The"Like A Girl" commercial during the Super Bowl definitely added to the women not being given the confidence needed to really pursue dreams they may have, maybe even into STEM fields. That's probably a different topic than what I intended this post to be, but it was worth mentioning.
While we recently talked a bit about STEM and women I found this research to be interesting in taking it a step deeper. This report came out in January, but I originally found the first blog post regarding the racial/gender bias combo on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2015/01/26/women-of-color-stem-research/).
The full report/research can be found in here - http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopardy-report.pdf.
I haven't made it all the way through the research yet, but even through the executive summary there are some great points.
- All of the women reported some pattern of gender bias.
- They note four patterns: Prove-it Again, The Tightrope, The Maternal Wall, and Tug of War. We can likely understand what is behind these patterns just from the names themselves.
- A new approach for organizational change is introduced called the Metrics-Based Bias Interrupters
- There is a bright light that they mention briefly, but provides hope for women in STEM. Some of the women interviewed felt that the bias they experienced actually gave them support to overcome challenges they may face.
And a few questions:
How can we help to support women in STEM from our respective areas (housing, advising, etc)?
How or what can be done to continue to empower women through high school to continue to follow STEM pathways?
Why is there not support? Is it all historical or are there other factor?
If women of color are far less supported could programs be developed on our campus particularly to help support? And what would those look like.
With the need for more people in general to be in the STEM field I hope we can overcome some of this bias before America falls much farther behind.
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