The Final Frontier of Feminism: Forcing Women Into STEM, and Why It Must End
Decades of funding, campaigns, and rhetoric exposed as social engineering, not liberation
In this essay +
California’s Experiment in Equality
For more than a decade, California’s politicians, academics, and corporate allies have promised to “fix” the gender gap in STEM. Millions in grants, statewide programs, and glowing headlines all insisted the future would be equal. Women, they told us, would finally flood the engineering labs and computer science departments, reshaping the workforce of tomorrow.
But a decade later, the results are a national embarrassment. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, women’s share of engineering degrees crawled from 19% in 2009 to just 25% in 2023. In computer science, from 16% to 23%. Mathematics has actually regressed. Meanwhile, women hold 42% of jobs statewide but only 25% of STEM positions.
The question is not whether progress is slow. The question is why so much time, money, and political will has been wasted chasing a utopian fantasy. California’s failure reveals something far deeper: that the ideology of parity is not about freedom, but about control.
The Mirage of Parity
The ideology of parity is seductive in its simplicity. If men make up 75% of engineers, then women must be excluded. If women comprise only 23% of computer science graduates, then sexism must be to blame. But this reasoning rests on a falsehood: that equality means statistical sameness.
Men and women are not interchangeable. They are different—by design, by biology, by preference. Across cultures and throughout history, women have consistently chosen careers that emphasize care, teaching, and human connection. Men have pursued technical, abstract, and physically demanding fields. This is not oppression—it is natural order.
The problem with California’s experiment is that it tried to erase natural evolution and innate human behavior. Policymakers and activists imagined that with enough indoctrination, enough taxpayer dollars, and enough billionaire philanthropy, women could be pressured into abandoning family and balance for long hours in cubicles and laboratories. But natural law cannot be bribed away.
Get more from Andrew B. Raupp in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidEven in Scandinavia—the so-called gender utopia—where universal childcare, generous family leave, and massive subsidies have removed every structural barrier, women still overwhelmingly choose education, healthcare, and social sciences, while men dominate engineering and computer science. This widely studied “gender equality paradox” proves the point: the more freedom a society gives, the more clearly men and women choose differently.
California’s STEM crusade failed for the simplest reason imaginable: it sought to override human nature with ideology.
Beyond Sexism: The Maternal Wall
A widely circulated essay by biologist K.J. Morenz—Is It Really Just Sexism? An Alternative Argument for Why Women Leave STEM—argues convincingly that the true barrier is not bias, but biology. Women enter STEM in strong numbers, thrive academically, and excel professionally—until their early thirties. That is when the maternal wall rises: the collision between peak childbearing years and the relentless demands of academic and corporate advancement.
The evidence is stark:
In chemistry, women earn nearly 50% of bachelor’s degrees, but only 36% of PhDs (NSF Science and Engineering Indicators, 2008).
In biology, women earn 59% of bachelor’s degrees, but just 50% of PhDs (NSF, 2008).
At mid-career, despite reporting high satisfaction with their work (74% enjoy STEM), 56% of women leave, citing “work-life balance” as the primary factor (Morenz, 2016).
Those who leave often do not vanish from society: half become self-employed or enter nonprofits, 30% shift to family-friendly careers, and 20% become stay-at-home mothers (Morenz, 2016).
This is not a story of weakness. It is a story of women making rational, deliberate choices in the face of biology and family responsibilities. The attrition is not proof of sexism, but proof that women often prioritize children over careers that demand 70-hour weeks, constant relocation, and unbroken publication records.
In other words: women are not failing STEM. The technocratic class and those proliferating $cientism (masquerading around as STEM advocates) are failing women.
The Hidden Agenda Behind Parity
If women freely choose to exit STEM, why does the state and its corporate allies remain obsessed with parity? Why do governments pour money into programs designed to keep women at lab benches rather than in nurseries? Why does every statistical imbalance spark panic?
The answer may lie in the incentives of power.
An economy that relies on constant growth requires ever-expanding labor pools. For decades, this expansion came from immigration and women’s entry into the workforce. But with birth rates falling and immigration politically contentious, policymakers look to gender parity as the next reservoir of labor.
By normalizing the idea that motherhood is secondary to STEM careers, elites achieve multiple objectives:
Expand the labor supply: More women in the workforce suppress wages and increase economic output.
Delay or reduce family formation: Women pursuing careers through their thirties have fewer children, easing population growth in a way aligned with global “sustainability” agendas.
Increase dependency on institutions: Families weakened by absent mothers turn to state childcare, corporate healthcare, and government programs. Dependency breeds compliance.
What is framed as liberation is, in fact, a redistribution of allegiance—from family to state, from motherhood to market, from autonomy to technocracy.
Philanthropy as Social Engineering: The Gates Case
No actor exemplifies this better than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2022, Gates pledged $1.1 billion over four years to overhaul K-12 math education, making math its top priority until at least 2026.
The stated goal is to close racial and gender gaps in math achievement. But philanthropy at this scale is never neutral. As Education Week reported, Gates has long been explicit that education reform is about workforce preparation. As he once told the Council of Chief State School Officers: “We need students who can be ready to fill the jobs of the future.”
But jobs for whom? And at what cost?
When billionaires dictate curricula, they dictate culture. Math, abstracted from broader humanistic education, trains compliant technocrats rather than critical citizens. And when the beneficiaries are multinational corporations and the elite managerial class, philanthropy becomes indistinguishable from social engineering.
The question is not whether Gates’ $1.1 billion will improve math scores. The question is why his vision of society should be allowed to shape the next generation without democratic debate.
The Benefits of Honoring Choice
What gets lost in the fixation on parity is the immeasurable value of women’s contributions outside the STEM pipeline.
Family and Fertility: Societies depend on reproduction. Nations with strong families enjoy lower crime, stronger civic life, and greater resilience. The collapse of fertility in California is a crisis that cannot be solved by women coding apps.
Education and Community: Women who exit STEM often become teachers, nonprofit leaders, or community organizers—roles essential to the social fabric.
Human Flourishing: A woman raising children, nurturing families, or pursuing creative passions is not “wasted potential.” She is fulfilling the very roles that sustain civilization.
The real tragedy is not that women choose family over STEM. The tragedy is that policymakers demean that choice as failure.
Toward a Different Vision of Equality
If equality is to mean anything, it must mean freedom, not force. True equality honors difference, respects family, and allows women to chart their own course without being told that worth is measured in parity.
California could support women not by forcing them into STEM, but by supporting their choices:
Encourage paid parental leave.
Flexible tenure clocks.
On-site childcare in universities and corporations.
Recognition that caregiving is not wasted time, but essential work.
Equality should mean a society in which women can thrive as scientists or as mothers—or as both—not one in which they are conscripted into laboratories for the sake of statistics.
Final Thoughts: Freedom, Not Force
California’s failed experiment reveals the truth: women are not broken. The model is.
Parity in STEM has become a mirage, a metric worshiped by politicians and billionaires for reasons that have little to do with women’s flourishing. Behind the slogans of empowerment lies an agenda: to expand labor, weaken families, and normalize dependence on state and corporate structures.
The irony is that women have already answered the question. They are leaving STEM not because they cannot succeed, but because they refuse to trade away their families, freedom and pursuit of happiness for the hollow promise of parity.
And in that choice lies not failure—but wisdom.
The future of equality will not be secured by forcing women into the workforce. It will be secured when society finally honors women not as quotas to be filled, but as human beings—free to choose the path that leads not to uniformity, but to dignity.
Andrew B. Raupp is the Founder / Executive Director @stemdotorg. “Resolutely preserving the rights and freedoms of the STEM education community through sound policy & practice…”
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First published August 30, 2025. Original publication
