Researchers and others examining the challenges African-American women confront in earning college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math fields may want to consider new research showing that, while Black women are more likely than White women to express interest in STEM majors at the start of their college careers, Black women are less likely to actually complete STEM degrees.
In addition, Black women and men are less likely than Whites to subconsciously consider STEM fields as more masculine, according to the research, published online this week in the American Psychological Association journal Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology.
“One of the key things that we found was that African-American women were less likely to hold these subconscious stereotypes associating STEM fields with masculinity as compared to Whites,” said Tulane University psychology professor Laurie O’Brien, the study’s lead author.
“And I think those findings are really interesting because there’s a lot of other research, including our own, that shows stereotypes have a really big impact on people’s outcomes in different fields,” she noted.
In the article titled “Ethnic Variation in Gender-STEM Stereotypes and STEM Participation: An Intersectional Approach,” O’Brien and her co-authors present analysis of data from more than 1.7 million college freshmen surveyed in the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey between 1990 and 1999. Twenty-three percent of Black women respondents indicated that they had planned to major in STEM fields in comparison to 16 percent of White women. In contrast, 37 percent of Black men said they intended to major in STEM, compared to 34 percent of White men.
The research team paired the CIRP survey data analysis with data it collected from three recent survey studies including 1,108 students at several universities across the U.S. In one of the three studies, the research team surveyed 838 college students, including 212 Blacks at four universities—one private, predominantly White university in the South; one public, predominantly White university in the Midwest; one private, historically Black university in the South; and an ethnically diverse public university in the West.
In the team-conducted study, 38 percent of Black women had declared a major in a STEM field, compared to just 19 percent of the White women. Black women at the historically Black university were more likely to participate in STEM majors than those at the other institutions, according to the article.
