Abstract
Although women graduate from college at higher rates than men, they remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This study examines whether women react to failing a STEM weed-out course by switching to a non-STEM major and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in a non-STEM field. While competitive courses designed to weed out potential STEM majors are often invoked in discussions around why students exit the STEM pipeline, relatively little is known about how women and men react to failing these courses. We use detailed individual-level data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) Postsecondary Transcript Study (PETS): 1988–2000 to show that women who failed an introductory calculus course are substantially less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree in STEM. In doing so, we provide evidence that weed-out course failure might help us to better understand why women are less likely to earn degrees.
Highlights
A longstanding body of research on gender differences in education suggests that women are underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)fields— in the physical sciences and engineering (Xie and Shauman 2007)
To motivate the analyses for our central research question, we first ask (1) who takes and who fails calculus? we ask, (2) what are the schooling outcomes associated with failing calculus? we address our key question, (3) are there gender differences in the schooling outcomes associated with failing calculus? To understand how failing a weed-out class may affect students in the STEM pipeline, we narrow our sample size for questions (2) and (3) to students who planned to major in STEM as high school seniors
Nationallyrepresentative representativedata dataand andaawide widerange rangeof of controls, controls, we we find that women who intended to major in STEM and fail calculus in college are significantly less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field
Summary
A longstanding body of research on gender differences in education suggests that women are underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)fields— in the physical sciences and engineering (Xie and Shauman 2007). While the factors that contribute to this climate are likewise numerous, competitive weed-out courses at the introductory level are a source of considerable dissatisfaction among undergraduates (Seymour and Hewitt 1997) These courses serve a gatekeeping function, as they are required for many STEM majors, and are often failed by a substantial number of students, promoting a competitive “sink or swim” environment (Seymour and Hewitt 1997; Kokkelenberg and Sinha 2010; Olson and Riordan 2012). Both women and men see this as problematic. I just said ‘Do you really want to do this? Is it really worth killing yourself for?’” or “It’s been unadulterated hell
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