在科学、工程、科技和数学领域中，男性工作者的数量远远超过女性。尽管如此，女性对科学的发展做出过很多巨大的贡献，在其发展过程中扮演了重要的角色。但为什么在这些领域工作的女性人数一直不高？女性为什么不选择这些职业？

 

There's an old riddle¹ used by psychologists which shows the gender² bias³ 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 Belle⁴ at the University of Boston, only 14% of those surveyed were able to imagine that a surgeon could be a woman.

 

Stereotypes⁵ about who should do what type of job are mirrored in the makeup⁶ of the workforce⁷. 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.'

 

Regardless of their lack of visibility, a number of pioneering women have paved the way to 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 momentous⁸ contributions to science, technology and engineering. If these achievements were more celebrated⁹, 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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