EDITORS' CORNER
They recommend ‘parental guidance campaigns to design inclusive structured activities’ for children
Parenting could be partially to blame for the persistent gender gap in fields like science and technology, according to two British economics professors.
And government intervention may be needed, they wrote in an article published Tuesday at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
“Policymakers may need to move beyond promoting formal equality and focus on family, community, and school interventions that encourage mixed-gender interactions,” University of Warwick Professors Manuel Bagues (pictured left) and Natalia Zinovyeva (pictured right) wrote.
Their research focused on the “gender equality paradox” – the fact that the “most economically prosperous and gender-equal societies often display stronger gender segregation in educational choices.”
In other words, despite government and social efforts, more men still choose to go into STEM fields, and more women still choose health and education careers.
Bagues and Zinovyeva said their research suggests the gap is due to “gender segregation in childhood activities and friendships, which are shaped by family income and parenting styles.”
After looking at 20 years of data on half a million children in Western countries, they found that “societal attitudes toward gender roles have become increasingly egalitarian and women have made substantial gains in labour market participation, politics, and educational attainment.”
Despite these factors, the gap has not changed much, they found.
“Even more surprisingly,” the gap is bigger in the “most” “egalitarian” countries like Finland, the professors wrote.
To find a possible cause for the gap, the researchers looked at early childhood, and found a link between career “segregation” and the friendships that children choose early in their lives. Those with fewer friends of the opposite sex tend to choose more traditional careers, they found.
This, in turn, they linked to wealth and parenting styles.
“Most notably, we observe that children tend to have significantly fewer opposite-sex friends in richer countries and in countries where parents place greater emphasis on children’s self-realisation and self-expression,” they wrote.
While Bagues and Zinovyeva could not say conclusively that parenting styles are the cause of the gender gap, they believe there is enough evidence for leaders to take action on it.
“If affluent parenting styles unintentionally reinforce gender-segregated peer groups, more nuanced interventions are needed to counteract the pull of homogeneous friendships,” they wrote.
Their recommendations include policies that encourage “mixed-gender activities in after-school and community programmes” and create “parental guidance campaigns to design inclusive structured activities.”
“The goal is to ensure that children’s social worlds do not inadvertently limit their academic and career horizons,” Bagues and Zinovyeva wrote.
However, other scholars have questioned whether the gender gap is a problem at all, as long as men and women both have equal opportunities. Some scholars also have faced criticism for attributing the gap to men’s and women’s different interests.
MORE: U. Washington prof gets heat for saying gender differences behind ‘tech gap’
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: University of Warwick economics Professors Manuel Bagues and Natalia Zinovyeva; University of Warwick
