Duct Tape for Leaky Pipelines: Mentoring for Women Scientists in the United States and South Korea

• In Event: 284 - Regular Session. Gender

Abstract

Although women now earn half or more of advanced degrees in higher education, men dominate academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Furthermore, variation in women’s participation across STEM sub-disciplines has been persistent but undertheorized. This study explores how professional socialization mediates the relationships between numerical gender disparities and gendered disciplinary cultures. By analyzing in-depth interviews with women biologists and electronic/computer engineers in the U.S. and South Korea, this study clarifies the mechanism of how the disciplinary culture of “engineering masculinity” prevails across nations and contrasts with more inclusive norms in biology. Within the men’s world of engineering, however, mentoring relationships not only bolster women’s participation and success at the individual level but also catalyze cultural changes at the institutional level. Complementing top-down approaches such as quota systems and gender training for administrators, mentoring relationships serve as bottom-up relational interventions to facilitate two-way professional gender socialization. While women are socialized into an existing disciplinary culture, both mentors and their students are change agents who also actively strategize to remake that culture to be a more inclusive one.

Authors

• Yun Kyung Cho, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin