Participation Could Encourage More Female STEM Graduates

There is currently a real shortage of workers. The COVID pandemic has provided an incentive for many older workers to leave the workforce and retire. Other, younger workers are slow to rejoin the workforce after the pandemic in what has become known as the great resignation. It is a situation that has been found right across all areas of industry, including our own. Even though STEM jobs usually pay relatively well and offer decent benefits, companies are still struggling to recruit the number of workers they need. That is especially bad news for the electronics industry as it needs to clear the backlog of orders cause by the global semiconductor shortage and deal with an increasing amount of new orders.

One solution to the workforce shortage could be to get more females involved in science and engineering. Despite many initiatives, the amount of females in STEM careers is still pretty low. According to the stemgraduates.co.uk website, only 15% of STEM graduate are female, which is a pretty low figure for a demographic that makes up the majority of our population. Could there be a simpler solution?

Nikita Dutta, a Ph.D. student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, noticed that women generally speak far less than men in undergraduate engineering classes with a male instructor, however when a female instructor is in charge of the class, the gender gap disappeared. Dutta also found that after a female student had spoken, more females in the class were likely to participate in the conversation. After confirming her hypotheses during the remainder of the term, Dutta presented the results to her professor and the rest of his research group. Dutta and her professor, Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and director of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, then submitted a proposal on the further study of the issue to Princeton’s Institutional Review Board, which oversees research on human subjects.

Over the following two semesters, other graduate students were asked to assist with observations in lecture courses representing different class sizes and levels. The observers labelled comments as “unprompted,” “solicited” or “involuntary.” They found that women participated more frequently after another woman’s comment, regardless of comment type.

The results of the study were published online on March 1 in IEEE Transactions on Education. It included observations of 1,387 student comments over 89 class periods in 10 different courses in Princeton’s engineering school. Five of the courses were taught by women and five were taught by men. While the students observed in the courses were 45.5% women and 54.5% men, only 20.3% of the classroom comments came from women.

To encourage more female participation, the researchers recommended involving more women as co-instructors, guest lecturers and teaching assistants. It could also be useful to draw on early-career researchers as instructors and role models, given the long timespan of changing gender representation among university faculty.