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Gender ratio at STEM - favors girls, looking to find a nice boyfriend. *</p>
<p>Perhaps that is true still somewhat in engineering, but in other hard sciences,women are proliferate.
Why would anyone study something they werent good at/interested in?
Where do you get this idea that women should marry for money( from another thread), or enter a field to hook up?</p>
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<p>Not in math, physics, etc. as far as I know, but I’m not sure. </p>
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<p>I didn’t write the original comment, but I don’t think that was the implication…no one even said anything about marriage or money. It’s just that girls can be more selective when guys outnumber them, regardless of the kind of relationship they’re trying to get into…which is just a bonus if you’re a woman who would have picked a hard science field to begin with.</p>
<p>Definitely women do not preponderate in math and physics–except at women’s colleges.</p>
<p>Ok math,physics & engineering then - but lots of women in chem, in bio, in computing, pharmacy, medicine, geo… & not so they can find a man.</p>
<p>On another thread he said he would advise his daughter to find a rich husband if she wanted to be an artist.
Perhaps the northwest has more women in the sciences?
But at least half if not more of the women I know- starting from the new secretary of the interior, whose undergrad was in engineering, & including the majors of both D’s and their friends - are in the sciences. ( & none of the ones I know attended a women’s college)</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/Why-So-Few-Women-in-Science-Technology-Engineering-and-Mathematics.pdf[/url]”>http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/Why-So-Few-Women-in-Science-Technology-Engineering-and-Mathematics.pdf</a> (pages 9 and 12) indicates the percentage of women earning bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in various majors in 2006:</p>
<p>59.8%/47.9% Biological and agricultural sciences
51.9%/34.3% Chemistry
44.9%/29.6% Mathematics
41.2%/35.3% Earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences
20.7%/16.6% Physics
20.5%/21.3% Computer science
19.5%/20.2% Engineering</p>
<p>On page 10, it is noted that in 2007, women earned 88,371 STEM bachelor’s degrees, of which 48,001 were in biological sciences.</p>
<p>Salaries have dropped 20% for engineers in the past 25 years since I graduated with an EE degree. Does that sound like a field with a shortage?</p>
<p>There was a time when Texas Instruments would pay for any of its employees to go get a BS in engineering. That is a sign of shortage. In the late 90s with the internet bubble, we were offered big raises, signing bonuses, moving expenses, and stock options. The Seattle Times had 6 pages of high-tech employment classifieds. Those also were signs.</p>
<p>For a nerdy kid with 0% chance of making it as an investment banker, engineering and computers is still a pretty good career choice. For a kid with options, I usually recommend staying away.</p>
<p>I pursued an engineering degree in the late 80s because I loved the science and the guarantee of employment. That failed miserably in the recession of 1991. I pursued medicine several years later after I found something else I truly loved.</p>
<p>I was happy until I noticed a trend. I have worked for those same guys who majored in business and partied at the frat houses, who were managed by the same guys who received their MBAs, for a company run by an Ivy league CEO, for a corporation owned by a few wealthy investors in a private equity. Those business majoring frat boys won. That’s happening in medicine as it did in engineering. Their incomes have increased while mine has decreased. My message is that (IMHO) all fields are inevitably owned and managed by business people who depend on generating profits and worry about your well being last. Surpluses and deficits are all relative anf follow the business cycle. Nothing is guaranteed. Btw, the corporation that own us laid off half of the physicians last year.</p>
<p>While finance seems to be consuming an ever-larger percentage of the US economy, and executive pay in the US is huge by international standards, remember that the highly paid CEOs, investment bankers, etc. are not especially numerous – business majors are very common (21.6% of bachelor’s degrees in the US), but relatively few of them reach the point of being paid as well as CEOs of major companies or investment bankers.</p>
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<p>How did they “win”? I don’t get your reasoning here. Other people’s monetary success doesn’t mean you’ve “lost.” Whether it’s an Ivy League frat boy on Wall Street, Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates, their incomes, lifestyles and what they enjoy don’t affect me in the slightest. If I’m content with where I’m at, then I don’t have a need to envy these people.</p>
<p>My comment was definitely not about their lifestyle or money. It is about getting that job because of the “shortage”. It is about my income for the work I did as an engineer and continue to do as a physician. I was commenting on the belief that there is a STEM or in my case a doctor shortage that really doesn’t exist. Also the belief that if you study hard, you will have a guaranteed career. The business people want to minimize the cost of doing business whether it is engineering or medicine. So from the business perspective, there is a shortage of employees willing to accept what they want to pay these employees. Alternatives are used to lieu of these employees. In engineering, techs and H1Bs are used. In medicine, nurses and physician extenders are used. So despite choosing the fields that conventional wisdom states are guaranteed jobs, the field you may have avoided (business) wins out. In fact, even some of the liberal arts win.</p>
<p>America needs an overabundance of STEM majors in order to depress salaries.</p>
<p>Even though STEM PhDs have a rough job market it’s still not as bad compared to Social Science and Humanities PhDs. I’m don’t know why people focus on PhDs so much anyways. The number of people who get them is too small to matter.</p>
<p>Also, I’m not really sure how HB1’s come into play, at the PhD level. In my subfield of computer science at least, the Northeastern grad is going to much more highly regarded than the average Tsinghua or IIT grad.</p>
<p>The number of people who get PhDs in the U.S. may be small, but that doesn’t mean it’s too small to matter - especially to those people and their affected families.</p>
<p>And read the article - it talks about why HB1s matter in science. Because a lot of times American-educated PhD holders are unwilling to work for $40,000 a year for 6 years straight in a “postdoc” position for more “training” (*** was my PhD for, then?). However, HB1 holders who want to immigrate to the U.S. may be much more likely to take those jobs. In the author’s words, there’s a shortage of American-trained scientists who are willing to take what companies want to pay.</p>
<p>I can’t say about computer science, but for my field, juillet is exactly right.</p>
<p>juillet and QuantMech,</p>
<p>First, most PostDocs have J1 visas, not H1B. The number of J1 is not restricted.</p>
<p>Second, without the cheap labor of foreign-born PostDocs most labs won’t be able to function. Lab leaders don’t have money to pay high salaries to PostDocs. Most PostDoc salaries are paid by grants, mainly government grants. If you want to double PostDoc salaries, please, double NIH and NSF funding by taxpayers. Since it is not possible, PostDocs are paid approximately $40,000 and foreigners are taking these jobs. </p>
<p>I don’t know many PostDocs working in the industry. Most H1B salaries are around $80,000.</p>
<p>I have a post-doc with an H1B visa, who makes about $40,000 per year. If you could get NSF to double my funding, I’d be happy to double his salary.</p>
<p>With a J1 visa, I believe that the scientist/engineer commits to returning to his/her home country after the visa expires. Practically none of the foreign students I have advised (who are getting US Ph.D.s) are willing to go onto a J1 visa. People who have Ph.D.s from a foreign country may accept J1 visas.</p>
<p>Post doc funding guidelines at NIH starting in October of this year show 43,933 for someone just starting. They seem to have raised it by $500 from last year.</p>
<p><a href=“http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/pdfs/2013_14SalaryScale.pdf[/url]”>http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/pdfs/2013_14SalaryScale.pdf</a></p>
<p>Yes, and the average NIH grant is twice the average NSF grant, at least in my field. I have faculty colleagues in other departments who do work that could be funded by both/either NIH or NSF. Several of them have said that they do not intend to apply for NSF grants in the future.</p>
<p>Does NSF say what you can/should pay your post doc? I am under the impression professors need to list cost of employing anyone on the project including paying tuition for people under the level of a post doc.</p>