Though ASU boasts a student body that is 51 percent female and loves to tout its diversity, the New American University is still an all-boys club, where math and science are concerned.
While it's common knowledge that fewer women than men go onto successive levels of higher education and, eventually, into careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, a new research study, funded by the National Science Foundation and begun at ASU, is telling us why and what can be done about it.
Bianca Bernstein, a psychology professor at ASU and one of the study's leaders, said that she was surprised by how pervasive the problem is. "We've opened up an area that really needs attention," she said.
The study outlines several reasons that women drop out of graduate programs in STEM fields, some of them gender-related and some not. And guess what? None of them have anything to do with differences in intelligence between men and women (sorry, Lawrence Summers).
But while innate differences in intelligence may have nothing to do with the attrition of women in the sciences, gender is still a major player. According to Bernstein, one reason more women than men drop out of graduate programs in STEM fields is that they feel "slighted, excluded, marginalized, ignored" by their male peers and even their advisers in lab settings.
Quinn Spadola, a graduate student in biophysics, remarked, "Women [in lab settings] end up taking on the 'mom' role, the maid role, the assistant role."
She added that many women in this situation don't speak up because "our generation wants to believe that everything is fixed, everything's 100 percent equal, and they don't notice that [other women] are being treated the same way."
Women in STEM fields also have the added pressure of balancing a highly demanding and stressful career with the demands of having a family — and, though their male peers also get married and have children while pursuing graduate degrees, women scientists don't often have wives at home to birth and raise their children for them.
This double standard can be detrimental to young scientists' careers — and it's where many women scientists give up. The problem is so pervasive that even Nobel Prize-winning scientist Christiane Nusslein-Volhard decided to get involved, using her own money to offer grants to young women scientists for childcare and household help.
But because of such specific, gender-related challenges faced by women scientists, whether parenthood or a hostile work environment, some have argued that women just might not have what it takes to pursue careers in the sciences.
"The mentality in the academy is that only the toughest shall succeed," Bernstein said. But the problem, she added, is not in the quality of women's work. Rather, "in male dominated fields, it's difficult to separate the culture of discipline from 'male culture' because they've become the same. It's the classic conflict of people who don't fit."
Bernstein's research team believes the solution is in changing the way people think. They hope to develop courseware that will give all students, but especially women, the resources they need to better anticipate and deal with negative situations and environments that might discourage them from the continuing their education.
And as more women enter the sciences and the male culture shifts to something more inclusive, the difficulties of graduate school will, they hope, have less to do with gender.
"Women need to see other women who have some power and some credibility," Bernstein said.
Let's hope that the New American University will let that happen.
Reach th reporter at: tcatherine.traywick@asu.edu.
