College students’ perceptions of gender stereotypes: making connections to the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields

ABSTRACT

In this study, we surveyed 499 college students at two different universities in the United States to determine what they believe are society’s current stereotypes about male and female personality attributes. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, ANOVA, and regression. We found that college students do believe that certain personality attributes are stereotypically associated with males while others are stereotypically associated with females within society, and that the strength of these beliefs varied by gender, whether or not they planned to pursue a STEM career, and by parental education. In this paper, we report our findings and relate our results to career choice to better understand how stereotypes might be connected to the shortage of women in many STEM careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender stereotypes
• personality attributes
• STEM careers
• STEM stereotypes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Katrina Piatek-Jimenez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6508-2260

Jennifer Cribbs http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8299-419X

Nicole Gill http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0633-2626

Notes

1. We chose not to include the medical or health professions as STEM careers since many large organisations such as the National Science Foundation do not consider these as STEM careers. Marginson, Tytler, Freeman, and Roberts (2013) notes that the definition of STEM differs across and within research in different countries. Additionally, some researchers use the acronym STEMM rather than STEM to indicated that medical fields are included (Kimmel, Miller, & Eccles, 2012).