By: David Bressoud @dbressoud

Links to responses by CBMS societies to the systemic racism that has been brought back to national attention by the murder of George Floyd are available here.

Links to resources and posted information related to the COVID-19 shutdown by the member societies of CBMS and other organizations are available here.

AAAS will be running a series of five online discussions of Talking about Leaving Revisited, beginning on June 9. Details are available here. This is part of the new SEA Change initiative at AAAS (SEA= STEMM Equity Achievement, 2nd M for Medicine).

This month continues my discussion of Talking about Leaving Revisited (TALR). Last month’s column did not do adequate justice to the emphasis within these reports on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This month I want to focus on what these researchers learned about the experiences of women in STEM fields.

I want to begin by pointing out how underrepresented women are in the mathematically intensive disciplines of computer science, engineering, physical sciences, and the mathematical sciences. While women account for 57% of all Bachelor’s degrees, in 2018 they constituted only 20% of computer science graduates, 22% of engineering graduates, 40% of physical science graduates, and 42% of those in the mathematical sciences.

Women as a percentage of majors in the mathematical sciences peaked at 48% in 1999 and again in 2001. The general trend has been downward since then. As shown in Figure 2, the peak percentage around 2000 is more about a decrease in the number of men through the mid to late ‘90s. This century has seen the numbers of both men and women growing, but the disparity is slowly widening (Figure 2).

At the six institutions that were studied in TALR (four large public R1 universities, one private R1 university, and one liberal arts college with an engineering program), 14% of the students declared but did not complete a STEM major, either because they dropped out or switched to another major outside STEM. By gender, the dropout rate was 18.3% of the women (1041 out of 5696) and 11.0% of the men (979 out of 8864). What is most interesting is that the better prepared the students were, the greater the disparity between the switching rates of men and women. 

Among the students with the lowest math scores on college entrance exams—24 or lower on ACT Math or 560 or lower on SAT Math—29% of the women did not complete their declared STEM degree versus 21% for men. Among those with the highest scores—31 or above on ACT or 681 or above on SAT—10% of the women did not complete a STEM degree against 6% for men. Even more striking is what happens when we look at actual performance in college. Figure 3 shows that good grades in the first semester are a much stronger predictor that men will persist that it is for women. Among women who earned a 3.5 or higher GPA in their first semester, 16% switched out. Among this same group of high performers, 8% of the men switched out, half the rate.

TALR conducted interviews with a total of 346 students of whom 250 switched out of STEM (148 women and 102 men). The editors devote an entire chapter to the interviews that they conducted with high performing students. In the semester in which they switched out of STEM, 42 of the interviewed women and 3 of the men had a GPA of 3.5 or higher. The interviews revealed that, especially for the women, their sense of belonging in STEM was intimately tied to the high grades they had received in high school.

As one of the men observed,

Girls I normally work with, they got 4.0s in high school. In my fluid dynamics class, if you get a 70 overall, it’s an A, and he makes the tests so that the average is supposed to be like a 50. And so, even though they got a 55 and it’s above average, they still couldn’t wrap their heads around it. They would always freak out … I definitely see that a lot more with girls—that perfectionism that they get from high school, where they need to get a 100 on everything. And it can really bite them in the ass. (p. 341. White man, graduated in chemical engineering)

Loss of confidence, especially as the result of “weed-out” courses of which calculus is the most prominent, was a common theme among both those who left and those who persisted. I will leave the rest of this column to a sample of their voices, both those who switched and those who persisted. The solution is not inflated grades, but a greater sensitivity to the effect of grades, especially on women. This includes active interventions to assist women through the self-doubts that arise in the first year.

[My grade] defined me. Until very recently, I could not accept an A-minus and when I came to[college] and started getting A-minuses for working my butt off in classes, it broke my heart … My perfectionism has quickly faded. But for a very long time I would cry if I got an A-minus instead of an A. (p. 345. White woman, graduated in neuroscience)

At orientation I was a little bit nervous about being a math major. And I’m in the Honors College so I came to Honors Orientation. We were sitting in a room of very intelligent people. The College of Math and natural Sciences was one of the smallest groups … And everyone was talking about their standardized test scores … It just seemed like everyone was, `Oh, I go t a 2400 [on my SAT]. Oh, I got a 36 on my ACT.’ `Oh, I got a 36.’ Oh darn, I got a 35!’ And while I did have good test scores, I wasn’t to that caliber of having almost perfect scores. That scared me a little bit. I was already deciding maybe I don’t want to do mathematics, and I think that could have been a little extra nudge for me [to switch out]. Because I was like, `Well, what if I’m not good enough for this … what if I’m going to fail in [comparison] to the rest of my peers? (p. 342. Hispanic women, switched from mathematics to business)

It was frustrating. It was different from high school … It was hard. On many tests in high school and on standardized tests I’d always performed really well and I kind of thought of myself as a top student … so it is demotivating to find yourself kind of moving down … I think that the depression played into the dropping grades and the dropping grades played into the depression. I lost confidence. I did. I felt like I wasn’t succeeding in the sciences and I wasn’t sure that I could succeed. (p. 346. Multi-racial woman, switched from microbiology to psychology)

I excelled well in high school. My GPA—I think I graduated with like a 4.16, so I thought I was really ahead of the game when it came to coming to college. But I wasn’t, and was nowhere near prepared for the sciences, and the math … I performed well in high school. I got As in everything. And then when I got to college, everyone was coming in with (a better) knowledge base from their high school classes. They had taken AP Calc, AP biology, all these classes, so they already knew things. Like, the beginning classes were just so easy for them; it was review. For us, it was learning something entirely new. (p. 346. Hispanic woman, switched from life sciences to communications)

I shoot for As usually, but … but they curved the class a lot … and it didn’t really feel like you were excelling when you were getting low grades on the test freshmen year. You don’t understand how college classes curve and when you’re getting like a 67 or 70 something on the test, it just doesn’t feel good to you. It feels like you’re failing almost. (p. 340. White woman, switched from biology to sports medicine)

Student: I think it, it definitely took some convincing on my professors’ part to really nail it into my head that just because I got a B minus doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t continue on in the major. Even though that was my first thought. But also, I was so interested in it that I was willing to like latch onto what he was saying and just go with it. Interviewer: They could have lost you if he hadn’t gotten through to you. Student: Yeah, definitely. (pp. 230–231. Asian woman graduated in bio-medical engineering)

Download the list of all past Launchings columns, dating back to 2005, with links to each column.