How to Engage and Retain Women in STEM Fields

Recently, I wrote about masculine defaults as a barrier to women’s participation in male-dominated fields, including the sciences, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Why are these fields dominated by men? Women can be turned off from STEM subjects, not because of the science and math content, but simply because those fields are seen as operating under masculine defaults. That is, people see STEM fields as emphasizing what are known as agentic values, such as independence and achievement, at the expense of what are known as communal values, of teamwork and making a difference in the world.

What is the solution to encouraging science-minded people who value communal goals to enter or stay in STEM fields? Answering this question can open the doors more widely to groups more likely to value collaboration and helping others, including women, underrepresented minority students, and first-generation students.

One solution may be demonstrating that communal values can also be consistent with work in STEM fields and even welcomed there. That’s where an intervention developed by Amanda Diekman and her team in the Social Roles Lab at Indiana University may be useful. In a published study sponsored by 3M, Diekman and colleagues asked university students in engineering and the physical sciences to think about the challenges of being a STEM major. Half were asked to include a “purpose reflection” that allowed them to reflect on why they chose to be a STEM major and what they hoped to do with their training. This purpose reflection, in theory, would allow students to think about how their area of study matches their values, including communal values when those are important.

The result? These purpose reflections increased students’ sense that STEM fields can fulfill both agentic and communal goals, enhancing their feelings of belonging in STEM majors. These findings held for everyone, both men and women. They suggest that being reminded of communal opportunities may help encourage women who value these goals to feel like they belong in STEM fields without scaring off men.

To be clear, this simple intervention is not enough to repair the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. But it helps demonstrate how matching the opportunities in a STEM area of study to the communal goals that many women value—what Diekman has called goal congruity—can help encourage women to feel like they belong in those fields. Even more promising is that communal goals are highly valued by students across different groups, so highlighting communal opportunities holds the potential to increase representation and participation widely.

More STEM companies and institutions of higher learning are paying attention to these developments. Diekman and her team are now working with Jayshree Seth, chief science advocate at 3M, to scale up the idea by creating a repository of exercises that STEM faculty can integrate into their teaching and assignments. This plan is part of a larger 3M initiative to investigate how the findings of this research can be integrated into university classrooms.

Seth, herself an accomplished scientist and inventor, believes that diversity, including gender diversity, is good for social equality and science itself. As she notes in the recent documentary series Not the Science Type, “We need every idea, every diverse perspective, in order to solve problems.”