Where Does All the Humanities Hate STEM From: Gender’s Role and What’s to Be Done

Caroline Blake, Delaney Single, Francesca Lesinski

April 19, 2024

The debate over the importance of STEM vs humanities has persisted for decades, transcending all levels of education from high school and beyond. Many STEM kids describe a common experience that at some point in their academic career they come to be considered a ‘genius’ among their peers, getting tracked down during their free periods to assist with math homework or lab reports. For humanities kids, however, their assistance is rarely requested, and if it is, it’s typically attributed to inadequate teaching by educators because there’s no way that the half-assed essay you submitted at 11:59 pm earned you a failing grade. Where does this long-standing academic hierarchy come from? Well, there’s a reason you probably hold Albert Einstein in higher esteem than Jane Austen. 

The notion that STEM subjects require more intelligence and foster more success emanates from the longstanding exclusion of women in STEM fields, which has forced women into the humanities, and labeled humanities subjects as lesser areas of study. The deeply rooted sexism in the divide between STEM and humanities begs the question asked by The Eagle: “If humanities fields were always dominated by men, would a STEM degree still be the only way of proving one’s success?”

This patriarchal system of valuing STEM over the ‘lesser’ humanities fields is harmful not only to women in humanities but also to women in STEM, who are continuously forced to prove themselves to reach even a fraction of the success of their male counterparts. While women have made progress breaking into STEM fields in the last decade, men still dominate the workforce, holding 65% of all employment. This gender discrepancy creates a potentially problematic outlook for women in both fields, as those succeeding in STEM are deemed the “few who beat the odds,” while those in humanities are viewed as the majority or those who took the ‘easier’ route. 

Although it may be true that women in humanities do not have to overcome the same barriers that women in STEM do, to imply that their work is in any way ‘easier’ is to disregard both the importance of humanities as a whole and its contributions to society, a reality underscored by the recent decrease in popularity of humanities subjects. 

According to the Cornell Undergraduate Research Journal, enrollment in undergraduate humanities courses plummeted a whopping 30% from 2005 to 2020, while enrollment in engineering and technology courses skyrocketed. According to The Eagle, degrees in humanities “constituted less than 10 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded as of 2020.” 

While some of this decreasing interest in humanities might be due to women’s gravitation toward STEM, spurred by those fields’ increasing inclusivity, much of this decline undoubtedly arises from the core belief, driven by historical sexism, that humanities subjects are less intellectual, less realistic, and less remunerative than STEM subjects. 

The way to resist the impending ‘death’ of humanities is not to force women to stay in those fields in order to keep them alive, but rather to revive the humanities by acknowledging that its value to society is equal to STEM’s. 

Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and Chair of the Committee on the Integration of STEM, humanities, and the arts, David Skorton, suggests that one method to increase recognition of these undervalued fields is to take an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the gap between humanities and STEM. This approach is already being used in higher education. For instance, Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and the College of Fine Arts, teaching computer science students how to apply their skills to fields like gaming and filmmaking. This collaboration, along with other similar interdisciplinary projects, has shown massive success in supporting the “development of written and oral communication skills, teamwork skills, ethical decision making, [and] critical thinking…educational outcomes that many employers are asking for today.”

Although it is unfortunate that in today’s society, humanities must be linked to STEM subjects in order to gain the respect and value they deserve, realistically, the integration of STEM and humanities fields serves as the best strategy for both keeping the humanities alive and encouraging collaboration between these two fields in the future.