Scinece*Fact* - Page 2

By all credible accounts, there is an acute shortage of females in four key areas of science. Known collectively as "STEM," these disciplines include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics " all of which have historically been male-dominated.

In studies conducted in the United States, as listed in the infographic created by the New Jersey Institute of Technology, it was found that:

Women comprise 50% of the population and 49% of the total U.S. workforce, but only 24% females hold only 24% of all STEM positions
In 2009, a total of 2.5 million employed college-educated women working in STEM fields in stark contrast to 6.7 million men with college educations
A STEM-employed woman makes 86 cents for every dollar that her average STEM-employed male colleague earns
Female STEM majors were twice as likely to be employed in healthcare and education after graduation than male STEM majors

Many have posited almost as many theories about the "whys" of the above-listed phenomena. At least one study has concluded that the accurate answer to this enigmatic query is abundantly " and painfully " clear: stereotypes.

What's most worrisome is that negative stereotypical attitudes are often developed early in young American girls and boys alike. In a controlled social experiment conducted, a group of middle school girls scored poorly on Visual-Spatial abilities tests when testers gave them no information at all or told them that boys were better than girls was at performing test-related tasks. Conversely, girls lead to believe that no gender-based differences exist for tested aptitudes scored significantly higher.

The galaxy contains billions of potentially habitable Earth-sized planets, according to even the most conservative estimate drawing on data from NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Although a mechanical failure recently put the telescope out of commission (SN: 6/15/13, p. 10), Kepler's census of planets orbiting roughly 170,000 stars is enabling astronomers to predict how common planets similar to Earth are across the galaxy.

SIMILARLY SIZED Data collected by the Kepler spacecraft, shown in this artist's rendering, indicate that the Milky Way is home to billions of potentially habitable Earth-sized planets.