Walking on Gender Tightrope With Multiple Marginalities

Abstract

This phenomenological research explored how international female students understand the role of gender and national origin in their program experiences and how they cope with the challenges derived from their triple marginalities—gender, race/ethnicity, and foreign nationality. Based on in-depth interviews with 22 international female students enrolled in various STEM disciplines, we drew four thematic findings that illustrate the participants’ multiple marginalities and ironic coping strategies grounded in their prior cultural upbringing and contextualized in the hostile cultural environment of STEM programs against women. This study suggests that STEM educators in higher education understand the multifaceted struggles of international female students as a triple minority in their graduate programs and provide culturally relevant support and professional mentoring.

STEM and gender gap: a systematic review in WoS, Scopus, and ERIC databases (2012–2022)

“…From another perspective, studies have focused on considering the socioeconomic and cultural profiles of female high school students who intend to pursue STEM careers (Kızılay et al, 2020). Meanwhile, recent research addresses the experiences of female graduate students in STEM careers regarding gender gaps and the challenges they face (Lim et al, 2021).…”

Understanding the challenges faced by female non-native English-speaking international doctoral students in engineering programs

“…In addition, Lin and Scherz (2014) found that Asian international graduate students were left out in summer when others went back to their home countries, and very few NNES students stayed on campus. Interestingly, a recent study has shown that Asian female international graduate students believe cultural aspects are unimportant because they believe academics are the more important aspect of graduate schooling (Lim et al, 2021). This belief leads students to spend extra time gaining academic knowledge rather than integrating cultural knowledge.…”

“…Female international graduate students can be considered a doubly marginalized group (Dutta, 2015) in the male-dominant engineering field. According to previous studies (Kuniyczka, 2019;Dutta, 2015;Lim et al, 2021), this group of students faces additional challenges, including marginalization and gender equality issues. In addition, female international students experience identity challenges, invisibility, insecurities, and stereotyping.…”

“…Furthermore, women face difficulties fitting into the engineering culture due to gender-based challenges in the engineering field (Dutta, 2015;Kuniyczka, 2019;Lim et al, 2021). Thus, female international students in the engineering graduate program face a complex interaction of challenges that go beyond their international status (Dutta, 2015).…”

“…U.S. higher education institutions should pay attention to how to support international students as they bring several benefits to the U.S. economy, 28.4 billion in the academic year of 2020-2021(NAFSA International Student Economic Value Tool, 2022. It has also been shown that they supported 306,308 job opportunities in the U.S.…”