There's an old riddle used by psychologists which shows the gender bias people have when it comes to the types of jobs men and women do. Let's see if you can do it: A father and son are in an accident. The father dies. The surgeon refuses to operate on the injured boy saying, "The boy is my son." Can you explain?
According to research done in 2012 by Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle at the University of Boston, only 14% of those surveyed were able to imagine that a surgeon could be a woman.
Stereotypes about who should do what type of job are mirrored in the makeup of the workforce. For example, the BBC recently reported that only 10% of UK engineers are women. That's the lowest in Europe, where most other countries put the figure at around 20%. That’s still only a fifth. And it’s not just engineering either. In August 2017, Prof Polly Arnold of Edinburgh University found that only 10% of the top jobs in Scottish science, technology, engineering and mathematics are held by women.
So why is it that women don't go into scientific jobs? Sophie, a girl from a school in Hertfordshire, England, who studied engineering at secondary school, says, "It starts at a young age… girls are put in a corner with a doll while boys play with trucks and cars."
There's also the lack of female role models. 「I don’t think they get as much visibility as they deserve,」 says Priyanka Dhopade, one of the Women’s Engineering Society top 50 under-35 women engineers. She says that it would make a huge difference for young girls to have someone to look up to and say 『I want to be like her.』
Soyeon Yi
Regardless of their lack of visibility, a number of pioneering women have paved the wayto amazing discoveries. Let us not forget Marie Curie, whose groundbreaking work made her the first Nobel Prize winner in two different fields: physics and chemistry. There's Rajaa Cherkaoui El Moursli, who overcame any number of cultural prejudices to play a key role in the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle. And Soyeon Yi, who became the first South Korean astronaut in 2008, and who hoped her success would inspire more women.
Quite clearly, women have made momentous contributions to science, technology and engineering. If these achievements were more celebrated, it may encourage girls and young women to consider science as their future career. And as more women start to do these jobs, more people might instantly recognise that the surgeon in the riddle is a woman.
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gender bias