{"id":3388,"date":"2020-07-31T00:24:13","date_gmt":"2020-07-31T04:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/?p=3388"},"modified":"2020-08-11T10:21:31","modified_gmt":"2020-08-11T14:21:31","slug":"women-and-coding-economic-and-pop-culture-context-impacts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/2020\/07\/31\/women-and-coding-economic-and-pop-culture-context-impacts\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Women Don\u2019t Code: Media Exposure and Occupational Choice in U.S. Labor Markets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ha Bui, 2022, Professor Sarah Pearlman, Economics Department<\/span><\/p>\n

This summer, under Professor Sarah Pearlman\u2019s guidance, I had the opportunity to investigate the relationship between exposure to media content and women\u2019s decision (not) to pursue Computer Science in higher education and a career in the U.S. Women in STEM is a topic that has intrigued numerous gender and labor economics projects. While the percentage of women entering stem fields such as bio, physics, and engineering has steadily risen since the 1980\u2019s,\u00a0 women\u2019s participation in Computer Science has been waning, wherein the percentage of women majoring in Computer Science has halved between 1983 and 2010.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Percent of Undergraduate Majors who are Women, by Fields<\/p><\/div>\n

Simultaneously, the second half of the 20th century also saw the expansion of cable networks in the U.S., offering households unprecedented access to affordable information and entertainment services. This socio-economic transition created a new cultural context that harbored the 80s college-and-job-market-entering generation of women and men.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Our project was inspired by an NPR article titled \u201cWhen Women Stopped Coding\u201d that highlighted gender dichotomies in pop-culture as a potential catalyst and was informed by previous studies of cable television\u2019s impacts on women\u2019s household autonomy and girls\u2019 access to education.\u00a0 We examined the following questions:.<\/span><\/p>\n