throwaway09851

If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with

I did not say "put up with", I said "deal with", which includes many options other than accepting what you're given. If your workplace discriminates on the basis of race, you could report them for violation of anti-discrimination laws, lobby for stronger laws, leave the workplace for a better one, etc.

It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in

Exactly what I just discussed, maybe in an ideal world such things shouldn't be your responsibility, but the only way to guarantee action is to take it. If someone pushes you into a puddle, you might be right to say that it shouldn't be your responsibility to remove yourself from that situation, as you did not put yourself into it, but I think most would agree that the right course of action is to deal with it yourself anyways.

I am not suggesting that the responsibility falls solely on women or minorities to deal with their own problems at all, but I am suggesting that they should take some agency of their own.

Yes! Thank you, I failed to touch on this in my comment at all, it's not a gender-specific phenomena to have to push back against negative social aspects in order to pursue the things that truly capture your interest. I agree wholeheartedly.

I am a woman, and this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else. It seems to me that if you have a genuine passion for STEM stuff, it takes a lot more than a bad environment to completely redirect your career path.

Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.

It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with. That's not a bad thing, it just means that they misjudged the interest:difficulty ratio.

Of the cases I know of personally, most of these women ended up in a job working fairly close with STEM stuff, writing manuals, doing graphic design, etc, and are perfectly fine with those jobs.

To be clear, I'm not accounting for cases where an entire university or business or whatever is made up of toxic sexism, but that's been pretty uncommon in my experience in the US.

Women of STEM: if you've got a bad environment, do something about it! Tell your higher-ups, talk to people directly, seek a different position, endure what you can, and for God's sake stand up for yourself.

tl;dr the implication that most women in STEM can't handle a toxic work environment without giving up entirely doesn't seem that progressive at all

NB disclaimer, most people I know are computer scientists, plus a few mathematicians, so maybe engineering is different