Academic Career Trajectories for Stem Baccalaureates in the U.S. 1995-2014

Yun Kyung Cho, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Academic careers time is shorter for female STEM baccalaureates than their male counterparts. To better understand this female advantage in STEM, this study suggests the careers trajectories framework for the uneven academic careers time between high school diploma and STEM baccalaureate. Analyzing data of the National Survey of College Graduates of 2017 with descriptive statistics and multivariate regression models, this study finds that the female advantage in the STEM academic careers time varies not solely by gender but also by other individual demographics, such as race and US citizenship status. The multivariate analyses provide the evidence that the female advantage in STEM academic careers time is neither simplistic nor universal but rather variegated and conditional on academic major field of study as well as individual demographics. The results also reveal that race and US citizenship status play a more significant role than gender in affecting the academic careers time particularly by interacting with academic field of study. These multiply intersecting inequalities in the STEM baccalaureates’ careers time highlight the limitations of the dominant leaky pipeline model’s simplistic binary lens emphasizing gender, and also indicate the importance of the interactions between STEM fields of study and baccalaureates’ demographical status as predictors of STEM career trajectories. This study’s findings contribute to the empirical study on gender inequalities in STEM education by utilizing the national-level representative data over the recent two decades and specifying gendered STEM careers as more complex outcomes of the interaction between individual-level demographics and academic major field of study.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 223. Education, Discrimination, and Social Stratification II