Closing the gender gap in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) goes beyond just getting more women into fields like computer science. A study from Cornell says it’s not just about having more women around; it’s about treating them fairly, especially when it comes to pay.
The researchers focused on computer science and checked how women in this field are doing. Even though more women are entering STEM fields, the number of computer science jobs, which make up a big chunk of STEM, is still low. Plus, the pay gap between men and women in computer science is still hanging around. So, it’s not just about getting women in the door; it’s about making sure they get equal treatment, especially when payday rolls around.
Boosting returns
“It’s not the composition of women in STEM—it’s the returns that they experience for the very same attributes as their male counterparts, such as degree attainment,” the researchers explain.
Digging into a decade’s worth of data, the researchers found that women in computer science jobs were earning around 86.6 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made. It’s a bit better than the average across all jobs (82 cents), but still not quite hitting the fairness mark.
They dove into the numbers from the American Community Survey between 2009 and 2019. Looking at folks between 22 and 60 with a college degree working full-time in computer science, they tried to figure out why this pay gap exists. Even after factoring in things like age, degree, job within computer science, and race, the gap got a bit smaller—closing by about 34% to 91 cents for every dollar men make. But, yep, the gender wage gap was still hanging in there.
Quickly forming
“And it shows up pretty quickly—by the time women reach their mid-20s, well before women with college degrees start having kids, on average,” the researchers explain. “All these arguments about, ‘Oh, it’s because women have families,’ that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on.”
The study found that married women and those with kids actually earn more, but they still make less than married men or dads. Even if women and men have similar qualifications or work in the same field, women end up with lower pay.
Now, the jobs women pick in computer science might be part of the issue. More women go for roles like computing managers or analysts, while more men go for high-paying gigs like software developers. But here’s the catch: the job differences only explain about a third of the pay gap, according to the researchers.
They finish by saying it’s not just about family roles affecting women’s careers. To fix the gap in STEM and pay, we need to tackle the discrimination happening in today’s workplaces. Most of the pay gap, they argue, comes from women getting different treatment based on their roles as partners, parents, and workers.
