[cauterized]

Where did I claim to be an authority on women in science? Where am I blaming men for anything? All I said is that I lose respect for people who make assumptions and draw conclusions about other people's experiences and motivations based primarily on speculation and stereotype.

And I do not claim to be an expert on women in science, only that I am a woman in STEM and in the absence of evidence to the contrary that gives me good reason to think that the man who wrote the article is even less qualified than I to speak about women's experiences trying to enter traditionally make fields.

As for the rest, I suggest you read the NY Times article I linked to in another post. Even if there is some innate component (which assertion I take with a certain amount of skepticism - and potential flaws have been pointed out in the studies with newborns), the research and experiences detailed there very strongly support the existence of a cultural component to gender imbalances in STEM.

[birdsareweird]

If your upset is about stereotypes and speculation, why did you bother to specify the gender of the author?

"It makes me lose respect for the person who thinks they can pontificate about someone else's experience and motivations."

Except this is what men have to contend with all the frickin' time. Apparently when I do it, I'm not "sharing my lived experiences", I'm "mansplaining".

I also didn't deny the existence of a cultural component, merely that it is not the entire story. If the cultural component was the dominant factor, you would see cultures where the situation is reversed. We don't.

[cauterized]

I specify the gender of the author because he's purporting to explain the gender specific experiences and motivations of the gender that he is not. He's trying to speak for someone else. This bothers me even more than usual because he does it in such a way as to attempt to dismiss an aspect of those experiences that is reported by a lot of individual women, supported by research, and inconvenient and apparently uncomfortable for many men in STEM to acknowledge.

If you're talking about your own experiences as a man, there is nothing wrong with that. If you try to draw conclusions about women's gendered experiences based on your experiences as a man then yeah, that's mansplaining and some people will call you out on it.

There are a lot of different cultures in this world, even traditionally matriarchical ones. It just so happens that those (along with a lot of patriarchical cultures in adjacent locales) were not the ones that developed modern science and thus not the ones that frame this particular debate. I hate using those terms because now you're probably going to accuse me of railing against patriarchy, which is not something I like to do.

Here's the thing: even if there are slight innate differences in interests, both men's and women's innate levels of interest in and aptitude for STEM can almost certainly be mapped to Gaussian distributions. And even if those curves nearly completely overlap, people seem to assume that non-identical centers mean that all women are less interested in and capable of involvement in those fields than all men.

And here's the part you're going to consider rant-ish but is based on personal experience, the experiences of women I know, the experiences of women who write articles in newspapers, magazines, and online, as well as extensive academic research that I make a habit of informing myself about whenever it percolates out to the non-academic community:

The effect is that from childhood adults are more surprised at our expressions of interest, they don't push us as hard into those fields or encourage us as much when we do express interest in entering them. As a result we find ourselves skeptical of the notion that science or math or engineering is "for someone like me".

We have to be far better in order to have a hope of disproving the default assumption that we're worse. We're less likely to get interviews and are suggested lower starting salaries with a female name on an otherwise identical resume. We face assumptions that we only succeeded because of affirmative action even when we had to be better than the men around us to get any respect at all.

My conclusion, based on a combination of experience, anecdote, and data, is that many women who would enjoy and be good at such careers don't even consider them because they were never given any reason to consider them. That many women who do consider them wrongly conclude that they're not capable of pursuing them based not on actual failure but on lack of encouragement and recognition. And that those who persist nonetheless face a steeper climb than men, all else being equal.

I don't seem to be the only one with access to such personal experiences and data who's reached that conclusion.