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Women earned only 18% of all Computer Science degrees and made up less than 25% of the workers in engineering- and computer-related fields in 2009. These statistics stand in stark contrast to the gains they have achieved in law, medicine, and other areas of the workforce. While this dearth of women in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is often attributed to lack of innate ability or desire on the part of women, the director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, sociology professor Shelley Correll, sees this explanation as incomplete. And she offers a competing one: stereotypes.
During her recent talk, “How Gender Stereotypes Influence Emerging Career Aspirations,” Correll detailed the ways in which negative stereotypes about women can hinder their performance, depress their self-assessments of ability, and bias the evaluations made of them by key decision makers. She asserts that the combination of these effects can subtly influence women’s aspirations and career decisions, funneling them away from degrees and careers in male-dominated STEM subjects.
Correll explained that extensive empirical research on stereotype threat has demonstrated that if a person is exposed to a negative stereotype about a group to which they belong (e.g. women, Asians, African-Americans), they will then perform worse on tasks related to the stereotype. This is problematic for women in the STEM fields, as there are many societal beliefs about how women do not have strong mathematical ability and about how men make better engineers and scientists. Thus, if you tell women that they generally score lower on math and spatial tests than men, they actually score lower on those tests than they would have had the stereotypes not been made salient.
This has significant implications for real-world situations; for instance, researchers found that having women indicate their gender before taking the AP Calculus exam was enough to trigger stereotype threat and significantly suppress their scores. Researchers calculated that if the gender question were moved to the end of the exam, 4,700 more women in the United States would have received AP Calculus credit that year.
Tech career aspirations for women have stalled. Source: comunicaciones
In addition to decreased performance, Correll’s own research shows that negative stereotypes can lower self-assessments of ability and lead individuals to judge their performance by a harsher standard. In a laboratory experiment Correll performed, male and female students completed a ‘contrast sensitivity’ task, in which they had to determine whether a given image was composed of more black or white squares. Unbeknownst to the subjects, ‘contrast sensitivity’ is a fabricated task: there is no correct answer, as all images have the same amount of black and white. However, this allowed Correll to give all subjects the same score and to control the stereotypic beliefs associated with ‘contrast sensitivity’ performance.
She found that when subjects were told that men had higher ‘contrast sensitivity’ ability, women rated their aptitude lower (even though all participants were given the same score), held their performance up to higher standards, and reported lower interest in entering fields requiring skill in ‘contrast sensitivity’ than men. According to Correll, these effects make women less likely to enter STEM fields because they are less likely to, “… believe they have the skills necessary for that career in order to develop preferences for the career.”
However, when subjects were told that woman and men had the same ‘contrast sensitivity’ ability, these disparities disappeared and there were no gender differences in ratings of aptitude, assessments of competence, or interest in fields requiring ‘contrast sensitivity’ ability. This demonstrates the powerful effects of negative stereotypes on the psyche. Beyond diminishing performance, stereotypes decrease self-assessments of ability, lowering the likelihood that women will enter STEM fields.
But how can change occur when gender stereotypes are everywhere? The first thing to keep in mind is that these effects are situational. For this reason, Correll says it is important to avoid the knee-jerk reaction that women should to be fixed, and to focus instead on organizations. “We need to understand that stereotypes affect not only people’s own judgments of their competence, but they also affect the judgments of others.” For instance, an experimental study on the evaluation of engineering internship applicants found that the same resume was judged by a harsher standard if it had a female, versus a male, name.
Correll, who has advised organizations as diverse as Facebook, the National Science Foundation, and Cornell University on how to attract and retain women, named three key things that organizations can do to affect change. First, they can control the messages they are sending, by making sure there are no negative gendered beliefs operating in the organization. Second, they can make performance standards unambiguous and communicate them clearly because, “When people don’t know what to do, gender stereotypes fill in the gaps.” Last, organizations can hold gatekeepers in senior management accountable for reporting on gender disparities in hiring, retention and promotion of employees.
Correll remains optimistic about increasing the representation of women in STEM fields: “We can affect interest if we can figure out what’s causing people to be less interested.”
A video of the original talk can be found viewed on the Stanford YouTube Channel.
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Susan Fisk is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at Stanford. She is part of the Clayman Institute student writing team, reporting on gender topics at Stanford.
Responses to Negative+Math+Stereotypes=Too few women
What's in it for women by producing more math/engineering mavens?
Considering the kinds of employment available to engineers in today's world, most of it is working for huge companies that care nothing about destroying the environments in which they are operating, or working for various state (also federal) governments which, in today's political climate, are turning back the EPA's rules and regulations for protecting air, water, soil, and public health. Most women have children, eventually. As they think about the world they are bringing the kids into, they might stop and think if becoming engineers will be better for their and other kids' futures than going into any number of other professional fields--like medicine, nursing, social research, environmental advocacy, IT, etc.
We have to change our attitudes about gender roles if we want to eliminate negative stereotypes about math. We discourage girls and young women from pursuing careers in math because those fields are marked as "masculine"and the exclusive domain of boys and men. They receive messages to socially conform to areas marked as "feminine" such as learning how to be a housewife and becoming a mother. During the formative years, young girls receive messages stating it is not ladylike to delve in the realm of boys and men. As a result, they choose career paths to where they socially conform to the "feminine" model. For women of childbearing age, they face social pressure to adapt their lifestyle and career choices to the "feminine" social construct. For the women who work (in the fields of math and science) there is a constant struggle to maintain femininity in areas marked as "masculine". We have to re-evaluate our why we hold onto such rigid gender roles and teach our children better values.
I love to see issues like this discussed and researched. I believe the issues stem from a very young age, having a daughter and two nieces myself I know when shopping for presents that will engage problem solving skills development are primarily marketed towards boys. Maybe a good place to start would be toy manufacturers.
Maybe women's self-esteem is too high for STEM work? Many of the boys who go into STEM fields self-assess themselves as nerds, geeks, and dweebs, and believe that science is a field where they'll fit in; where being socially awkward is de rigueur. Check out Sagan's essay "Maxwell and the Nerds". There are probably few girls who see themselves that way.
And why should women want to join STEM fields? STEM jobs have low prestige, there's already a glut of workers, rapid changes in technology leave aging workers in the dust, and patent and employment structures mean that STEM workers can rarely profit from their ideas; instead, they enrich the executives above them. Much better to be a doctor or a lawyer. Working exclusively with your mind is an exquisitely outsourceable job, and China and India are churning out workers with top-notch educations willing to work for a fraction of an American wage. American women would be fools to enter such a field.
American men are fools too, but perhaps they love science and technology too much to resist it. Or maybe they were tricked by male role models offering an impossible dream, the way so many boys think they can become a professional basketball player or a rap star. Whatever the case, I suspect female nerds have the real intelligence - they're too smart to do 30 hours unpaid overtime in exchange for a "free" pizza.
Little girls dream about becoming wives and mothers. Little boys dream about visiting the stars.
I find the comments here as fascinating --and revelatory-- as the article itself. From flat denial that the gender imbalance is a problem in the first place to overt hostility to (stereotyped!) STEM careers, they neatly illustrate some of the subtle and not-so-subtle messages girls and women receive throughout their lives telling them that they should not pursue a future in STEM.
I am encouraged, however, by the research indicating that the impact of negative stereotypes on performance and self-assessment is situational. It is much easier to influence particular situations than to change all of society wholesale.
Unfortunately for the female STEM student at most universities today, there is no quick fix for the situation of being one of the only (or the only) female among a sea of male students in class. As Meghan Heintz's experience at Humboldt illustrates, even having significant women faculty isn't necessarily enough to counter this.
This is why I continue to encourage high school girls interested in pursuing STEM to seriously consider attending a women's college. When I graduated with a physics major from Mount Holyoke College, on average, MHC was graduating as many or more female physics majors each year (I was one of six in 1987) as any physics department in the nation, even those that produced ten times as many (male) physics majors. It sounds like the figures probably haven't changed all that much in the last couple decades.
And before anyone suggests that the advantageous situation of studying STEM subjects at a women's college doesn't prepare women scientists for the competition of the "real world", note that women's colleges like MHC also produce more graduates who go on to earn advanced degrees in the sciences.
It isn't about whether going into STEM fields is a good decision for future success...or whether some people end up in those fields because they believe it complements a socially awkward personality. Regardless of other factors, those who are interested in science should deserve equal opportunity to pursue it. If, according to the author, stereotyping is something that acts as a stronger barrier to opportunity for some reason, then it is good to identify this problem and find a solution for it. I do think that more evidence would be needed for this study- do stereotypes stop men from pursuing arts/humanities or fields that are more 'feminine'?
A lot of guys don't go into math and engineering because they see it as a geeky thing to do. Every employment field has stereotype threat. It's silly to try and make an issue out of it. No one is directly stopping anyone from doing anything.
You do not see people pushing for the hip hop industry to be more welcoming to white people with hip hop aspirations. Why? Because life's tough, and you'd sound like an idiot to ask for such a thing.
But because people like the sexist author if this article view women as emotionally incapable of controlling their own fates, people make a hoo-haa about innocuous discrepancies. Real feminists believe in the strength of women and do not try to make victim storylines for every situation known to humanity.
This could explain why there's so few men in traditionally female dominated fields. What worries me is that 57% of university attendee's are female, men are the new minority.
At my university, there were just as many women receiving math degrees than men. I have seen an increase in women taking an interest in math, and in particular, in becoming math teachers. Having more female math teachers can also help encourage female students to go into math/science, especially since the female math teacher can share her story and her experience.
Growing up, I have never felt that I couldn't do math just because I was female. From the time I was 9 years old, I wanted to be a chemist, then switched my interest to math in high school. I was always the top of my class in math and science. I think the stereotype that only men can do math and science is rapidly dying, especially since females are tending to have better math and science scores than males in the high schools.
I wonder what this says about the negative stereotype surrounding female asian drivers?
It goes to show how smart women are in the western world. There smart enough to know STEM jobs have no future. No manufacturing +broken patent system+ GOP creationist + outsourcing = no jobs.
The only thing this country needs more then engineers is engineering jobs.
A small quibble, but shouldn't "affect" in "can do to affect change" be "effect" -- the rare use of the verb "effect".
Let's get real--Math and Science careers, including Engineering, are top tier pay scale professions that also wield a lot of power and social privilege. Hence, why we encourage more males than females to make their careers in those fields. There are people who judge their self-worth and social status by their careers and the salaries those careers command. As a result, careers in the math and sciences have been an exclusive "Old Boys Club" which shunned women not only because of the sexist notion that women are inferior mentally and socially, but also because of rigid gender roles and expectations we assign to children.
Children pick up social cues from the adults in their environment about what is and is not acceptable behavior. If we expose our children to male and female professionals in the science fields then they will grow up accepting that it's okay to pursue careers in sciences and math.
Look elsewhere on Stanford News to read about women engineer faculty/researchers who have scored gains on making solar cells more versatile. Not all engineering is anti-human :)
Why don't women go into more STEM fields, or drop out of educational programs early? Because no one wants to be the first woman engineer at her company, or the only woman in the math dept., etc. It's less hassle to go into medicine or law, where the trail has already been blazed by other women, and women are accepted and respected. Once the first critical mass of woman forms in STEM fields, more will follow in a flood. In the meantime, who wants to experience all the sexism and hassle, for not very much money? Dangle some better rewards for those women to stay in the field, and that critical mass will form. Until then, it's not worth it for the women. They can do something else that doesn't require so much pain and suffering, for the same or better money than STEM jobs.
This is a very interesting study, and I was really intrigued especially by the 'contrast sensitivity' study which got at the subtle aspects of self assessment. This, by the way, has interesting implications about how we build self confidence, independent of the women issue.
However, it is also interesting that the article does not mention anywhere the possibility that good old fashioned overt sexism could be at play also. If women are more likely to drop out during their studies (yes, they are), maybe it's because they become aware that they will have to produce much more than their male colleagues in order to be appreciated. Maybe they notice that the women faculty who dare to have children are looked down upon by the male colleagues. Maybe they learn that when women faculty stop the tenure clock while being pregnant, they are looked upon as wimps by their male colleagues. Maybe they learn that it is much harder for women to get their papers accepted in high profile journals than for men, maybe they learn that it is harder for women to receive the grants that are so important to doing research, maybe they learn that the letters of recommendations that are written for women are not as strong as the letters written for men.
These are simply statements that need to be supported by research, despite the fact that *everyone* in these field know them to be true (the reply from 'i-call-bullshit' above notwithstanding). But the fact that there is so much mental acrobatics trying to uncover hidden reasons for the disparity of numbers of men vs. women in these fields raises the question: why are so few people mentioning the possibility that what is at play is as plain as the nose on our faces?
I'm a female junior engineering student at Humboldt State. The head of my department is a woman, the former head, my thermodynamics professor and my systems analysis professor are all women. I've got mad math skills and so do the other women in my program. I'm the last woman from my original intro to engineering class, however. My advisor, who happens to be the head, told me once women were more likely to drop out with significantly higher grades while the men only really left when they were forced out b y failing too many classes. It's an interesting quandary. I don't know why women end up quitting quicker than their male counterparts.
Well, Asian(probably true for middle-eastern girls too) girls who come here in America for studies, are generally cream of the Asian Society both intelectually and economically. So, somehow they are not victim of the stereotype, at least not to the extent a general American girl , here, would be. The story is same or even much worse for general Asian girls who live in Asia.
We have to consider that most of stereotypes in America are driven by Television series, and seriously The Big Bang Theory only contributes to the socially awkward stereotype of tech guys. Universities should watch the sources of such stereotypes, TV and mass media are elements any social scientist can't ignore today.
Women within the United States have the toughest time proving their mathematical ability.There are so many pop psychologists with an agenda to detour girls and women from math and science that I'm not suprized there is a shortage of women in science.I have told my foreign friends and they think Americans are very sexist in many ways including when it comes to academics and careers.I remember my Calculus III class had only myself and two other America women.We were out numbered quite a bit by women from the Middle East and Asia where they believe women are equal in spatial and math abillity.We have become a joke to the rest of the world when it comes to these sterotypes.
How can we call America a free country when we have such damaging sterotypes.We cannot go around the world bragging about freedom when we have such myths and sterotypes.
So how can I, as a substitute teacher in the Ravenswood City School District, San Jose Unified School District, and the Fremont Union High School District encourage my female students to study for and eventually enter the STEM fields?
Elise, read the report Why So Few? Women in STEM from the AAUW (American Association of University Women). It is filled with practical recommendations for teachers.