Cover by Claudia Huggins

Factoring Female Students Into the STEM Equation

By Sarah Lindley

“Can anyone tell me why the solid sphere, the hollow sphere, the cylinder, and the hoop, which all have the same mass, aren’t going to hit the bottom of the ramp at the same time once I let go?” 

They have different moments of inertia, I thought to myself. The ones with greater moments of inertia will go slower because their angular velocities will be smaller, which means their translational velocities will be smaller too. I knew the answer, but I did not volunteer it. 

After a moment, a few hands shot up around the room: students leaning back nonchalantly in their seats, mostly male, ready to show off their knowledge of conservation of mechanical energy. My professor called on someone to answer, but I will never know if that student answered correctly or not because I had already drifted off into my own little world, wondering to myself, Why didn’t I raise my hand? 

It is a story that repeats itself in every physics and chemistry class. I am paying attention in class, I understand the question, but I keep my answer to myself. I am not afraid of public speaking. But the fear of being wrong, even if I know I am right, forces me to sit in all of my lectures in complete silence. 

But this is not just my story. Dr. Chandralekha Singh, a physics professor here at the University of Pittsburgh who researches physics education, told me that women who have A’s in their physics classes have the same confidence in their ability to do physics as men who have C’s in the class. According to Dr. Singh, students who are underrepresented in physics, such as women or racial or ethnic minorities, are more likely to express concerns about “whether they have what it takes to excel” in their physics classes. 

A study published in 2020 by researchers from California State University and Colorado State University found that its female participants actually slightly outperformed their male counterparts in both life sciences and physical sciences courses. Why, then, do female STEM students struggle to believe in their own abilities? 

Dr. Singh explains that physics, for example, is deeply afflicted with stereotypes about “who belongs” in the field. This is rooted in the fact that everyone who has contributed to physics in the last century has been a man of European descent. That is, at least, “the ones we find out about.” She names Marie Curie, who earned a Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of radium, as one of few exceptions to the trend. 

Women do contribute to science. They always have. However, they tend to be swept under the rug of scientific history, either not receiving due credit for their work or having their ideas stolen entirely. Science historian Margaret Rossiter first gave this pattern a name, the “Matilda effect,” in 1993. Perhaps the most famous example is the story of Rosalind Franklin. As Jane J. Lee of National Geographic writes, Franklin was the first person to photograph DNA using a technique known as X-ray diffraction. Victoria Hernandez of Arizona State University describes the technique; X-rays aimed at crystals (in this case, crystallized DNA) interact with electrons in the crystal and scatter and diffract at various angles. When they do so, the rays hit a film and leave a dark mark on its surface that can be used to infer information about the crystal’s structure. The photographs Franklin took were shown without her knowledge to James Watson and Francis Crick, who used them to correctly deduce that DNA took the form of a double helix and who alone were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of its structure. Franklin had died four years earlier and was therefore ineligible for the Prize, since it is not awarded posthumously. The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s profile of Franklin reveals that it was only after her friend Anne Sayre published a biography about her in 1975 that her contributions began to be fully recognized. The biography was published in protest of Watson’s controversial accounts of Franklin, which many of his peers found inaccurate and misogynistic. 

The Matilda effect still reverberates through STEM today and may contribute to the fact that women are still underrepresented in STEM fields. The National Academy Press reports that women in “scientific, engineering, and medical disciplines” are invited to speak at academic conferences less frequently than men, their manuscripts are less likely to be cited, and they are more likely to be harshly reviewed as principal investigators, which impacts their access to grant funding. It is not altogether surprising, then, that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, women currently make up only 27% of the STEM workforce, 25% of computer scientists, and 15% of engineers. Here at Pitt, the student body is 54.9% female, but women represent only 32.6% of the Swanson School of Engineering, as reported by the University’s Diversity Dashboard. 

Whether it be due to this lack of representation or not, men and women alike are predisposed to associate “math” and “science” with “male.” Children of both sexes develop this implicit bias as early as first and second grade, Dario Cvencek, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Anthony G. Greenawald of the University of Washington found in 2011. Common cultural stereotypes in the United States, such as “girls do not do math” or “math is for boys,” as well as one’s own gender identity, inform one’s “self-concept.” Social psychology states that because of a desire to maintain “cognitive balance,” people are unlikely to associate themselves with anything that is incompatible with their self-concept, including academic fields. As a result, if the cultural stereotype is that “girls can not do math,” and a student knows she is a girl, she is likely to believe that she “can not do math” herself. 

With all these forces at play, Dr. Singh’s research, done in collaboration with the psychology department at Pitt, reveals that underrepresented students are more likely to have fixed mindsets and believe that “intelligence is...immutable.” They are more likely to blame their struggles on the notion that people like them “are not supposed to be good” at physics. Dr. Singh elaborates that this lack of self-efficacy, or belief in one’s ability, creates a detrimental feedback loop. If such students are not able to alleviate their fears, their anxiety may use up their “cognitive resources,” an issue that may extend to exams and impact their overall performance in class. When we allow such beliefs to persist, Dr. Singh says, “we are actually preventing a lot of talented people, such as women and racial and ethnic minority students, from contributing to this great field that is a lot of fun.”

So how do we put an end to this self-fulfilling prophecy? It will be an extensive and collaborative process involving female students, their instructors, their peers, and other important people in their lives. Dr. Singh told me of a simple intervention she and colleagues from the psychology department led for physics students. First, they had students write down all their fears and concerns for being in the class. They then showed the students examples of what past students had written: students who also shared the same worries, but ended up excelling in the course. They showed examples from male and female as well as white and non-white students. After its completion, the researchers found that the activity was a great success for underrepresented students; in classes where this intervention was conducted, there was no performance gap between male and female students. It took only thirty minutes of class time, and to the students, Dr. Singh says, it was like “water on parched land.” 

What Dr. Singh and the psychology department achieved with this activity was instilling students with a greater sense of belonging and self-efficacy, as well as an understanding that adversity is not only normal, but beneficial. These strong foundational beliefs are known as defensive skills. Students equipped with these “defenses” are more likely to “feel like they have an identity as a person who can excel in physics.”

The greatest way to solidify students’ defenses is to create an equitable and inclusive environment. Dr. Singh emphasizes the value of collaboration, which can help abate the stressful, competitive setting of some classes and “improves outcomes and even can lead to co-construction of knowledge.” Being able to collaborate is “a useful skill that will be valued greatly by employers,” further preparing historically underrepresented students for the rest of their education and their careers. 

With all of this information in mind, I asked Dr. Singh if she felt the field of physics was progressing towards inclusion and equity. She said that she is “obviously optimistic” and “hoping that the future is bright, but it remains to be seen because we do have a lot of work to do.” 

That work also needs to extend beyond the classroom. Columbia University doctoral student Laura Mosely, a board member of the Women in STEM organization at Columbia, says that institutions need to take greater lengths to diversify STEM research, education, and careers in general. She also suggests that men start raising their voices to “call out overt discrimination and microaggressions” and call for greater female representation in areas where women have been traditionally overlooked, and that white women similarly act as allies for women of color. 

Interpersonal relationships can also have a significant impact on the confidence of women in STEM. As Christianne Corbett and Catherine Hill reported for the American Association of University Women in 2015, the greatest factor that increases a girl’s interest in computer science, for example, is encouragement. It does not have to come from her teacher (though it certainly can); her friends and family can create the same effect. Although regular people may not have the resources or time to lobby research institutions or organize classroom interventions, anyone can certainly take a moment to encourage a woman in their lives who is studying STEM to keep going, even if it is themselves they are cheering on. 

  Dr. Singh’s parting advice to any female STEM student who might be reading this is to “believe in yourself...stay focused and have a mission, and you are going to do well.” My advice: raise your hand in class. You might be right or you might be wrong, but either way, you are learning, and you deserve to be there. Do not let yourself or anyone else count you out of the equation.