Warming the Chill: Mitigating Institutional-Level Factors of “Chilly Climates” for Women in STEM Education

• In Event: 1555 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 7. The Job of Research: Examining the Academic Institution of Science

Abstract

Despite women’s gains in higher education degree achievement in recent years, women still lag behind their male peers in STEM degree persistence and completion. Women’s pre-college experiences and background characteristics shape their entry into STEM degrees; these include mathematics ability beliefs, STEM course-taking patterns in high school, and quality of pre-college instruction. Importantly, however, student characteristics and pre-college experiences do not fully explain the perception of a gendered “chilly climate” for women in STEM on campus. The present study addresses a critical literature gap by using National Center for Education Statistics Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS) data on U.S. institutions to quantitatively investigate the consequences of chilly institutional climates across institutional types. We estimated three series of increasingly sophisticated regression models predicting (a) the proportion of bachelor’s STEM degrees earned by women at doctoral-degree granting universities with higher or highest research Carnegie classifications, (b) the proportion of bachelor’s STEM degrees earned by women at liberal arts colleges, and (c) the proportion of master’s and doctoral STEM degrees earned by women at doctoral-degree granting universities with higher or highest research Carnegie classifications. Our findings demonstrate that, when accounting for faculty rank, increases in the fraction of women holding tenured and tenure-track faculty positions correlate with an increase in women’s proportion of earning bachelor’s STEM degrees. This result makes sense: for undergraduate women at research institutions, the traditional stigma and bias against women in academia runs strong. For undergraduate women at these institutions, terminal-degree-holding women academics focused on research careers are important role models; their increased presence affirms women undergraduates’ academic motivations. For women STEM majors, increased interaction with women who have achieved research success may serve as a buffer against patriarchal norms during their sequential progression through challenging coursework in a traditionally male-dominated environment.

Authors

• Emily Daina Saras, Florida State University

• Samantha Nix, Florida State University