Six months ago, I submitted my college applications. In the fall, I will begin my first year of college studying geology. If you ask someone to think of a scientist, an engineer, a mathematician, or anyone that works in a STEM field, they are most likely going to think of a man. You might be thinking, “That’s just because there are more men in STEM fields than women,” and you’re right, but have you ever thought about why that is? 

Many people assume that women just aren’t interested in these fields, but when you look at young girls, most of them are going to have some interest in science. I’m sure that there is a little girl in your family who is fascinated with insects, or loves to collect rocks, or maybe she owns ten books about the ocean. So what happens between childhood and adulthood that scares women away from these fields? It’s not a lack of interest.Women choose not to become involved in STEM fields because the prevalence of sexism and sexual assault in those fields makes them feel unwelcome and unsafe.

As a result of the lack of women in certain STEM fields throughout history, people expect women to not succeed in these fields. Harvard Business Review surveyed 557 women in 2015 and found that over half of women surveyed felt that they needed to provide more evidence of their competence than their male counterparts. Women end up working much harder than men to prove that they deserve a seat at the table, but are still expected to be less competent than men. Many people believe that this is because “science was built by men,” but what about Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, Marie Tharp, and the many other women who made huge discoveries furthering the development of science. If you need to work twice as hard as everyone else just to have your work not be recognized, then what is even the point in doing it? There is a high probability that one of the men in your field will take credit for your work, just like Watson and Crick were praised for “discovering” something that Rosalind Franklin already discovered. While these examples may seem like a thing of the past, they happen frequently, not just in stem fields. 

While you might look at this and think that it’s fine, you can work hard to get recognized, and you feel that you can deal with the biases of others in your workplace, then you should consider the very real physical danger that women experience in these fields. Between July and October 2020 data was collected at five colleges showing that women in STEM majors that were gender balanced experienced higher rates or rape and sexual coercion than women in other majors. Even when there might be the same level of men and women in a particular field, women still do not have true equality. While attempting to make STEM more inclusive for women, it is imperative that we first look for solutions to the violence that women experience. If women are facing such high rates of sexual assault in college, where there is constant staff supervision, what about women who do field work? 

The challenges that women face in STEM fields will not go away on their own. If we want more women to become involved in STEM fields, we need to focus on the actual issues that face women in these fields. Simply showing up at a school to lead a workshop for girls interested in STEM might help a little bit, but by encouraging girls to get involved in fields where they will experience high levels of misogyny and potential violence is just cruel. 

We must first find real solutions to combat the biases surrounding women in STEM as well as implement more safety measures to prevent sexual assault. We need to begin taking sexual assault more seriously as a society, making sure that men do not get away with it, as well as implement better protections for women in the field. To prevent biased behavior in offices, we need to make sure that there are actual consequences for misogyny and harassment instead of those complaints simply being swept under the rug. Only once women are safe and respected in STEM, will there be true equality in these fields.