From a young age, women are educated to exclude themselves from science

Carolina Gomez Mena

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, February 13, 2022, p. 6

on a global scale only eight percent of women who go on to higher education choose science, technology, engineering, and math-related careers (STEM, for its acronym in English), and this is due to various factors, including the patriarchal culture and the sexual division of labor, considered Marta Ferreyra Beltrán, general director of the National Policy for Equality and Human Rights of Women of the Institute National Women’s (Inmujeres).

They tell us that girls and women are not made for scientific reasoning, that ours are care and emotions, and with that argument, girls are educated from a very young age to exclude themselves from STEM optionscommented to the dayafter pointing out that this is also compounded by the “lack of opportunities for more women to have access to these disciplines.

Culture not only creates material obstacles, but also subjective ones, which are what we women have internalized, and which make us believe that we cannot access a certain type of knowledge.

In addition, girls are inculcated scientific knowledge, abstract thinking and leadership take away femininity from women, as if that masculinized us, and that is penalized by culture, but we are working to reverse that idea. She lamented that female scientific talent is wasted by the prevalence of stereotypes and cultural prejudices.

The unequal distribution of unpaid care tasks (women spend three times as much time as men on these tasks) is a material barrier to studying and choosing a STEM career. So “not only should the development of women and girls be promoted, but also educate and make a cultural change, so that men understand that they too can and should do care work.

“If you see the professional career of a man dedicated to science, the family does not affect them at all. At no time are they going to say ‘I can’t travel to a congress because I have to take care of my baby’”. That is why we are working on the construction of a national care system.

In the context of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, InMujeres organizes awareness events with entities and institutions, including private ones, concerned about the low representation of women in STEM careers. It collaborates with the SEP to include the representation of women scientists and aspirational cases in primary education plans. Likewise, it works with the Mexican Association of Mathematics, directed by an expert, and takes women who work in science to the primary schools so that they speak and tell what they do.