STEMing the Tide: Using Ingroup Experts to Inoculate Women's Self-Concept in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)

Increasing young women’s exposure to successful female scientists, mathematicians, and engineers strengthens female students’ self-identification with STEM and enhances positive attitudes, feelings of self-efficacy, and motivation to pursue STEM majors and careers.

• Interaction with a female peer with expertise in math resulted in more positive attitudes towards math, greater identification with math as well as in increased effort on a difficult math test. Female students scored higher on implicit attitude scores for math and English when their professor was a woman, but strongly disliked math when their professor was a man (p=0.001). Male students did not differ when their professor was a man or a woman.
• The percentage of female students who voluntarily answered questions in calculus class increased from 7% to 46% when they had a female professor, but decreased from 11% to 7% when they had a male professor over the course of a semester-long class. Male students also showed a similar pattern: 18% of males asked questions at the beginning of the semester, while 42% of male students responded to questions at the end of the semester with a female professors. Little change was noted between the beginning of the semester and the end of the semester for male students with male professors.
• Though the female students achieved higher grades than the male students regardless of their professor’s sex, the female students were less confident in their abilities when they had all male professors and significantly more confident when they had all female professors.  On average, when female students had a female professor, the students expected to their grade to be higher than when they had a male professor. There was no effect of professor gender shown among male students.

Taken together, these findings suggest that being able to identify with women role models in math and engineering not only improves educational experiences in STEM classrooms, but enables female students to envision future careers in STEM fields for themselves.

Researchers conducted two controlled experiments and one semester length observational study to test the impact of exposure to female STEM experts on undergraduate women who have an interest in STEM fields.  In the two experiments, 174 (73 and 101, respectively) undergraduate women with STEM majors were recruited to participate.  In the first experiment, half of the students interacted with an advanced female peer, while the control group interacted with an advanced male peer.  In the second experiment, one-third of the students were assigned to read biographies of female engineers; one-third read the same biographies with pronouns and accompanying pictures changed to seem to be about male engineers; and one-third was a control group assigned to read descriptions of engineering innovations. In both experiments, the students’ implicit attitudes towards, identifications with, and gendered stereotypes about mathematics were then measured using Implicit Association Tests (IAT), and their explicit attitudes, identifications, and stereotypes were elicited through self-reporting.  In the first experiment, the students’ effort on a difficult math test was also measured.  

In the semester length observational study, 100 students were recruited from 15 sections of an introductory calculus course, half of which had all male instructors and half of which had all female instructors.  Once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end of the semester, students’ attitudes towards, identifications with, and gendered stereotypes about math were measured using the same IATs as in the first two tests. The students were also asked to predict the grade they expected to receive in the course to measure their sense of confidence in their math abilities.  Additionally, experimenters observed the participants in class to measure participation and interaction with their professors.