Paging Larry Summers…. According to a study presented today at a meeting of the American Economic Association, more female faculty in engineering departments cause more undergraduate women to major in engineering. An article in Inside Higher Ed explains:
The study found… one area where there was a correlation between increased representation of women on the faculty and increased likelihood of women majoring in a field: engineering. Notably, the study found that engineering during this period had particularly low levels of female enrollment and representation on faculties.
But engineering was the only place where female representation mattered. According to the study:
We only find a significantly positive influence of female faculty in Engineering, a field which had the lowest proportion (less than 3%) of female faculty. An important contribution of our study is that it provides evidence on the exact mechanisms by which female faculty influence female students. We don’t find any significant effect of female faculty on choices of female students once we control for gender stereotypes. This suggests that female faculty affect female students’ choices by negating the stereotype threat.
Despite the fact that women make up a large, and growing, percentage of American undergraduates, they still don’t choose male-dominated majors, no matter what the gender breakdown of the faculty looks like. In short, just having women around doesn’t help much.
It’s unclear what actually work will, though. The study says vaguely that “a more useful policy [to attract female students] would be to take measures to change social attitudes and remove stereotypes, such as females not being as good as males in math.” In 2006 the Society of Women Engineers issued an equally vague recommendation to “step up enforcement of Title IX with regard to STEM disciplines [science, technology, engineering, and math], and fund programs that will help educate students and their parents, and STEM faculty, of their rights under the law.”
Good luck with that.
