Despite the fact that women outpace men in high school science and math courses and earn the same grades in college-level science and technology courses, they remain underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering, and technology fields. With the exception of biology, where women represent 46 percent of the profession, women are also graduating with fewer degrees in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering. They’re also woefully underrepresented in computer sciences.
This is all research-supported information, but what’s unclear is why? What happens in between high school and college and choosing a career path?
The Research
There are plenty of people who would argue that women aren’t as skilled in math and science as men. But looking at real math courses, researchers have found almost no evidence to support that. In high school, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, women receive higher grades than men. Weirdly, according to a study titled Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes, women who perform best in science are particularly unlikely to pursue those careers. This is despite the fact that research shows that in college, men reported more of an affinity for avoiding math and science classes due to poorer academic performance than women.
Let’s review what we know thus far: women perform better (or equally as well) in science and math classes, but that hasn’t translated into more women in science and technology. What is the disconnect?
Facing Discrimination
It would be easy to make a strong argument about the discrimination that women face in the science and tech industries. For example, a study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly found that in a survey of natural and social science faculty at a university, the women in natural sciences encountered more sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and sexism when compared to women in social sciences. In a study of biomedical researchers published in Nature, women had to do 2.5 times the work of male colleagues to receive the same peer review score for post doctoral fellowships. When it comes to lab managers, science faculty were more likely to hire men when the male and female candidates offered the exact same credentials, according to a study discussed in the PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Faculty at doctoral programs were more willing to meet with white male candidates than white women (or any minority), according to a study in Psychological Science.
If women are trying to get their work published, they better hope the journal does a double-blind review instead of single-blind. One study, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, showed that when journals made that switch, the number of female first-authored manuscripts increased. If there is a math task involved, people are more likely to hire a male candidate despite being given evidence of female superiority at math tasks.
Basically, it’s not that women aren’t technically qualified for positions in STEM, but there seems to be a misperception and bias against hiring or publishing women.
The Sexist Stereotypes
In a new study, published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, researchers have acknowledged all the above limitations and tried to figure out if stereotypes about women are actively preventing them from working in the STEM fields. This is important because at the end of the day, skill sets are irrelevant in a system that assumes gender belies professional strengths.
It is important to note that this study did not look at discrimination against women in the sciences–there is plenty of research to support that–but it did look into stereotypes and how the perception of women affects hiring and jobs.
There is “some evidence [that] suggests people perceive scientists to be more like men than women,” according to the research.
This paper looks into what traits people associate with men, what are associated with women, and which are associated with scientists.
Essentially, “the fact that people implicitly associate men with science and spontaneously depict more male scientists than female scientists does not demonstrate that people consider women inadequate as scientists. However, if people believe that the traits of a good scientist are more similar to the traits of men than the traits of women, it would be a direct demonstration that women are perceived as relatively deficient in the qualities needed to be effective scientists. But there is little known about how scientists are perceived.”
Part of the problem might be because women are rarely depicted as scientists in textbooks or advertisements and when asked to draw a scientist, most people draw men.
In the first part of the study, participants rated specific traits as to whether it was high (indicates agency) or low (passivity) in agency and high or low in communion. In this case, agency indicates mastery and assertion while passivity indicates weakness and failure. Communion indicates intimacy, and dissociation indicates hostility and remoteness.
Examples of traits that rated on the communion scale include: Cheerful, Helpful , Need for Security, Sympathetic, Social, etc.
Disassociation includes: Bitter, Devious, Deceitful.
Agency: Ambitious, Ability to Separate Feelings from Ideas, Analytical, Firm, Mathematical, Logical, Objective, Risk-taking, Technically Skilled, etc.
Passivity: Demure, Fearful, Easily Influenced, Submissive, Uncertain.
The results, which aren’t difficult to figure out given the rest of this article, indicate that “people perceive successful scientists to be more similar in personality characteristics to men than women.”
Stereotypes about women assume they are more communal, while men have more agency. The stereotypical traits associated with men overlap with those associated with scientists, including high agency and low communal.
Interestingly, when the results are broken down by whether it was a man or woman taking the study, both genders agreed that scientists are high in agency and low in communal. However, female participants were more likely to say that women were capable of a greater degree of agency and more likely to “perceive a somewhat greater similarity of women to successful scientists.”
Some of this makes sense when you factor in research that indicates men hold more traditional attitudes toward women than women do and are more inclined to justify gender inequality, according to the research cited in the study published last week.
In the second study, the researchers looked at the “perceived similarity of men and women with different types of scientists.”
The study found that “women are seen as less similar to successful scientists than men are.” Interestingly, women were considered more successful in scientific fields that already have a higher number of women. Men were considered successful regardless of the type of scientist they became.
This research “may indicate that women have to predominate in a field before people perceive them as having the same role congruity as men.”
One interesting takeaway from the second study was that women who attended single-sex colleges saw a greater connection between successful “scientist traits” and women. This could indicate that women who are exposed to other successful female scientists are more likely to believe that women are just as capable, while men and women who attend co-ed institutions have a different idea.
While this is all alarming, the main takeaway is even scarier.
“Women may be at a disadvantage in science because people hold different stereotypes about women than they do about men and successful scientists, particularly in scientific fields where women are less prevalent,” according to the study.
The perceived relative lack of fit between the female gender role and the role of scientist may undermine people’s evaluation of female scientists, who may be seen as overly communal, insufficiently agentic, or too passive to succeed in science.
The solution? The study doesn’t really offer a solution other than just being aware that the bias exists when evaluating candidates. The takeaways that indicate women exposed to other female scientists suggest the solution is more women in science and tech, but given the bias and stereotypes, that’s quite a challenge.