– The vast majority of the literature reviewed underlined how challenging it was for female students to identify with STEM because the social environment provided a variety of signals that women do not belong to STEM and do not embody STEM prototypes.
– Although boys tended to have higher STEM career interest overall, girls with higher STEM interest and who belonged to a mixed-gender group of friends had the highest STEM career interest scores among their female peers. In contrast, girls who belonged to primarily female friend groups and perceived their friend group to not be supportive of STEM had the lowest STEM career interest scores in the sample.
– Being in a class with more male peers who held these gendered biases negatively predicted intent to major in computer science and engineering. In contrast, being in a class with confident female peers positively predicted intent to major in computer science and engineering.
– Female students rated themselves as having lower abilities than their male counterparts.
– White female students were more likely to major in STEM in college if they felt competent in high school math.
– Young women are operating in an environment where parents, peers, and teachers think and say that they do not belong in STEM and their abilities are challenged even when they are academically successful.
– Young women experience challenges to their participation and inclusion when they are in STEM settings.
Current Selections
ClearDeveloping a STEM Identity Among Young Women: A Social Identity Perspective
Fighting for Desired Versions of a Future Self: How Young Women Negotiated STEM-Related Identities in the Discursive Landscape of Educational Opportunity
Authors illustrate the local struggles that young women of color at two high schools in the same school district engaged in to construct and maintain STEM-related identities in the context of their high school lives. In particular, authors focus on the local discourses and practices of the school learning environments within and against which four of the young women in the larger study engaged in STEM identity work.
The Burden of Being “Model”: Racialized Experiences of Asian STEM College Students
– The students constructed personal narratives mediated by symbolic cultural systems to make meaning of their experiences, which more often disputed than confirmed the model minority stereotype.
– Eleven students brought up the notion that some Asian students are encouraged to pursue STEM-based fields because the perception is that they will not be successful in other fields, such as English, religion, or history. They discussed being pigeonholed into majoring in STEM in spite of their many diverse life and career interests.
– The experiences of Black and Asian STEM college students overlap significantly, in that both are bound by society’s misrecognition of their race and ability.
– These students were not immune from believing in the stereotypes and biases about their own race, even as they recognized that these stereotypes might be harming them.
– Five students in this study discussed using the MMM and their high achievement in STEM to capitalize on or take advantage of the stereotype.
– South Asian (Indian or Pakistani) students in particular have similar experiences that differ from those of East Asian students. Many women in this sample talked about the salience of skin tone discrimination in their lives and its effects on their academic performance.
Friendship Groups, Personal Motivation, and Gender in Relation to High School Students’ STEM Career Interest
Friendship group characteristics, motivation, and gender were investigated in relation to adolescents’ science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career interest. First, the authors investigated the extent to which personal motivation and friendship group STEM climate predicted adolescents’ STEM career interest after controlling for gender and other background factors. They hypothesized that the effects of these variables would be domain-specific, such that the friendship group’s STEM climate and students’ sci-ence motivation would predict STEM career interest after controlling for the friendship group’s English climate and students’ English motivation. Finally, they investigated possible moderation effects.
Is Science Me? High School Students' Identities, Participation and Aspirations in Science, Engineering, and Medicine
To explore why some who were once very interested in science, engineering, or medicine (SEM) majors or careers decided to leave the pipeline in high school while others persisted.