Social or Economic Goals? The Professional Goal Orientation of Students Enrolled in STEM and Non-STEM Majors in University

Ilka Wolter,Tina Seidel,Lisa Ehrtmann,Barbara Drechsel

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02065

Abstract

Various studies try to disentangle the gender-specific competencies or decisions that lead to a career in a STEM field and try to find a way to encourage more women to pursue this kind of career. The present study examines differences in the meaning of work (i.e., their professional goal orientation) of students who are enrolled in STEM or non-STEM programs in tertiary education. Based on the background that gender stereotypes associate women and men with communal or agentic roles respectively, we expected that women in STEM subjects differ in their professional goal orientation from women in non-STEM programs. More precisely, women who are enrolled in a STEM major are expected to be less oriented to social and communal goal orientations than women in non-STEM university programs. In a sample of 5,857 second-year university students of the German National Educational Panel Study, three profiles of professional goal orientation were confirmed in a latent profile analysis. As expected, women were more oriented toward social aspects of occupations, whereas men more likely belonged to a profile with high importance for economic aspects of occupations. Moreover, students enrolled in STEM programs more likely belonged to the profile of economic goal orientation. There was, however, no interaction of gender and STEM program: Women in STEM fields did not differ in their occupational goal orientation from women enrolled in non-STEM programs. Based on these findings and on a goal congruity perspective, future interventions aiming at overcoming the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields should consider the individual meaning of work and the goals that are associated with STEM occupations.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
The present study examines differences in the meaning of work of students who are enrolled in STEM or non-STEM programs in tertiary education
An analysis of the official statistics of first-year university students in the winter term of 2017/2018 for Germany, as a highly STEM-industrialized western country, showed the unequal proportion of women and men who are enrolled in different subdisciplines within STEM majors: While women are overrepresented in subjects such as biology (62.0%), pharmacy (68.6%), or architecture (57.9%), they are decidedly underrepresented in subjects like physics (28.7%), engineering (22.3%), or computer sciences (21.1%) (German Federal Bureau of Statistics, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Gender segregation in the labor market and in university majors is a widely known and consistent pattern of previous empirical research (e.g., Leuze and Strauß, 2009; Bechmann et al, 2012; Ochsenfeld, 2012; Hausmann and Kleinert, 2014), showing in detail that women are especially underrepresented in STEM fields (i.e., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). This segregation is concerning because STEM fields are mostly. Most studies only find small differences and the current discussion focuses more on the proposition of the gender similarities hypothesis (Hyde, 2005, 2014)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion