Gender Diversity in STEM Disciplines: A Multiple Factor Problem

Abstract

Lack of diversity, and specifically, gender diversity, is one of the key problems that both technological companies and academia are facing these days. Moreover, recent studies show that the number of female students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related disciplines have been decreasing in the last twenty years, while the number of women resigning from technological job positions remains unacceptably high. As members of a higher education institution, we foresee that working towards increasing and retaining the number of female students enrolled in STEM disciplines can help to alleviate part of the challenges faced by women in STEM fields. In this paper, we first review the main barriers and challenges that women encounter in their professional STEM careers through different age stages. Next, we focus on the special case of the information theory field, discussing the potential of gendered innovation, and whether it can be applied in the Information Theory case. The working program developed by the School of Engineering at the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV), Spain, which aims at decreasing the gender diversity gap, is then presented and recommendations for practice are given. This program started in 2011 and it encompasses Bachelor, Master and PhD levels. Four main actions are implemented: Providing institutional encouragement and support, increasing the professional support network, promoting and supporting the leadership, and increasing the visibility of female role models. To assess the impact of these actions, a chi-square test of independence is included to evaluate whether there is a significant effect on the percentage of enrolled female students. The percentage of graduated female students in the information and Communications Technology Field is also positioned with respect to other universities and the Spanish reference value. This analysis establishes that, in part, this program has helped to achieve higher female graduation rates, especially among Bachelor students, as well as increasing the number of top-decision positions held by faculty women.

Gender bias in the Erasmus network of universities

“…Finally, in the fields of Agriculture, forestry, fisheries, veterinary and Services it is not possible to identify a general trend since the points displayed appear rather scattered, showing heterogeneity in the gender balance across countries; in the field of Natural sciences, Mathematics and Statistics, instead, the points appear concentrated around the mean value being close to the x-axis, with their position on the plane suggesting that the variance decreased over time and pointing out that gender disparities have been nearly cancelled, in a sector usually characterized by a larger male presence as common in the STEM-fields (Botella et al 2019;OECD 2017).…”

Barriers Faced by Women in Software Development Projects

“…The latest studies show that the number of female students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related disciplines have been decreasing over the last twenty years. Unfortunately, the number of women resigning from technological job positions also remains unacceptably high [15][16][17]. Furthermore, recent diversity reports demonstrate a large gap between the percentage of women holding computing jobs compared to the percentage of men [18].…”

“…Another study that makes use of innovation to attract women in STEM is presented by Botella et al [16]. They argue that one action to reduce the gender gap is the gendered innovation initiative, and in particular, Machine Learning and Data Science areas provide new opportunities to include gendered innovation in Information Theory, which could be achieved by the fact that these areas are very diverse.…”

Outperforming yet undervalued: Undergraduate women in STEM

“…Many see women's increased representation in fields such as life science to be examples of gains in equality (e.g., [14,15,16]). Psychological research has demonstrated that increased representation can promote better outcomes for women, particularly in STEM fields, such as a sense of belonging and interest in participation [17,18].…”