THE GENDERED SUBSTRUCTURE OF STEM: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE, ORGANIZING PROCESSES, AND THE PROPORTION OF FEMALE GRADUATES IN SIX DISCIPLINES

Sarah Ann Morton

Women remain underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) disciplines. A lot of research has examined individual-level impacts of their absence, such as women’s lack of interest in STEM, their lack of sense of belonging, and low math confidence. In this dissertation, I use Acker’s theory of gendered organizations as a theoretical foundation to conceptualize STEM disciplines as multi-layered gendered organizations. In three quantitative studies, I test hypotheses based on components of Acker’s theory, specifically, organizational culture and organizing processes. I use Acker’s idea of gendered subtext to justify using text data to measure organizational culture in STEM programs. The text, program, and institutional data come from 1,758 STEM programs in six STEM disciplines: biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, physics, and psychology. The data sources are texts from each STEM program’s “about us” or other introductory webpage, the Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS), and the IPEDS Completions Survey. In Study 1, I examine the extent to which the cultures of STEM disciplines are gendered using social network analyses of mental models. In Study 2, I explore how organizational cultures in programs differ across STEM fields using machine learning, multinomial logistic regression, and multivariate regression. In Study 3, I examine how organizational culture and organizing processes are related to the proportion of female bachelor’s graduates in each discipline. I find the largest difference in organizational culture between the most female-dominated STEM fields (biology and psychology) and the most male-dominated field in the sample (computer science). I also find that feminine organizational culture does not distinguish the cultural differences between male-dominated versus female-dominated STEM disciplines, but that the presence of masculine organizational concepts (such as expectations of brilliance and competition) distinguish the cultures in these disciplines. While I am not able to link organizational culture and the proportion of female graduates, at least in the way I hypothesize, I do find that programs housed in certain interdisciplinary departments in computer science, chemistry, and psychology have higher proportions of female graduates than programs in single-disciplinary departments. I discuss this dissertation’s contributions, limitations, and implications, as well as avenues for future research.

THE GENDERED SUBSTRUCTURE OF STEM: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE, ORGANIZING PROCESSES, AND THE PROPORTION OF FEMALE GRADUATES IN SIX DISCIPLINES

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