An Unconscious Bias: Women in Math and Science

Posted by Robyn Gee on March 9, 2011

As we celebrate the 100th Annual International Women’s Day this week, it’s an appropriate time to assess how far women have come in 100 years. However, new research highlights how far we still have to go to attain true equality, especially in the realm of math and science.

Doctoral candidate, Jane Stout spends every day thinking about and studying gender stereotypes and yet she said, “We’ve all got these biases. I totally have an unconscious bias that associates with men with math.”

Stout was among a team of researchers, led by Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst that recently released a series of studies that hints at deep levels of unconscious bias against women in math and science. The study was called, “STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women’s self-concept and professional goals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  Stout shared with us the highlights of their findings.

Their research stemmed from the question, why do women excel in science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) classes, but choose not to pursue careers in these fields? Why does the number of women in these fields decrease as you ascend up the educational and professional ladder? They quote statistics from the National Science Foundation in the abstract of their report, “Only 26% of graduate students in the physical sciences are women, and 18% of full professors in STEM departments at research universities are women (National Science Foundation (NSF), 2009).”

NSF funded Dasgupta’s research to examine this phenomenon of the “leaky pipeline,” which refers to the amount of women who drop out of pursuing STEM careers over the course of their education. Dasgupta and her team predicted that feeling like an outsider will predict how likely women are to drop out of STEM.

Stout said, “Our work focused on the self-concept, sense of fit, and sense of belonging in these contexts. It’s a different question than just performance.”

In the past, Stout said people have attributed the phenomenon of the “leaky pipeline” to the fact that women aren’t as talented, just not interested, or perhaps experience discrimination and get discouraged. Stout said women actually perform very well compared to their male peers. “Instead, we suspect that women get the sense that they don’t belong. They don’t see women in their textbooks, they don’t see women in their lectures,” she said.

To address this issue, the researchers did three studies with undergraduate women who had already chosen to pursue careers in STEM. This means that their explicit / conscious attitudes towards STEM were very positive. The researchers were also interested in their implicit / unconscious attitudes towards STEM under various environmental conditions. “In all of our studies we ask women to tell us how much they like math, how much they identify with it, and how important is it to them. This gives us a self-reported version of their thoughts. Then we test their implicit reactions to STEM,” said Stout. They do this with an Implicit Association Test.

In one controlled experiment, a member of the research team, disguised as a math major, greeted participants at the doorway to a very difficult math test. “We found that when the math administrator was a woman, the female participants attempted more tough problems. They were feeling more of the implicit self-concept and identifying more with math. Female participants who had a male administrator were showing more negative implicit attitudes towards math. Even though, on a conscious level, all the female students told us they liked math. They have this unconscious bias against themselves,” said Stout.

Similarly, the researchers found that the sex of the professor in a calculus 101 class can alter the unconscious attitudes of female students.  In a class with a male professor,  women who had entered the class with consciously positive attitudes towards math, were already forming negative unconscious feelings towards math after two weeks of the class.

Men, on the other hand, regardless of the sex of the professor, all reported liking math, and their implicit self-concept reflected this positive attitude. “ It’s a cultural expectation that math and science are for men. It bleeds into their self-concept, and regardless of who they see in a STEM environment, they are always going to have a sense that ‘STEM is for me.’ Women are constantly battling the negative stereotype,” said Stout.

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