Eighteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Although women and minority representation in higher education has been consistently increasing over the last decades, their proportion has remained low in specific fields and professional workplaces. While the earlier “leaky pipeline” literature largely focused on individual women and minority students’ science competence and demographic characteristics, more recent studies illustrate that they initially have STEM interests and occupational aspirations but gradually become discouraged or unwelcome through interactions in their fields. This study examines how professional socialization facilitates mutual influences between the dearth of women in STEM and gendered STEM culture. By conducting individual in-depth interviews with female graduate students and professors in three STEM fields in the US and South Korea, this study seeks the organizational change mechanism by which professional women first socialize into STEM cultures for their individual success in their fields and then gradually modify the existing cultures towards more diverse and inclusive STEM cultures. By illustrating individual women’s agency and strategies in research practices and interactions with male colleagues, this study suggests a minority-based model for bottom-up organizational change mechanisms. It complements the current understanding of institution-level diversity issues that are based on majority-based model for reproduction mechanisms of existing social inequalities.