The effects of male peers on the educational outcomes of female college students in STEM: Experimental evidence from partnerships in Chemistry courses.

Abstract

A major concern among universities around the world is that female students face gender bias, discrimination and related barriers in male-dominated STEM fields. To investigate this concern, we conducted a novel large-scale experiment of interactions between female and male students in one of the most important gateway courses for the Sciences and a course in which students interact one-on-one extensively throughout the term. Over the past four years, at a large public research university, we randomly paired every student enrolled in an introductory Chemistry lab (3,902 students and total N = 5,537). Using precise estimates from the experiment, we provide novel evidence that female students are not negatively affected academically by male partners. When assigned a male partner, female students do not receive lower scores or grades, and they are no more likely to drop the course or not continue in Chemistry or a STEM field. We also find that academically weaker female students are not negatively affected by male students and that female students are not negatively affected when paired with academically stronger male students. Although previous studies have documented that female students self-report experiencing gender bias from male peers in STEM, importantly, we do not find evidence that female students are negatively affected by male peers in intensive, long-term pairwise interactions in their course grades or future STEM course taking. The findings provide hopeful news for future trends in female representation in STEM fields.