The survey was 4,914 U.S. adults was conducted from July 11 to Aug. 10, 2017 and included 2,344 workers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs.
The problem will always be in the subjective nature of the concept. How many people have career setbacks and assume it must be because of some secret factor, like corporate hiring quotas, that they have heard or read about, rather than their work quality? In sports, athletes readily accept if someone else is better because the results are quantifiable, but in jobs there is not always a deliverable that will lead to a promotion.
Gender discrimination
Pew solved that by coming up with eight different forms of gender discrimination, so it was likely someone would have at least one. Yet only 19 percent of men did, compared to 50 percent of women. Still, some of the discrimination was oddly framed. If you were treated like you were incompetent and you were a man, you did not assume you were treated thus because of gender. Far more women did. Male and female responses about sexual harassment, however, were so close as to be within a margin of error on a survey as broad as this (36 percent of women and 28 percent of men) while a non-specific "harder to succeed" question got 20 percent of women saying it was gender-related compared to 7 percent for men.
Who would disagree? Every corporate HR department and hiring manager. They would be shocked to learn they care more about genitalia or color than succeeding at their own jobs, which will only happen if they hire the best people. If it's happening as broadly as survey respondents think, academic STEM may be able to hide discrimination more easily because labs are usually small.
Racial discrimination
On minorities, while 75 percent of white people think blacks are not discriminated against, only 37 percent of blacks believed that. Only 13 percent of whites claim they have been discriminated against, while 44 percent of Asians and 42 percent of Latinos believe they have.
Education complaints
Though everyone publicly supports teachers, and America leads the world in science output, adult science literacy and Nobel prizes, only 25 percent of STEM participants surveyed think American education is good. The rest actually believe American education is worse than other countries despite our STEM dominance. This is also likely due to well-publicized complaints about standardized tests, written without the context that American kids have been at the middle of the pack since testing began in the early 1960s. And yet American adults still win in STEM. That's because Americans do not teach to the test, as other countries do, we are more interested in critical thinking. Uniformly, people who complain about American education are also critical of Common Core, which was designed to improve scores on standardized tests.
Not me. Thanks for all you do, teachers. Though every two years international test scores will come out and groups will be saying our education stinks and only more government money can fix it, I think you are doing a great job - and I know that the money is not going to you.
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