“Why So Few?”: Differential Effects of Framing the Gender Gap in STEM Recruitment Interventions

Abstract

Interventions designed to increase women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines sometimes emphasize the STEM gender gap. Drawing upon optimal distinctiveness theory, we hypothesized that interventions overtly emphasizing women’s minority status in STEM might lead to less interest in STEM relative to interventions with subtler references to women’s minority status. In Study 1, women who viewed a STEM recruitment presentation drawing direct attention to the STEM gender gap showed lower implicit identification with STEM compared to those who viewed a presentation referencing gender through images alone. In Study 2, women’s greater feelings of unwanted distinctiveness in STEM following a presentation emphasizing the enduring gender gap (relative to one emphasizing the closing gender gap) had a significant indirect effect on their interest in STEM. In Study 3, women who viewed information about the gender distribution of a STEM company expressed less interest in the job when the same information was framed in terms of a continuing gender gap (vs. women’s growing representation), due to reduced feelings of belonging and increased feelings of unwanted distinctiveness. The present findings indicate that those designing STEM interventions targeting women should do so in ways that not only make women feel welcomed into the discipline but also do not place undue emphasis on women’s underrepresentation. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684320965123