What does STEM really mean, anyway?
Mumu and I keep trying to answer this question as we talk to more women and record more episodes.
Directly translated, STEM is just an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, but it has so much weight in social conversations now and those four words leave out so many other fields.
We are using STEM as a way to sell/pitch our podcast to people — an easy shorthand of saying ‘all those non-liberal arts fields.’ But what do we actually mean? I’m not sure we know, ourselves.
When people encourage STEM careers — do they intend Ph.Ds in Psychology? What about being an entrepreneur and developing a business that features tech even if you aren’t doing the coding yourself? Or do we use those four letters as a stand-in to imply all career paths that are dominated by men?
Does it have to do with the actual degree you have? I wouldn’t call myself a person in a STEM field (well, prior to this podcast) but I have a Bachelor’s of Arts in political science and a Master’s of Science in journalism. Weird, right?
A cursory google search shows I’m not alone in wondering about definitions — but maybe that’s not the point.
Maybe the definitions don’t matter. Maybe, now that we’ve given this really broad swath of categories a cute and clever acronym, the specifics are less important.
What bothers me the most about using STEM is my fear that I’m leaving someone/something out. Our podcast features women who are doing clever, innovative, interesting and important things. Why would building a new phone app not count the same as staring through a telescope or analyzing data? Does quantifiable work count more than qualitative?
When we told people to suggest future guests (which you can do here), we got a whole assortment of careers. Some are obvious ‘STEM’ ones like biologists or chemists. Some less so, like project managers and business consultants.
Where do we draw the line? Should we? When we run out of guest ideas, does our definition get broader?
So what do you think? How do you define STEM?