GDSE/RES - Gendered Pipelines? Sex Segregation in Engineering and Math/Computer Science Fields of Study

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

In discussing women's under-representation in mathematics-intensive educational programs, social scientists often invoke the analogy of a (leaky) pipeline, focusing on the characteristics of individuals and their immediate social environments that promote or hinder successful passage through the science pipeline. The proposed research aims to supplement such individual-level analyses by considering the cultural and structural factors that constitute this pipeline's context and determine its contours. Aggregate-level data from 44 developed, developing, and transitional countries are employed to examine how cultural ideologies and features of national educational and economic systems are related to levels of female participation in engineering, mathematics and information technology fields of study. Intellectual Merit: Previous research by the PIs and others has identified cultural attitudes about gender roles as one of the most important determinants of cross-national variability in educational gender segregation. The current project aims to explicate these cultural effects. Detailed data on eighth-grade boys' and girls' math/science attitudes and math/science achievement in 44 countries, collected through the Third International Math and Science Surveys (TIMSS), allows evaluation and comparison of different explanatory mechanisms. In addition, structural determinants of sex segregation in higher education, including overall female enrollment rates, features of national higher education systems, female economic opportunities, and national economic development will be considered. The team, from University of California San Diego and Western Washington University, will employ a new log-linear modeling approach, which allows distributional patterns to be compared across educational systems characterized by different rates of overall female enrollment and different programmatic structures. Broader Impact: There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that female under-representation in math and science cannot be understood with attention to individual-level attitudes and interests alone. If they are to fundamentally change the gender composition of these fields, policymakers must also attend to the role of broader cultural ideologies and organizational practices. Cross-national research of the sort proposed here is an excellent way of exploring effects of cultural and structural variables and of identifying the appropriate locus for policy efforts aimed at integrating these fields.