Abstract
Decades of initiatives have striven to fix the so-called “leaking pipeline” problem—persistent high attrition of women from the career/educational path toward STEM professorship. Though these initiatives call on academics to increase female retention along this path, it remains unknown whether academics actually prioritize this goal. To investigate this, we tested whether academics would prioritize female retention at the cost of a competing goal when giving career advice to students at risk of leaving the “pipeline.” We present results from a national survey in which United States professors (n = 364) responded to vignettes of three hypothetical undergraduates, rating the extent to which they would encourage or discourage each student from pursuing a PhD in physics. Professors were randomly assigned vignettes with either male or female gender pronouns. Two vignettes featured students who cogently explained why remaining in the physics pipeline would not match their individual goals and interests, while another vignette presented a student with goals and interests that clearly matched pursuing physics graduate school. Professors who received female-gendered vignettes were thus forced to choose between prioritizing striving to increase female retention in physics and acting in the best interest of the individual student. We present evidence that professors seem prepared to encourage women more strongly than men to remain in physics, even when remaining is contrary to the stated goals and interests of the student: Our logistic regression results suggest that professors have higher odds of encouraging women over men, net of vignette and other controls. We also find that male professors have higher odds of encouraging undergraduates and find no evidence that, relative to non-STEM professors, STEM professors have higher odds of encouraging women over men.
Highlights
The metaphors we choose to describe an issue both shapes and reveals how we think about it (Morgan, 1998)
We aimed to assess whether academics prioritize increasing female retention on the path toward STEM professorship
As one way to detect such a priority, we sought to test if academics would strive to increase female retention at the cost of a second goal that they consider important–in this case, striving to “match” individuals to careers
Summary
The metaphors we choose to describe an issue both shapes and reveals how we think about it (Morgan, 1998). In United States national reports, popular news and scholarly debate on female underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the ubiquitous metaphor is the leaky pipeline (Alper, 1993; Blickenstaff, 2005; Ceci et al, 2014; NRC, 2006; IM2, 2007; Harmon, 2018; Williams and Massinger, 2016). The metaphor captures troubling, persistent patterns of female attrition on the path toward tenured STEM professorship in the United States, with attrition conceptualized as “leaks” from the pipeline. In some fields in the United States, like physics, women have long been underrepresented at each career/educational step. Even in other STEM fields in the United States, like biology, that have made considerable progress toward gender balance, underrepresentation persists at the senior-most career milestones (Ceci et al, 2014)
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