TOOLS FOR CHANGE: BOOSTING THE RETENTION OF WOMEN IN THE STEM PIPELINE

Abstract

IntroductionThe scarcity of women in science well documented, a nd its impact - profound. A 2012 Report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that a deficit of one million science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals will result in the United States' workforce if current rates of training persist (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012). It's not hard to see how this hurts the United States' competitive position - and will continue to do so if women in STEM meet more gender bias in the U.S. than do women elsewhere, notably in India and China.The conventional wisdom that women haven't progressed in careers in STEM due to the pull of children and early choices not to pursue math and science careers (Moss-Racusin, Dovidio, Brescoll, Graham, & Handelsman, 2012). Some studies conclude that the relatively low percentage of women reflects these factors and is not caused by discrimination in STEM (Ceci, Williams, & Banett, 2009; Ceci & Williams, 2011; Ceci et al., 2011).Yet three recent studies found that gender bias also plays a role. One found that even when math skills were identical, both men and women were twice as likely to hire a man for a job that required math (Reuben, Sapienza, & Zingales, 2014). A s econd study found that in academic laboratories in elite universities, male (but not female) scientists employed fewer female than male graduate students and post docs (Sheltzer & Smith, 2014). A third double-blind randomized study gave science faculty at research-intensive universities application materials of a fictitious student randomly assigned a male or female name, and found that both male and female faculty rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hirable than the female with identical application materials (Moss-Racusin, Dovidio, Brescoll, Graham & Handelsman, 2012). These studies are part of a much larger literature on gender bias: experimental social psychologists have documented bias over and over again since the 1980s.STEM fields provide fertile ground for bias for at least two reasons. First, studies of tokenis m document that bias t ends t o occur more often when women make up less than 15%-20% of a given field, which common in ma ny fields of science (although no longer in biology) (Ka nter, 1977a, 1977b). Second, an influential study by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard found that bias more common in fields, like science, that see themselves as highly meritocratic (Castilla & Benard, 2010).This report asks a long-standing question: do the patterns documented in experimental social psychologists' labs reflect what actually occurring at wor k for women in t he STEM fields? (Mitchell & Tetlock, 2006). The answer yes. Gender bias exists, and it exists for women of color: 100% of the sixty scientists interviewed for this study reported encountering one or mor e of these patt er ns of gender bias, based on inter views in which we simply described experimental findings and asked women scientists, Does any of that sound familiar? (An earlier study found that 97% of the Black women interviewed were aware of negative stereotypes of Black women, and 80 percent had been personally affected by them (Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003)).This research unusual in that it bridges the gap between experimental social psychologists' labs and actual workplaces - and because it examines gender bias among women of color as well as White women. The current body of social psychological work on gender bias has focused almost exclusively on the experiences of White women, leaving the major question of whether these four distinct patterns of bias extend to women of color unanswered.This report adds to a small existing literature on women of color in STEM. The classic report, The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science, was written in 1976; it reports many of the same patterns of bias documented by this report (Malcolm, Hall, & Brown, 1976). …