Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem.
I also have some doubts about this being the sole issue. As an undergrad, I watched my school work hard to try to play up the fact that there were female students, female professors, and famous women in engineering. This was done whenever potential students were visiting. This was done in pamphlets sent out to high schools. The effect was not even measurable. I see the same pattern in my graduate program, and the same pattern in other engineering schools, and even among recruiters for corporations. I am not sure what else people in the field can do to try to dispel the notion; if indeed this is a cause, I suspect that girls are learning to dislike engineering from somewhere else, but I think that something happens earlier in life, at least if we believe the research on when girls lose interest in technical fields (somewhere around middle school or early high school).
There absolutely are things STEM workers can do. If it's a cultural problem in STEM, then we can work to change our culture. If it's a cultural problem with the perception of STEM, we can work to change the perception of STEM.
1. If it's us, then honest self-examination can reveal what we're doing wrong. Are we patronizing towards the women we work with or who are in the ranks below us (grade-wise in school, hierarchically in the workplace) more than we are with the men? Are they more sensitive to it, if so can we change how we approach them to be less off-putting?
2. If it's the wider culture in the US, we can participate in programs that reveal the reality of STEM to a broader audience. Help with youth mentorship programs. Become a teacher. There are many good math and science teachers, but there are many terrible ones too. I like my friends, but some of them teach math because that's what they were qualified to teach by credit hours, not because of an innate interest or understanding. They don't convey the sense of interest and itrigue that can capture children's attention and interest.
3. The reality is some combination of the above, our institutions (educational and professional) contain a great deal of systemic, often unintended, bias. Our media portrays engineers as lonely losers or creeps. As a community we can work to tackle these things if we take it on as a real challenge, instead of dismissing it as just gender differences.
> Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem.
Sure they can. They can simply hire more women. Once the gender ratio is sorted out, the new equilibrium will be self-sustaining.
You're smart enough to know it's not that simple; even if one were willing to "just do it" it's not clear the unintended consequences would not result in a net-negative effect on women in engineering.
Fundamentally, if the source funnel is unbalanced, and you assume that there is a scalar "skill" quantity that is the economic factor of production employers actually desire, then it is mathematically impossible to hire-toward-parity without having a lower standard for hiring from the less-represented pool [0].
If you accept that ratio-correcting hiring mathematically necessitates lower standards for women then you need to answer some thorny economic questions.
Will the women whose skill is below the minimum skill of the men in your quota system be paid the same as the men (all of whom by mathematical necessity, will be more skilled)?. If they are paid the same as the men, it is a subsidy paid by the employer, the employer's customers, and the disemployed men who otherwise would have been hired but-for the quota. It's not clear to me that they bear any culpability for the social problem, or that the economic costs of this subsidy are sufficiently small not to have significant negative effects on those businesses. I know, I know: boo hoo, those poor businesses won't have two golden swimming pools of money, just one. But the reality is that the margins most businesses have between the cost of employment and the productivity of that employment is not, for most companies, rich Google-y numbers like 50%. If the margins are more like 10% it is entirely credible to me that such a subsidy will drive various arms of the business from ROI-positive to ROI-negative (or at least, ROI below just investing that cash in stocks). And then all those jobs we were planning to give to women will no longer exist.
If, on the other hand, the lower-skill women are paid sufficiently less than the men to balance the opportunity cost borne by the employer (for not being able to hire everyone above a minimum skill level) then the women need to be paid less than an open market wage (i.e. less than their skills would justify without a quota system, because the quota system is costing the employer lost productivity in men they would otherwise hire). So now the women are paying for the parity-seeking hiring. This will exacerbate the already high level of concern about fairness in compensation and will provide an additional disincentive for women to join this work force. Never mind that it seems perverse to have the women pay the employers for the privilege of working in a quota system.
Let me make a defensive statement lest it seem I am suggesting that women are less skilled than men: I am emphatically not. I'm saying that if you take the best five of 30 people and the best five of 100 people, the latter group will, with significant statistical regularity, be more skilled.
So what to do if ratio-correcting hire is DOA? It seems that there's an easier solution that has its roots in a long history of women conquering other obstacles; a generation of high-school aged women need to decide, en masse, that they will join engineering departments as a group and that they will stick to it with mutual support. This is direct action by the people whose well-being we are trying to improve, can be done without getting permission or cooperation from anyone outside that group, and solves the "boys' club" problem on day 1 of freshman year classes (because the club will be, by construction, full of women as well). I even have a slogan ready for them: "We're here, we're engineers, get used to it." I realize that coordinating this kind of movement is hard, but it is run-of-the-mill political and social organizing, and it seems to me like something that can actually work (as opposed to solutions that attack the symptoms of a skewed sourcing funnel).
[0] Proof sketch (hand-waving law-of-large numbers arguments, and assuming women's skills are distributed identically to men's):
1) If you reject quotas and hire simply for skill >= min_skill, then you will find more men meeting that criterion because there are men in the source funnel. So fixed-skill cutoffs are out.
2) If you have quotas (say 1 woman for every 1 man) then you can't hire everyone >= min_skill; you will instead hire the best among the people >= min_skill. The men will be pulled from a larger pool, and taking the best from a larger pool will result on average in a higher minimum skill level. So simply by taking the best N of the women and the best N of the men, the source funnel imbalance forces you to have lower standards for women
I also have some doubts about this being the sole issue. As an undergrad, I watched my school work hard to try to play up the fact that there were female students, female professors, and famous women in engineering. This was done whenever potential students were visiting. This was done in pamphlets sent out to high schools. The effect was not even measurable. I see the same pattern in my graduate program, and the same pattern in other engineering schools, and even among recruiters for corporations. I am not sure what else people in the field can do to try to dispel the notion; if indeed this is a cause, I suspect that girls are learning to dislike engineering from somewhere else, but I think that something happens earlier in life, at least if we believe the research on when girls lose interest in technical fields (somewhere around middle school or early high school).