When Do Female Role Models Benefit Women? The Importance of Differentiating Recruitment From Retention in STEM

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Acknowledgments

Preparation of this article was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (DRL-0845110) to S. Cheryan and a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-0718124) awarded to J. O. Siy.

Notes

One experiment by McIntyre, Paulson, and Lord (2003) found that undergraduate women performed better on a math test after they learned about the achievements of other women compared to when they did not learn about role models. However, because the control condition of this study used no role model instead of a male role model, it is difficult to know whether improved performance was due to the presence of a successful exemplar or if it was specific to female role models.

Null effects of role model gender were obtained in the context of an intervention known to successfully recruit women into STEM: changing stereotypes of the field (discussed further in the upcoming paragraphs). Because role model gender did not influence recruiting but another intervention did, we can be more confident that null effects were due to role model gender and not to a flaw in the experimental design or the nature of the dependent measures.