIH, faculty position, all focused on primate vision. She had a passion, and
she was assiduously following it.
What was wrong with me? I didn’t have a passion. I thoroughly enjoyed,
and was good at, eight or 10 different things. But I wasn’t passionate about
any of them. My Greek chorus—consisting of parents, doting aunts, caring
teachers, nosy neighbors, commencement speakers, and helpful librarians—
all sang, “Follow your passion,” in unison, because the chorus’s job is to
provide insight that the protagonist lacks. But “follow your passion” assumes
that you have one, and the injunction is merely to follow it, rather than to go
diffusely wandering off in some random direction of indifference.
Rather than celebrating the fact that I enjoyed and was good at several
things, I agonized, and I tried to hide from my Greek chorus, which never
works. When Caltech forced me to declare a major, I decided I could keep
three top options open (electrical engineering, physics and medicine) by
double majoring in electrical engineering and physics, while simultaneously
completing the requirements for medical school admission. It was painful to
narrow it down to three. In junior year, the workload became untenable, and
so I said a requiem for the physics major, and mourned the loss of Pamela-
the-quantum-physicist who was never to be. Now down to two options,
I finished four years with an electrical engineering (EE) degree and med
school requirements done.
I gained admittance to various Electrical Engineering Ph.D. programs, and

to med school, only to face the next agonizing quandary. At this final hour
of undergrad life, why had my passion still not emerged? How could I be
expected to decide between medical school and engineering graduate school
in its absence? I really liked both options. The incessant “follow your passion”
buzzing meant I had only one worthy way to decide the route to follow. I
would be forced to reach a decision using some unworthy mechanism. I chose
to go to graduate school in electrical engineering, because I had a scholarship
from the National Science Foundation to do my Ph.D. at Stanford in electrical
engineering. To attend Stanford Medical School, I would have had to take out
a loan.
What an unworthy way to decide! If only I’d known my passion, I could have
made the choice in a worthy manner.
There are two codas to this story. The first is that, in the end, I’m very happy
being an engineering professor. My research topics on image/video processing,
data compression and wireless communication are exciting. Interacting with
students and teaching are always interesting, and keep me learning and
growing. I love the opportunities to constantly learn about new areas. Along
the way, I have had several opportunities to bring my medical interests into
my engineering work. My Ph.D. dissertation was on how medical image
digital processing can affect the interpretation that radiologists make. And
I’m currently working on eye-tracking, to assess gaze behavior in children
with autism spectrum disorder. Over the years, I brought in some physics,
for example, in a project aimed at correcting color distortion in underwater
images—based on wavelength-dependent scattering and absorption. I even
got to bring in the economics topics I learned in the first quarter of my
freshman year. I teamed up with a UC-San Diego economist to apply concepts
of resource allocation to the problem of allocating bits to multiple video streams
in a network. So far, I have not figured out a way to bring the countercurrent
flow ideas or wastewater treatment plants into my research on video processing
and wireless communications. But, I still have a decade or two until retirement.
Even the high school goal of being a writer has found considerable
expression. I’ve written hundreds of technical papers, and also one fiction
book. The Secret Code Menace, published by Ransom (UK) in 2016, is
for ages 9 to 11. It introduces error correction coding, and other wireless
communication concepts, through a fictional story. The code starts out
as a way for children to send secret messages in school, but it winds up
playing an unexpected and crucial role during a hostage crisis.
The second coda to this story was that, a few years ago, I discovered that
paper by sociologist Maria Charles, who attributes some of the STEM gender
gap in affluent countries to well-meaning people encouraging girls to “follow
their passion.” [3] Whether we’re talking about kids at ages 12-13, or young
adults at 18-20, many of them haven’t found a passion yet. According to one
survey, only 40 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds say they know what type of
career they’d like to have in the future. [9]
So, what happens when people tell a girl repeatedly, “Follow your passion”;
and she cannot answer the question, “What am I passionate about?” She
might well transform the question in her mind into, “What should I be
passionate about?” or “What would society approve of me being passionate
about?” Well, when you phrase the question that way, the girl is not likely
to answer: Society would expect me to be passionate about setting a land
speed record, so I’m going to major in automotive engineering! No, the girl
is going to think: I ought to be passionate about helping children, so I’m
going to study early childhood education. Or maybe I’ll be a pediatrician.
So basically, the “Follow your passion” advice tends to push girls, especially
those who don’t have a passion, into gender-conforming choices.
In talking with many people about this phrase, I find that people think of
“Follow your passion,” as being appropriate, if somewhat hackneyed, advice.
People seem to think that the advice will be liberating to young people, as
in: I can feel free to pursue what I really want to pursue. The well-meaning
purveyors of this trite phrase don’t understand that children and young
adults often feel this advice is a burden, as in: Something must be wrong
with me, because I don’t have a passion; and I feel an enormous pressure to
acquire or simulate a passion, as soon as possible. It pushes girls away from
STEM and into gender-conforming career choices.
So don’t say, “Follow your passion.” Instead, say, “Nurture an interest.” I

have met many girls who are interested simultaneously in lots of things—and
who view that as cause for concern. Let’s celebrate it, instead. It is fine to
nurture several interests. And before you even know what you’re interested
in, just go ahead and explore. When you acquire a few tentative interests,
dig a little deeper on several of them. There isn’t anything wrong with you, if
you have four interest areas, but you don’t have a passion.
I would go a little farther than just replacing the phrase, “Follow your
passion” with “Nurture an interest.” If the child or young adult has
a STEM interest within the set of things they like to do, I would say:
Nurture a STEM interest. If my child’s interests were 100 percent in
arts, humanities and athletics, I’d support those activities, but if I had a
daughter who expressed interest in civil engineering and chemistry, and
who also really liked creative writing, dancing, and making jewelry out
of beads, I wouldn’t nurture all five of those activities evenhandedly. I’d
be pushing the engineering and chemistry, for several reasons:
• First, while one can have professional, emotional and intellectual fulfillment
in any of those careers, the STEM fields have a greater likelihood of economic
security and job security. My distant relative, Alicia, got a Ph.D. in anthro-
pology, but could not ever find a job in anthropology. She ended up working at
a lighting fixture store, feeling that her prestigious university had let her down
and deceived her—by making it seem that a Ph.D. in anthropology gives one a
good chance of working within that field.
• Second, it’s quite possible to be a civil engineer and do creative writing

as a hobby, but the reverse is much less likely. My friend, Sasha, is a
high-powered neuroscientist with a fulfilling career. She is also very
talented as a polymer clay artist. One room of Sasha’s house is devoted
to tools and materials for her polymer clay hobby, and she makes objects
that are whimsical and beautiful. On occasion, she teaches a workshop on
it, and she enjoys inspiring others. I believe that Sasha is deeply fulfilled—
both in her neuroscience career—and as an artist. But you generally don’t
encounter people who have a day job in the arts; and for their hobby, have
one room of their house converted into a neuroscience lab.
• Third, from the point of view of society, there is a great shortage of STEM
professionals, and no shortage of jewelry makers, dancers, or creative writers.
Don’t feel required to have a passion, and do view having several interests as a
positive. Nurture the STEM interests; and maybe in the end, several disparate,
but interesting and productive, flowers will bloom on the STEM stem.
BEWARE OF WILD CATS
A
few years ago, I was at a conference in where engineering leaders in
academia were talking about how to attract and retain more girls in
engineering. A woman suggested that people should be wary of CATs.
A Career Assessment Tool (CAT) is a questionnaire that attempts to ascertain
a person’s interests and aptitudes, and then suggest possible careers. First-
year college students, who are undecided about what major to declare, may
take CATs; or people contemplating career changes, might take one later in
life. For example, a veteran considering a transition to civilian employment
might take the questionnaire. Typically, the CAT asks a series of questions
about a person’s interests, and then will usually put out scores on various
traits or abilities (e.g., persuasiveness, organization), and a ranked list of
suggested careers.
The warning arose because a CAT had been administered to a small group
of college-senior women engineering students. The output of the CAT had
the career of “engineer” in the top ten recommended careers for only a
couple of the students. Nearly all of these women engineering students were
recommended to consider jobs in healthcare (doctor, nurse, psychologist,
social worker, etc.). The result was worrisome: would an undeclared, first-year
woman, with similar characteristics, also be told that she belongs in healthcare;
and so, might never even consider engineering? Although this mini-study was
very intriguing, it had some limitations—so it was not published, and did not
generate much discussion. First, only a small number of students were involved.
Second, the study did not include any men, so it’s unclear whether the CAT
not recommending engineering to women engineering students was a gender
effect (which would pose a problem); or perhaps, the CAT did not recommend
engineering much to anyone (which would still be a problem, but a different
kind of problem). Also, the women were not surveyed about their satisfaction
with engineering. Therefore, it was possible that these women were unhappy
with engineering, and may have been happier in healthcare.
I suspect that most people would agree: if a male student and a female
student, both juniors in college, are both doing well—and equally well—in
engineering classes; and both are very pleased about their choice of an
engineering major, then they should both receive equal encouragement to
continue. But consider those two students two years earlier, as uncertain,
first-year students pondering whether engineering is right for them; or
perhaps, with no idea of what major would suit their interests and aptitudes.
Would taking a CAT produce equivalent lists of career suggestions for both
of them—with engineering figuring prominently throughout the top ten
suggestions? Would they receive equal encouragement from the CAT to
begin an engineering major?
While scientists love doing prospective randomized experiments, it is, of

course, impossible to study this question prospectively in a randomized way—
by testing undeclared first-year students with a CAT, randomly assigning them
to majors, and evaluating their satisfaction two or three years later. But we
can get some idea by administering the CAT to junior/senior students already
in engineering, both men and women, and seeing what the recommended
majors are. So, I undertook this project with some colleagues.
We hypothesized that women engineering students, and possibly under

represented minority (URM) engineering students, as well, are more likely
to express (compared to men/non-URM students) that they want careers
that “help people” and/or “help the planet.” These expressions lead a
CAT to suggest jobs in healthcare, policy and advocacy, eco-tourism, and
the like. CATs are created based on the characteristics of people already
working in various fields. Since most older engineers in the workforce are
white males, CATs would then generally reflect their characteristics and
reasons for choosing engineering. However, it may not accurately match
why many women or URMs choose engineering in the first place, or why
women and URMs experience satisfaction with their choice in the long
run. We hypothesized that the CATs would not recommend engineering
careers equally.
Poking around the web, we found a lot of CATs out there: Holland Code,
O*NET interest profiler, Pymetrics, Career Strength Test, My Next Move,
Princeton Review, Career Planner, Careeronestop, StrengthQuest, Traitify and
so forth, which ranged in price from free to $90. We chose two tests, O*Net
(because it was free, and the U.S. Department of Labor produces it); and
Traitify, because it is the one the Career Services Center at my university
uses most often.
We administered the CATs to 121 engineering students, including 53 percent

women and 18 percent URMs (African-Americans and Latino). The average
GPA was 3.3; and 80 percent of the CAT participants were satisfied with
their major. We found that 66 percent of the male students taking the O*Net
test had at least one engineering career recommendation out of the top 20
recommended careers; but only 40 percent of the female students got such a
recommendation—a significant difference.3 For Traitify, the percentages were
68 percent and 72 percent, not a statistically significant difference.
3 This difference was statistically significant at the .05 significance threshold.
The average number of times that some type of engineering major was
recommended among the Top 10 was 2.5 for men versus 1.4 for women
(O*Net); and was 1.3 for men, and 0.8 for women (Traitify). Both of these
latter results represented statistically significant differences. Race and
ethnicity were effects, as well; both under represented minorities. Also,
students of Asian and Asian-American backgrounds were less likely to get
engineering recommendations, compared to Whites. We controlled for GPA,
and for satisfaction with the major, and found that engineering is more
likely to be recommended to White men than to women, and to URMs and
students of Asian backgrounds. This result means that among students who
are equally happy with being in engineering (same satisfaction score), and
doing equally well in it (same GPA), the White male students are more likely
to receive a recommendation from the CAT that they should go into the field
of engineering, compared to the women and to the URMs.
So, young adults, and parents and guidance/career counselors, need to be

wary of these tests. It is quite possible that CATs do not properly reflect the
interests and aptitudes of engineering-oriented female and URM students.
Like their flesh-and-blood cat cousins, these feline tests are not always
evenhanded in their treatment of people—and you can never be sure that a
CAT is woman’s best friend.
SIGNING OFF
T
his book is a very personal collection of arrows that I wish I’d had
in my quiver some decades ago, as a girl thinking about, exploring
and venturing into a STEM field. For the very few knuckle-dragging
Neanderthals I met early on, who smugly said that girls were biologically
inferior at doing science, a few arrows to help slay that ignorance would
have come in handy—or at least could have helped ease my own doubts.
Definitely an arrow to pierce imposter syndrome would have been nice;

it’s something I should have learned about much earlier, and gotten more
external advice on, than I did. I can imagine also a small hail of arrows
fending off the "Follow-your-passion" chorus. People meant well, but they
had me convinced for years that something was deeply wrong with me for
not having my passion path all figured out. And, since an arrow mounted on
a stick can serve as a signpost, a few arrows pointing out the connections
between engineering and human welfare would have been useful to me, as
well as lots of arrows, pointing lots of self-deprecating women, to stop signs.
I am very hopeful about the future of STEM education. A great many

dedicated educators have made huge strides in the past decade, and
arrows are pointing in better directions, even for the pink toy aisle. And
before this arrow metaphor gets too far from its target (too late for that—
sorry), I’d better go ahead and sign off.
I am sure this book has some flaws and mistakes. I regularly find that even
people versed in social science research, and working to spread a positive
girl-STEM message make some mistakes—since the research is so vast and
complex. For example, on the national web site of Girl Scouts, in the article:
“Raise her to be a STEMinist” [10] has the following sentence from the "Follow-
your-passion" chorus:
“Not every girl is going to want to pursue a career in STEM, and it’s
important to encourage her to follow her own passions,” says Girl Scouts’
developmental psychologist Dr. Andrea Bastiani Archibald, “but every girl
should be encouraged to try her hand at STEM skills, get comfortable with
those concepts, and learn how they apply to all kinds of surprising fields—
from fashion to finance, and beyond.”
I saw another example in a poignant public-service ad Verizon created.

[11] It begins with a toddler reaching for a plant, while the mother’s
voiceover says, “Who’s my pretty girl?” The preschool girl is admonished
not to get her dress dirty, as she crosses a tiny stream; and the grade-
school girl, fascinated by a tidepool creature at the beach, is told to put it
down. Through her school years, as she demonstrates STEM interests, her
parents give her kind-sounding, but destructive, messages about keeping
clean, pretty and safe—nudging her into Barbie-doll conformity. Shouldn’t
she hand that drill to her brother? The last scene shows the girl strolling
down a corridor at her high school, stopping at a Science Fair poster. The
viewer realizes, with a sinking heart, that guided by the messages she
has received and internalized, this potential engineer has lost interest in
science; the reflective glass in front of the poster makes it a good spot to
apply lip gloss.
Who’s my pretty girl, indeed! Her parents have unwittingly killed the Marie
Curie or Bernadine Healy she could have been. You could weep as she walks
away. And at that climax of emotional impact, statistics appear (66 percent
of 4th grade girls say they like science and math, but only 18 percent of all
college engineering majors are female). Then, the final voiceover says, “Isn’t
it time we told her she’s pretty brilliant, too? Encourage her love of science
and technology, and inspire her to change the world.” The ad is beautifully
made, and very powerful. But it’s also sending a fixed-mindset message of
“brilliance” that was probably not the optimal way to end the message.
I am sure that in this book, I am also saying some things that are not quite
right, or not saying them in the best way. I welcome your constructive
feedback, so that I can improve, as well as your comments and ideas.
My email is pcosman@ucsd.edu. Please visit my home page for more about
my work. I hope this book is helpful to you.
REFERENCES
1. Web site: https://www.payscale.com/data/biggest-college-regrets, June
28, 2019
2. S. Reges, “Why Women Don’t Code,” Quillette, June 19, 2018, retrieved
from https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/
3. M. Charles, “The Gender of Science,” Contexts, Volume:

10 issue: 2, page(s): 22-28, May 27, 2011, https://doi.
org/10.1177/1536504211408795
4. M. Othman and R. Latih, “Women in Computer Science: NO SHORTAGE

HERE!”, Communications of the ACM, March 2006, Vol. 49, Number 3, pp.
111-114
5. C. Thompson, “The Secret History of Women in Coding,” New York Times

Magazine, February 13, 2019
6. S.F. Reardon, E.M. Fahle, D. Kalogrides, A. Podolsky, & R.C. Zárate,

Gender Achievement Gaps in U.S. School Districts. Stanford Center for
Education Policy Analysis, 2018
7. Correll, S. J. “Constraints into Preferences: Gender, Status, and Emerging

Career Aspirations.” American Sociological Review (2004), 69:93-113.
8. Web site: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/helping_profession, June 7, 2019
9. Forrester’s North American Consumer Technographics Youth Survey, Q2

2015, Forrester Research Inc.
10. Web site: “Raise Her to Be a STEMinist’, https://www.girlscouts.org/

en/raising-girls/school/STEM/raise-her-to-be-a-steminist.html retrieved
May 18, 2019
11. YouTube Video: “Inspire her Mind—Verizon” https://youtu.be/

QZ6XQfthvGY, retrieved June 9, 2019.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P
amela C. Cosman received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the
California Institute of Technology in 1987, and her Ph.D. in Electrical
Engineering from Stanford University in 1993. Following a postdoc
at the University of Minnesota, she joined the faculty of the University
of California, San Diego in 1995, where she is currently a Professor of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as Co-Director of the Center
for Research on Gender in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics,
and Medicine (CRG-STEMM).
Her engineering research is in video processing and wireless communications.

Cosman's research projects have included cognitive radio; assessment of gaze
behavior in children with autism; color correction of underwater images; trans-
mission of video over error-prone channels; and automatic analysis of the body
posture and behavior of microscopic worms. She previously served as Director
of the Center for Wireless Communications, Associate Dean for Students, and
Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.
Through CRG-STEMM, Cosman also conducts basic social science research

on faculty hiring processes, experiences of minority graduate students, and
gender effects in career recommendations. For outreach and service work
in support of diversity in engineering, she was awarded the UC-San Diego
Affirmative Action and Diversity Award (2016), the Athena Pinnacle Award
(2017), and the national Diversity Award of the Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department Heads Association (2018).
Cosman has published more than 250 engineering articles, as well as one
children’s book—The Secret Code Menace (Ransom, UK)—that introduces
error correction coding and other wireless communications concepts
through a fictional story. You can find her book on Amazon at: https://
www.amazon.com/Secret-Code-Menace-Cold-Fusion/dp/1781279764/
ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Secret+Coding+Men-
ace&qid=1587489334&sr=8-1
Cosman’s web page is http://code.ucsd.edu/~pcosman/. Here, you can find

more information about her research, as well as free instructional materials
(Questions and Answers that go along with each chapter) for The Secret
Code Menace. Professor Cosman is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma
Xi, and a Fellow of the IEEE. She has four children: Benjamin (27), Rafael
(26), Gilead (22) and Ilan (16).
2001 L Street, NW, Suite 700 • Washington, D.C. 20036-4928
+1 202 785 0017 • www.ieeeusa.org
www.ieeeusa.org/communications/ebooks

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Editing, Review, Production and Publishing by Georgia C. Stelluto,

Cover design and layout by Hello. Hillary R. Coggeshall, LLC

Boys and Girls Going Into STEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

A Surprising Look Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

A Surprising Look Across Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

A Surprising Look Across Socioeconomic Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Believing in Difference Can Produce Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

I Killed Another Houseplant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Helping People, Helping the Planet—Really! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Passion? What Passion? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Beware of Wild CATs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

I found this reluctance deeply discouraging. I want more girls to go into

1 Names of friends in this book have been changed.

This book contains summaries of research studies,2 and my reflections on

When I’m presenting on gender in STEM, I ask people to guess which

If we first consider the question of less affluent countries, Professor

• For someone who has a sneaking suspicion significant biological factors

I wonder what would happen if Professor Reges were to teach computer

In a fascinating article [5], Clive Thompson presents several hypotheses

A second hypothesis has to do with movie portrayals of people in STEM

Other hypotheses that Thompson puts forth are about bias—conscious or

I recall my college years from 1983 to 1987, as a time when it seemed

So it has been a source of great surprise and disappointment to see that

People have studied a great many aspects—such as choice of programming

In 2018, researchers at the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis

The researchers considered various possible explanations for these findings.

A second explanation is that in wealthy families, men have higher educational

In a famous study, Shelley Correll administered a test to undergraduate

Another example where believing in difference produces difference occurs with

As a woman in electrical engineering, I’ve definitely experienced that stereotype

A friend told me recently of her sister-in-law expressing pride and pleasure

Imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people can’t

• being in the right place at the right time

• affirmative action policies

• It’s only because they like me.

• I was in the right place at the right time.

• I just work harder than the others.

• It’s only a matter of time before I am found out.

In terms of demographics, this syndrome is particularly common among

• Albert Einstein: “I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”

• Meryl Streep: “Why would anyone want to see me in a movie? I don’t

• Maya Angelou: “I’ve written 11 books—but each time I think, Uh oh,

• John Steinbeck: “I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability…For

In college, I believed that I had some ill-defined, “test-taking ability,” that

My Dad was so proud of me—My daughter, the electrical engineer! If we’d

When I was accepted to an electrical engineering Ph.D. program, I was

In my 3rd year of graduate school, I went to a workshop on imposter

Why is it important to know about imposter syndrome?

• Share your thoughts and feelings: Be a safe listener when others

• Monitor your self-talk: If a little voice in your head sometimes

• Accept that perfection is unrealistic and costly. Life is not mistake-

As an engineering professor, I had to decide it was okay not to prepare for

• I was never good at math.

• I could never understand math.

• I always hated math.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I internally experienced this tension between

When women say, “I always hated math,” it sends a destructive message to

If you look at which sub-fields of engineering women go into, it is not a surprise

For some people, even putting “engineering” together with “helping

But why is an electrical engineer who designs a cardiac pacemaker, less