GDSE/RES - Gendered Pipelines? Sex Segregation in Engineering and Math/Computer Science Fields of Study

在讨论女性在数学密集型教育项目中代表性不足的问题时，社会科学家经常援引（漏水的）管道的类比，关注个人的特征及其直接的社会环境，这些特征促进或阻碍了女性成功通过科学管道。拟议的研究旨在通过考虑构成该管道背景并确定其轮廓的文化和结构因素来补充这种个人层面的分析。本研究采用44个发达国家、发展中国家和转型期国家的总体数据来研究文化意识形态和国家教育和经济制度的特点如何与妇女参与工程、数学和信息技术研究领域的水平有关。智力优势：pi和其他人之前的研究已经确定，关于性别角色的文化态度是教育性别隔离跨国差异的最重要决定因素之一。当前的项目旨在解释这些文化影响。通过第三次国际数学和科学调查（TIMSS）收集的44个国家八年级男女学生数学/科学态度和数学/科学成就的详细数据，可以对不同的解释机制进行评估和比较。此外，将考虑高等教育中性别隔离的结构性决定因素，包括总体女性入学率、国家高等教育系统的特点、女性经济机会和国家经济发展。来自加州大学圣地亚哥分校和西华盛顿大学的研究小组将采用一种新的对数线性建模方法，该方法允许在不同女性总体入学率和不同项目结构的教育系统中比较分布模式。更广泛的影响：研究人员和教育工作者之间越来越多的共识是，仅仅关注个人层面的态度和兴趣，无法理解女性在数学和科学领域的代表性不足。如果要从根本上改变这些领域的性别构成，决策者还必须注意更广泛的文化意识形态和组织实践的作用。这里提出的这种跨国研究是探索文化和结构变量的影响和确定旨在整合这些领域的政策努力的适当地点的极好方法。

In discussing women's under-representation in mathematics-intensive educational programs, social scientists often invoke the analogy of a (leaky) pipeline, focusing on the characteristics of individuals and their immediate social environments that promote or hinder successful passage through the science pipeline. The proposed research aims to supplement such individual-level analyses by considering the cultural and structural factors that constitute this pipeline's context and determine its contours. Aggregate-level data from 44 developed, developing, and transitional countries are employed to examine how cultural ideologies and features of national educational and economic systems are related to levels of female participation in engineering, mathematics and information technology fields of study.Intellectual Merit: Previous research by the PIs and others has identified cultural attitudes about gender roles as one of the most important determinants of cross-national variability in educational gender segregation. The current project aims to explicate these cultural effects. Detailed data on eighth-grade boys' and girls' math/science attitudes and math/science achievement in 44 countries, collected through the Third International Math and Science Surveys (TIMSS), allows evaluation and comparison of different explanatory mechanisms. In addition, structural determinants of sex segregation in higher education, including overall female enrollment rates, features of national higher education systems, female economic opportunities, and national economic development will be considered. The team, from University of California San Diego and Western Washington University, will employ a new log-linear modeling approach, which allows distributional patterns to be compared across educational systems characterized by different rates of overall female enrollment and different programmatic structures.Broader Impact: There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that female under-representation in math and science cannot be understood with attention to individual-level attitudes and interests alone. If they are to fundamentally change the gender composition of these fields, policymakers must also attend to the role of broader cultural ideologies and organizational practices. Cross-national research of the sort proposed here is an excellent way of exploring effects of cultural and structural variables and of identifying the appropriate locus for policy efforts aimed at integrating these fields.