The Office of the State Superintendent of Education has a response to last week’s post about the strangeness of calling out STEM (science, math, engineering and technology) careers for women as “non-traditional.” If you’ll recall, we didn’t like that designation so much. OSSE says it understands:

[…D]espite how much we truly look forward to the day where STEM-related industries are globally recognized as gender-neutral, today is not that day, and ‘Non-Traditional’ is not a career term we arbitrarily decided on but instead an official category defined by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) in which one gender makes up less than 25% of the total number of workers in an occupation/career.

It may not seem like it now, especially in an area like D.C. with so many amazing females working in the field, but science, technology, engineering or math are still male-dominated industries in which women are far from equity.

Fair enough. For the record, we remain enthusiastic about getting more women involved in STEM tracks.