A lack of female role models and the impact on a woman's choice to pursue a STEM field

“I’m a big believer in the role model effect. Seeing people who look like you makes you want to pursue those fields,” said Abi Kulshreshtha, a physics concentrator and co-leader of the Physics Departmental Undergraduate Group in the aforementioned Brown study.24

If you were to put yourself in the shoes of a young female engineering student, imagine walking into a university on your first day and seeing a department where the large majority of students, professors, advisors, faculty, teacher's assistants, lab coordinators, etc. are all male. While most men in these positions are not overtly sexist (though some are, see here), the shear difference in visibility may be enough to deter you from succeeding in this field. As students move to university and are thrown into a wildly different experience than they had in secondary school, the lack of representation is simply another factor to deter them. This is shown both in gender but in racial minorities as well.

As many women can attest to, the chilly climate of the STEM field has a large part to do with the lack of a presence of female role models in these fields. Nationally, only 14% of physics faculty members are women, according to data published by the American Institute of Physics, though this is just one example of the great lack of representative educated women for students to look up to. Not only does the shear presence of these role models impact the way that students feel, it plays roles in fair academic guidance, classroom etiquette, dispelling stereotypes and gender roles, and enhancing student’s academic self-confidence. When the female students seek academic advice to a majority of male mentor figures, it hinders their abilities to seek well rounded advice. According to Snover, in all STEM fields, women reported they received advice about academic careers more frequently than men did which is impacted by the relative percentage of women in advising and academic roles.26

As cited in Aspects of an MIT educational experience that might influence whether a woman pursues an academic career in science and engineering, the relative representation of male professors may be negatively hindering the female students based on inherent teaching styles as well.26 One student from MIT was quoted as saying “there are too many stressors on people and not enough forums for support and self-esteem building".26 This lack of support has been mimicked in a multitude of studies, often reporting testimonials of how "others may have enjoyed the 'boot-camp' model of education, but that approach drives out many qualified people and causes others to underperform, The 'macho' way isn't always the best way and is a sure way to drive qualified women out.”26 The presence of the male dominated classroom, in regard to students, professors, and teaching assistants, was the norm at the university level for hundreds of years. Trends like this may not be visible to the non-marginalized group, who may see it as being “the way it always has been.”26

When the presence of suitable female role models is absent, women are more likely to "endorse the stereotype that science is for men”9, and that simply increasing the visibility of, and engagement with, positive female role models has proven efficacious. In fact, simply having a woman administer a mathematics exam was sufficient to reduce the achievement gap in one study. This research continuously cites how the presence of a more evenly distributed female faculty has the statistically significant impact on academic outcomes of the female students. While the immediate change may be slow due to university politics, tenure and the availability of positions, it is clear that it is in a university's best interest to increase the representation of women in STEM in order to best benefit their students.

In research that Momsen et al. cites the “experiences may play an important role in a student’s perception of self-efficacy and stereotype threat”, Momsen and Laeur analyzed the gender differences in success in introductory biology and biochemistry courses, which were both taught by female instructors, labs were taught by female graduate students, and found that “students are afforded multiple opportunities to observe women doing biology and biochemistry and may have greater self-efficacy when doing biology and biochemistry themselves.”9 This access to seeing women in leadership roles was enough to alter the academic self-confidence of the women studied. It is important to note that the gender gap potentially could be effected in the opposite direction in a situation like this, where if males didn't have representation equality they would be negatively impacted. This study is not to encourage a fully female faculty, but to emphasize simply how exposure to female role models can impact female students.

Similarly, Harsh et al. explains in A Perspective of Gender Differences in Chemistry and Physics Undergraduate Research Experiences that examination of data from a longitudinal sample of college students (n = 17,637), Sax, Bryant, and Harper reported that “interactions with faculty have a significant effect on female students’ self-confidence and sense of overall well-being.”27 They claim that such findings converge with Blickenstaff’s argument that the underrepresentation of women in the sciences is attributable to “the cumulative effect of many separate but related factors [that] results in the imbalance in STEM fields.”15 Therefore, it should be considered necessary to provide educational opportunities that enable women to compensate or overcome these factors that act as layers of gender-based filters.

The culmination of these studies is important to acknowledge the necessity of women in higher divisions of STEM education in order to best benefit female students. While this is obviously a very complex and pervasive issue, small steps that encourage universities to change are absolutely necessary.

To read more about a Dichotomy of Realities - An Analysis of Gender and STEM at the University of Wyoming, click here.

References can be found here.