Dissertation
“YOU DON'T HAVE TO BECOME A MAN TO SUCCEED IN STEM”: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF STEM FACULTY WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN AN EXTERNAL MENTOR PROGRAM
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2020
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/112153
Abstract
Gender and racial equity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a
serious concern. The absence of girls, women, and people of color in STEM has a deleterious
effect on the livelihood of all communities. Thus, broadening participation in STEM has become
a major focus of U.S. organizational and institutional policy. Initiatives include efforts to
broaden underrepresented groups’ participation in academic STEM, including focused attention
on recruiting and retention of women at the faculty rank. Therefore, mentoring programs have
served as one way to enrich the experience of STEM faculty women in higher education.
While a number of studies have articulated positive outcomes of mentoring, scant
attention has been paid to the socio-cultural context of STEM. Thus, discourses surrounding
mentoring programs for faculty women in STEM are replete with unchallenged assumptions
about knowledge, power, and identity. This study used critical theory, an application of
institutional theory, and Foucault’s articulation of power to qualitatively assess the various
discourses that frame the experiences of STEM faculty women who participated in an external
mentor program at an R1 University in the Pacific Northwest.
Ten faculty women and five department chairs (all men) were individually interviewed to
gauge their experiences with the mentoring program. Using critical discourse analysis as a
methodological framework, three main discourses surfaced to frame the way faculty women and
male department chairs spoke of the mentoring program: Discourses of Competition, Discourses
of Collaboration, and Discourses of Gender. Results indicated that these discourses may serve
to propagate competition in STEM environments, reify deficit views about women’s capacity in
STEM, and perpetuate a formal and traditional structure of academic STEM that benefits mainly
white men. Implications of this study rearticulate the necessity of viewing STEM ‘participation’
as a spectrum to benefit all humans.
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Details
- Title
- “YOU DON'T HAVE TO BECOME A MAN TO SUCCEED IN STEM”: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF STEM FACULTY WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN AN EXTERNAL MENTOR PROGRAM
- Creators
- Courtney Pearl Benjamin
- Contributors
- Paula Groves Price (Advisor)Pamela Bettis (Committee Member)John Lupinacci (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Teaching and Learning, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 242
- Identifiers
- 99900581703201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation