From 2013... Women in STEM: Investments and job rewards that generally stimulate field commitment, such as advanced training and high job satisfaction, fail to build commitment among women in STEM

From 2013... What's So Special about STEM? A Comparison of Women's Retention in STEM and Professional Occupations. Jennifer L. Glass, Sharon Sassler, Yael Levitte, Katherine M. Michelmore. Social Forces, Volume 92, Issue 2, December 2013, Pages 723–756, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot092

Abstract: We follow female college graduates in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and compare the trajectories of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related occupations to other professional occupations. Results show that women in STEM occupations are significantly more likely to leave their occupational field than professional women, especially early in their career, while few women in either group leave jobs to exit the labor force. Family factors cannot account for the differential loss of STEM workers compared to other professional workers. Few differences in job characteristics emerge either, so these cannot account for the disproportionate loss of STEM workers. What does emerge is that investments and job rewards that generally stimulate field commitment, such as advanced training and high job satisfaction, fail to build commitment among women in STEM.

Discussion

Our results suggest that there are few significant differences in the demographic and family characteristics of women in STEM jobs compared to women in non-STEM professional jobs, or in the measured work conditions they face (hours, job satisfaction, and job flexibility). Despite stereotypical notions about women in STEM not having families, our sample of women in STEM jobs are just as likely to be married and bear children as women in professional jobs. Women in STEM jobs do show slightly more egalitarian gender attitudes, higher earn-ings, and better work-life amenities, but this should make them less likely to leave STEM employment relative to women in professional jobs, especially for non-market pursuits like homemaking. Yet our findings reveal that women in STEM fields are dramatically less likely to persist in them over time compared to women in other professional fields and that this occurs because women in STEM move to non-STEM jobs at very high rates, not because women in STEM fields disproportionately move out of the labor force. Moves out of the labor force are in fact quite rare for both groups, confirming analyses that show grow-ing labor force attachment among professionals in all fields over time, particularly when workplace supports for parenting exist (Herr and Wolfram 2009; Percheski 2008).Moreover, the women who leave STEM occupations are unlikely to return; only a handful of women ever moved back into a STEM job following a job move out of the field. However, some of these STEM women could be moving from scientific or technical work into the management of scientific or technical work. To check, we looked at the distribution of jobs taken following the last STEM job and report the results in appendix C. Only about 21 percent of moves out of STEM are moves into managerial or administrative ranks; the vast major-ity are not. While some move into health professions (4 percent become health technologists, 1 percent become dietitians, and 1 percent become physicians) or teaching (11 percent), most go into non-professional jobs (50 percent).One reason that so few moves led to management careers may be that these moves occurred early in the respondent’s STEM career, most in the first five years of employment. This suggests not only that promotions into management are unlikely to be the sources of moves out of the field, but that marriage and chil-dren are not the primary propellants of moves out of STEM either. We turn to our multivariate models for clues about this early erosion from STEM employment into other fields among women who have persevered through the educa-tional process to get STEM degrees.

While we expected that women’s token status in STEM fields could be isolat-ing and lead to dissatisfaction with STEM work environments, neither of our measures of tokenism (occupation proportion female or motherhood status) sig-nificantly affect retention in our multivariate models. In addition, results show that most of the workplace characteristics, including hours of work, earnings, and parental leave policies, affect retention in similar ways for women in STEM and professional employment. However, women in STEM fields do not react as positively to increasing job satisfaction, job tenure, and advancing age, suggest-ing that climate issues or lack of “fit” between worker and job persist for lon-ger periods of time in STEM careers. This helps explain the widening retention deficit that STEM women experience over time relative to professional women.The effects of educational credentials on retention, which we initially con-sidered to be another indicator of commitment to STEM, bolster this interpre-tation. While holding an advanced degree does not affect the odds of leaving professional employment for either destination status (different type of job or labor force exit), increasing educational investment in STEM actually decreases retention and increases the odds of leaving STEM employment, suggesting that the STEM jobs held by advanced-degree holders are either more noxious or more isolating than those held by bachelor’s degree recipients. While unexpected, this is consistent with both the competition/demands and token status explanations proffered for the weaker retention of women in STEM employment. Whatever the origin of these effects, the fact that advanced training, increasing job tenure, job satisfaction, and aging do not deepen commitment to STEM fields as they do for most other workers in most other fields is particularly troubling.Family formation events and family characteristics that might decrease occu-pational commitment appear to be more closely associated with leaving STEM employment than with leaving professional employment. Early aspirations to avoid or postpone family obligations emerge as important for STEM employees’ reten-tion in the field while having neutral or negative impacts on field leaving among professionals. Actually getting married negatively affects retention in the field for STEM employees, but having a spouse employed in the same field emerges as sur-prisingly important in discouraging both changing fields and exiting the labor force among women in STEM, while having virtually no effect on field leaving among professional women.The patterning of these results supports the perspective that there may be pecu-liar unmeasured features of STEM jobs that are difficult to combine with fam-ily life, and that these are exacerbated as one goes up the hierarchy of skill and authority in STEM employment. But we hesitate to exaggerate the importance of these indicators of occupational commitment (family statuses and spouse char-acteristics) because the biggest problems in STEM retention occur so early in STEM careers. The large residual unexplained difference in moves out of field between STEM and professional women eludes explanation by family factors and simple job characteristics like earnings or work hours. Even work-life ameni-ties such as flexible scheduling and telecommuting matter little in accounting for the lower retention rates of STEM workers. We suspect that the retention deficit in STEM may be due to the team organization of scientific work combined with the attitudes and expectations of coworkers and supervisors who hold more tra-ditional beliefs about the competencies of women in these rapidly changing fields. The token status of women at higher skill levels, which we could not test, may also contribute to their disproportionate loss compared to skilled professionals.

We acknowledge that our longitudinal data on a single cohort of highly edu-cated women at mid-career cannot capture possible trends in reactions to STEM work environments among women college graduates from the mid-1990s and beyond. Younger women in STEM may differ from the pioneering cohorts of the 1980s and early 1990s, and may hold more conventional desires for marriage and family that discourage continuity in STEM careers. This may be counterbal-anced, however, by the fact that attitudes toward mothers’ employment, nonmar-ital childbearing, and cohabitation have liberalized among women at all levels of education and occupation since the early 1980s. Perhaps women in STEM jobs are more conventional now than in the past, and their family attitudes are more salient in explaining why women leave STEM employment in contemporary cohorts. Recent evidence from college-bound women in 2002, however, shows little evidence that the family plans of young women deter either majoring in STEM or aspiring to STEM occupations (Morgan, Gelbgiser, and Weeden 2013).The focus for future work should be, we believe, on the first few years of employment in STEM jobs, when the greatest attrition out of the field occurs. Our analysis suffers from a lack of detailed information on the characteristics of jobs and the organizational environment in which STEM women labor post-graduation. The interaction patterns between new STEM entrants and supervi-sors and coworkers may be especially relevant, along with the skill content of the job and the prospects for future upward mobility. The distinction between organizational provision of work-life amenities and the ability of employees to actually use amenities without negative consequence may also be important in understanding why women might leave fields that initially seem to have better pay and benefits and greater flexibility.