Women and girls’ underrepresentation in STEM reflects environmental factors, not differences in ability

Visible in-group role models and a felt sense of belonging are among the strongest predictors of persistence

Anyone can help by amplifying overlooked voices, confronting bias, and reframing science as collaborative

Co-authored by Asia Eaton, Ph.D., and Anoushka Rai & Rania Azizah, Girls in STEM Board

Across classrooms, labs, and after-school clubs, capable young women and girls are excluded from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics long before any real test of ability. Many never enter; others leave partway through. For many observers, the first reflex is to ask what is different about the girls who don’t persist. But decades of research point somewhere else: toward the environments themselves and the subtle messages they send about who belongs. Underrepresentation in STEM is less a story about the capability or interest of women and girls than about the cues, messengers, and social conditions surrounding them.

3 Insights From Psychology

1. Environments, Not Ability, Signal Who Belongs

Subtle features of a setting can trigger what researchers call social identity threat, or the concern that one’s group is devalued in a particular space. When women were exposed to a STEM environment with a skewed men-to-women ratio, they showed greater cognitive and physiological vigilance and reported a weaker sense of belonging and less desire to participate; men were unaffected (Murphy and colleagues, 2007). This “belonging uncertainty” disproportionately burdens members of historically excluded groups and predicts disengagement and lower achievement (Walton and Cohen, 2007).

2. Seeing Someone Like You Succeed Works Like a Vaccine

One of the most powerful cues is contact with in-group members who are thriving. Across two experiments and a semester-long calculus study, exposure to female experts in STEM strengthened women’s identification with these fields, raised their self-efficacy, and increased effort and motivation,........

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