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>>andren+(OP)
It’s important to investigate this topic from various perspectives, and the text contains a couple of important points (which of course are not new to anyone who’s been following this debate).

However, right at the beginning, this is really a bad argument: “There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing.”

This can hardly be surprising to the authors. People in lower-level technical jobs don’t have as much power over society at large as those in high-level positions. Thus gender imbalances there don’t have the same supposed impact and perpetuating effect on structural imbalances as those in high-level fields (an example: the recent study about facial recognition being less accurate on female faces). Thus they are not considered as harmful in the grand scheme of things.

Edit: In other words: no matter where one stands in the debate about the reasons for gender imbalance in STEM, it is totally reasonable not to be too concerned about imbalances among plumbers or car mechanics, because this imbalance does have less consequences. It doesn’t matter for any other aspect in life whether a woman or man fixes the car, but it matters who creates the algorithms that control everyone’s lives.

>>imarti+F4
> This can hardly be surprising to the authors. People in lower-level technical jobs don’t have as much power over society at large as those in high-level positions. Thus gender inbalances there don’t have the same supposed impact and perpetuating effect on structural inbalances. Thus they are not considered as harmful in the grand scheme of things.

I'm not trying to misrepresent you but are you making the claim that if we had more female PHDs in STEM, that would lead to more female plumbers and car mechanics?

Or is it more, the changes needed to get women into stem would necessarily get women into other "less prestigious" fields?

>>shard9+15
I think imartin2k is reading this:

  surprisingly there is no concern about the under-
  representation of women in lower-level technical
  jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing

And then reading this, two paragraphs below in the same article:

  These differences are socially important because these
  tend to be prestigious occupations, and practically
  important because the different numbers of men and women
  in these fields contribute, in part, to the sex
  difference in earnings.

When I read the article, this incongruity made me feel the surprise was feigned for rhetorical effect. And I was shocked - shocked! - to find crass rhetorical tricks in an article about gender bias in STEM :)