“It’s dude culture”: Students with minoritized identities of sexuality and/or gender navigating STEM majors.

Miller, Ryan A.; Vaccaro, Annemarie; Kimball, Ezekiel; Forester, Rachael

doi:10.1037/dhe0000171

Cited by 78 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Harper (2010) cautions against perpetuating deficit-oriented narratives for racially marginalized students in STEM; instead, he argues that investigating student success may lend insights into attainment disparities. The present study contends that an asset-based (anti-deficit) framework recognizes and centers knowledges, skills, abilities, and strengths found in Latinx families and communities that enable college success (Pérez & Taylor 2015; Yosso, 2005), thus decentering the white (McGee, 2016), masculine, and heteronormative (Miller et al, 2020) culture that defines STEM. Such a framework could reimagine a way of “doing” STEM that is culturally situated in Latinx students’ lives and gain insight into alternative ways of “being” a STEM person that are not contingent on assimilating (McGee, 2016).…”

mentioning

confidence: 83%

Latinx Students Charting Their Own STEM Pathways: How Community Cultural Wealth Informs Their STEM Identities

Rincón

Rodriguez

2020

Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

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Addressing Latinx student underrepresentation in STEM requires an assets-based reimagining of STEM experiences and pathways that facilitate student success. Drawing on data from two qualitative studies of Latinx students pursuing STEM majors, findings reveal that Latinx students draw on at least six distinct forms of cultural assets to facilitate their, and at times their peers’, persistence in STEM. Latinx students then utilize these cultural assets to develop culturally grounded understandings of themselves as STEM individuals.

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confidence: 83%

Latinx Students Charting Their Own STEM Pathways: How Community Cultural Wealth Informs Their STEM Identities

Rincón

Rodriguez

2020

Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

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“…For instance, Kersey and Voigt found that SGM students’ sense of resilience was usually combined with a deep desire to pursue STEM, that students persisted in STEM as a form of resistance, and that professional SGM societies were a powerful support for student resilience [ 46 ]. Miller and colleagues’ work on SGM STEM persistence focused on the behavioral and cognitive strategies students used to navigate the hypermasculine “Dude” or “Bro” culture in STEM, including participating in it, resisting it, traversing liminal parts of it, blending into it, or rationalizing it [ 69 ]. Similarly, Steele found that gay men used behavioral strategies like closetedness and gender performativity to deal with the unwelcoming STEM environment [ 41 ].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexual and gender minority undergraduates’ relationships and strategies for managing fit in STEM

et al. 2022

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Undergraduates with sexual and/or gender minority (SGM) identities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, pansexual, intersexual, asexual, or additional positionalities, often face an unwelcoming STEM microclimate. The STEM microclimate includes the places students experience, such as classrooms or labs, and the people, such as peers or professors, with whom they discuss their STEM program. While previous work offers a framework of microaggressions faced by SGM people, and the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional strategies they use to react to them, little is known about the strategies SGM students use to persist in the STEM microclimate. We analyze interviews with 29 SGM STEM undergraduates to uncover how they fit in STEM, their experiences that affect fit, how social capital in the form of influential others affects fit, and the strategies used to deal with microaggressions and cultivate a supportive network. Using thematic analysis, we find that students vary in their feelings of fit, with students with gender minority identities experiencing more frequent and more severe microaggressions than students with sexual minority identities (which are often less visible). We likewise find that students with racial minority identities report compounding issues related to identity. SGM students with social capital, or a network of people to whom they can turn in order to access advice and resources, believe they fit in better than those without such capital. To support their feelings of fit, students use defenses against discrimination, including micro-defenses, wherein they change how they present their self to avoid microaggressions and/or surround themselves with accepting people. This research highlights the role of microaggressions and social capital in affecting fit as well as the micro-defenses students use to defend against discrimination. Our introduction of the concept of micro-defenses provides a way to theorize about micro-interactional dynamics and the site at which students defend against microaggressions so they feel more welcome in STEM. Implications provide insight into how SGM students can be supported in STEM as well as the institutional changes STEM departments and campuses can make in order to better support and include SGM students.

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“…Even though we believe that gender is a socially-constructed concept, we could not include transgender and nonbinary women. Recently, scholars have investigated how the culture of STEM environments has excluded transgender, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary undergraduates (Haverkamp et al, 2019;Miller et al, 2020). We suggest that more qualitative inquiries are needed to explore these students' experiences and success in STEM higher education.…”

Section: Changing Systems Not Individualsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Gender Equity in STEM in Higher Education

Ro¹,

Fernandez²,

Ramon³

2021

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“It’s dude culture”: Students with minoritized identities of sexuality and/or gender navigating STEM majors.

Abstract: Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career pathways can be both lucrative and transformative in regard to social change (e.g.,

Cited by 78 publications

References 52 publications

Latinx Students Charting Their Own STEM Pathways: How Community Cultural Wealth Informs Their STEM Identities

Latinx Students Charting Their Own STEM Pathways: How Community Cultural Wealth Informs Their STEM Identities

Sexual and gender minority undergraduates’ relationships and strategies for managing fit in STEM

Gender Equity in STEM in Higher Education

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