Healthcare and STEM Education – Siamese Twins in Reform and Innovation

The US has lost ground in recent years to other leading industrial nations in attracting new generations to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. This has resulted in decreased enrollment rates in STEM college and university programs. Much of this trend is related to issues of global outsourcing of many of the related jobs in established industries, thus eliminating corresponding career incentives for high-school graduates. Industry and academia are in agreement that this educational trend is threatening the US economic and intellectual future and is one of the biggest challenges for current generations. Other reasons are related to an antiquated school system that has not changed significantly since the industrial revolution, and is, therefore, still favoring universal education over academic excellence on the PK-12 level.

National reform of our public school systems will take a long time, so one shorter-term solution is to specifically on women and minorities that are traditionally underrepresented in these careers. We need to find new approaches to attract minority groups to STEM programs, plain and simple.

One way we might do that is to embed STEM curriculum into currently desirable career fields. For instance, in a previous career at the University of Rhode Island, I wrapped traditional computer science education into the context of game design in order to attract more students. Another related initiative combined colleagues’ traditional STEM education with industrially relevant experiences and international exchange in order to emphasize the diversity and breadth of related career paths.

I will admit, however, that while this kind of approach can demonstrate isolated successes, it cannot change fundamental issues in career choice that are closely tied to gender differences: Although girls increasingly outperform boys in K-16 education, consequential female dominance does not seem to translate well into higher education or even STEM careers.

An extensive body of scientific research suggests that the apparent difference of career choice is in part related to gender differences in risk preferences, social preferences and competitive preferences. These differences have largely evolutionary roots, leading apparently – together with workplace discrimination and social acceptance pressure – to women’s ‘attraction’ to jobs with lower mean, lower-variance salaries. This relationship between evolved gender differences and occupational segregation might be hard to influence, so a bigger benefit may come from channeling these differences into new opportunities:

“The tendency of men to predominate in fields imposing high quantitative demands, high physical risk, and low social demands, and the tendency of women to be drawn to less quantitatively demanding fields, safer jobs, and jobs with a higher social content are, at least in part, artifacts of an evolutionary history that has left the human species with a sexually dimorphic mind. These differences are proximately mediated by sex hormones.”

What about healthcare reform?

It is widely accepted that healthcare reform will heavily rely on information and telecommunication technologies. Whether you are talking about electronic medical records or personal health records, telemedicine, telemonitoring or teleconsultation, online social communities of interest, remote caregiving, or Aging in Place, the trend from provider-centric healthcare to home- and individual-centered health and wellness is on the horizon.

This new found demand is creating an unprecedented need for scientific, technological, and engineering innovations. The corresponding career paths have the potential to combine both the job recognition and safety with the social content and rewards according to studies sought after by many women.

Could a potential to channel gender differences into new opportunities lie somewhere within healthcare reform? Early signs point to yes. Women are at the forefront of many of the emerging multidisciplinary research fields underlying the aforementioned healthcare IT R&D opportunities. These research fields combine aspects of Computer Science and Computer Engineering with Psychology, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Medicine and Communication and include Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Privacy Engineering, Health Communications (incl. Games for Health), Assistive Robots, and Online Social Networking, to mention a few. These women are the role models for new generations of women in STEM careers.

However, the emergence of such role models and the mere existence of the described opportunities for reform in health, wellness, and STEM education are not enough to catalyze the rapid change that is required. STEM education reformers are struggling to understand how to attract women and minorities to traditional STEM higher-education programs. There is also a struggle in determining how to develop frameworks for providing stronger workplace support for these underrepresented groups in STEM careers.

Where are the STEM curricula and initiatives specifically addressing the opportunities promised by home-centered healthcare and personalized health and wellness?

Where are the interdisciplinary centers communicating these opportunities to today’s high-school graduates?

And where are the public-private partnerships that can provide political decision makers with the implementation frameworks to link healthcare reform to STEM education reform?

The answers to these questions will not come from tweaking standardized testing or from providing in schools an additional hour of health and wellness per week … So where will they come from?