Why Women Shy Away from Careers in Science and Math

By Nyasigo Kornel

Nowadays women are prone to everything, speak of any angle of life, activists also are ahead defending this alleged vulnerable species just to make them survive well amid men who have justified a better dimensions for existence.

Rarely if you attend any academic meeting your ears will get hungry of the word gender with its sister vocabulary named ‘biased’ even in things that need them to undertake using sense organ.
We have docked to the point where activists promote girls in Tanzania to study science, although even few men who have managed to study those difficult subjects are not in proper utility to engage them in scientific policing and decision making.

At the hill of the University of Dar es Salaam, some scholars are ahead with long term research trying to answer the question to why women shy away from careers in science and maths.
Girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view science as a solitary rather than a social occupation, according to a Edu-consult Senior Research psychologist.
“Raising girls who are confident in their ability to succeed in science and math is our first job,” said Dr. Onesmo Malimoyo, a senior research consultant at the Edu-consult who is researching on Women and Gender.

“But in order to increase the number of women in science, we also need to make young women more interested in these fields, and that means making them aware that science is a social endeavor that involves working with and helping people,” he says.

Dr. Malimoyo gave an invited address on how parents and teachers influence children’s academic and career choices recently in Dar es Salaam University at the biennial conference of the Society for Research in Child Development.

For the talk, she drew upon data from decades of research, funded by a variety of agencies and foundations, including the Swidish International Development Agency (SIDA), Norway Agency for Development (NORAD) and the other donors.

One of the studies Dr. Malimoyo used for the analysis was the Tanzania study of adolescent and adult life transitions, a longitudinal study he started in 1998 that has followed approximately 1,200 predominately young men and women from early adolescence into adulthood. The last interviews were conducted in 2005 when participants were 25 years old.

In standard seven, the occupational aspirations of girls had little to do with their abilities as indicated by their grades and the opinions of their parents and their teachers, Dr. Malimoyo and colleagues found.

The girls’ perception of the career potential of advanced or honors math and science classes in high school was a stronger predictor of their selection of such courses than was their actual ability in those subjects.

Dr. Malimoyo and colleagues have repeatedly found that parents provide many types of messages to daughters that undermine both their daughters' confidence in their math and science abilities and their interest in pursuing careers in these fields.

Even though girls got better math grades than boys, parents of daughters reported that math was more difficult for their child than parents of sons.

“Parents of daughters also said their girls had to work harder to do well in math than parents of sons, even though teachers told us this was not true,” he says.

Girls said that they worked harder in math than in English, and parents reported that is true, too. But student time diaries given to students during the longitudinal interview told a different story, with boys and girls both reporting that they spent more time on language arts than on math.

“Parents also gave very different reasons for the math success of girls and boys,” Dr. Malimoyo says. “Parents of boys rated talent and effort as equally important, while parents of girls said hard work was much more important than math talent.”

Dr. Malimoyo urges teachers to tell parents that their daughters are talented in math and science, and to provide girls and their parents with vocational and intellectual reasons for studying math or science.

Dr. Malimoyo and colleagues also analyzed gender differences in college majors and occupations, finding that sex differences in general self-concepts and values at age 20 had a long-term influence on the high school or college courses and jobs young men and women picked.

Young women were more likely than young men to place a high value on occupations that permitted flexibility and did not require them to be away from their family. The women also valued working with people.

Even though young women had higher college GPAs than young men, young men were more likely to have a higher opinion of their abilities in math and science, and in their general intellectual abilities. They were also more likely to value jobs that required them to supervise other people.

“In addition to improving the confidence of girls, we need to show them that scientists work in teams, solving problems collaboratively. And that as a result of their work, scientists are in a unique position to help other people,” he advises.

Dr. Malimoyo advises that we as a culture do a very bad job of telling our children what scientists do. He says that young people have an image of scientists as eccentric old men with wild hair, smoking cigars, deep in thought, alone.

“Basically, they think of Einstein, Newton or Mendel. We need to change that image and give our children a much richer, nuanced view of who scientists are, what scientists do and how they work,” he says.