Ruth E. Fassinger - US grants

University of Maryland College Park will study the experience of S&E-trained women in the chemical industry. There are three areas of study: Contextual Patterns, Individual Experiences, and Effective Interventions.

Scientific Issues:
* What contextual patterns and influences exist with respect to the role of S&E-trained women in the chemical industry?
* What have been the individual experiences of S&E-trained women in the chemical industry, and what vocationally-inhibitory and -facilitative factors can be identified from their reports?
* What formal and informal strategies currently are being used to increase S&E-trained
women's participation in the chemical industry, and how effective are they?

Contextual Patterns will be assessed through quantitative investigation of organizational patterns of women's participation in chemical business and industry in the U.S. over time. This will include identifying a national, representative sample of chemical businesses, gaining access to archival and current organizational data on male and female employment patterns, and administering an organizational survey to management.

Individual Experiences will be assessed through both quantitative (survey) and qualitative (interview) investigation. A survey will be administered to a large, national, representative sample of women in chemical business and industry to assess their self-reported experiences in occupational preparation, entry, and advancement. A representative sub-sample of these participants (diverse in race/ethnicity, age, work setting, S&E sub-field, and education) will be interviewed to explore more specifically the variables that have inhibited or facilitated their career trajectories in the chemical industry.

Effective Interventions will be assessed through both quantitative (survey) and qualitative (interview) investigation, as well as literature review. The quantitative portions of Studies 1 and 2 and the qualitative portion of Study 2 will include assessment of formal and informal strategies currently used by companies to increase women's participation; interviews also will be conducted with a sub-sample of management personnel from Study 1 regarding their perceptions of intervention strategies, to compare to the responses from individual women. These data will be combined with a literature review to identify best practices interventions.

Science and engineering (S&E) fields are considered crucial to U.S. economic growth and are expanding rapidly. Demographic trends indicate that women and minorities represent the greatest increases in workforce participation; however, the continued under-representation of women (including minority women) in S&E fields is well documented. Much of the attention to women's relative absence from S&E fields has focused on women in academe, and very little is known about women in other S&E settings. Industry is the largest employer of S&E workers, but women are less likely than men to be employed in the industrial sector. Data regarding why women fail to enter industrial settings in predictable numbers and what happens to them there are virtually non-existent. Moreover, very little is known about the prevalence or effectiveness of strategies currently being used to address the paucity of women in industry.

The Broader Impacts of the study include:
* Providing a model for the study of demographic diversity in one industry
* Identification of "best practices" interventions to enhance the careers of women in S&E business and industry.
* Training of graduate and undergraduate students in research methods of the social sciences.

This project involves a set of "mixed method" studies testing a new model extension of social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). SCCT has proven to be a heuristic framework for understanding women's and men's interest in, choice of, and performance and persistence in various academic and career fields. This model offers promise as an integrative framework, bringing together a number of factors (e.g., personality, cognitive, social, and behavioral) that have been shown individually to predict or promote positive adaptation. In particular, this project will test, using a longitudinal design, the new SCCT model of academic satisfaction and adjustment, focusing on the dynamic relations among the social cognitive variables during a formative period in women's and men's transition to the STEM environment: their first two years in college. This part of the project will involve development or adaptation of psychological instrumentation, a large sample of students at two predominantly White and two historically Black universities in the mid-Atlantic region, and structural equation modeling procedures. In a companion study, participants will be queried using semi-qualitative methods to explore in more depth how they experience the academic environment and what strategies they use to cope with their transition as STEM majors. The University of Maryland, Morgan State University, Virginia Tech, and Howard University have agreed to participate in this study.

Intellectual Merit: The proposed project is intended to advance scientific understanding of how women and men adjust to the STEM environment by (a) testing the new SCCT model of satisfaction and adjustment, (b) assessing invariance of model-data fit across gender and institutional context, (c) examining differences in particular model paths for women versus men, and (d) exploring women's perception of environmental resources and barriers and personal/social coping strategies. The project will address gaps in prior research applying SCCT to women's adjustment to STEM fields.

Broader Impacts: The findings can inform the design of educational interventions to promote women's positive adaptation to, and retention within, STEM majors by focusing on variables and processes that are amenable to modification. The project team will (a) communicate the findings to scientific and educational audiences via presentations at professional meetings and journal publications; (b) make instrumentation developed as part of the project available to other researchers; (c) build a local, multi-disciplinary network of social scientists, physical scientists, and engineers who can pursue additional research on how to increase representation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM fields; and (d) provide research training opportunities for female and ethnic minority graduate students.