キャリアニュース2020年6月18～24日

I entered the main conference room in our chemistry building, feeling nervous. I was the last to arrive, and I hastily took my place at a boat-shaped table alongside four other students, all undergrads like me. A group of professors sat across from us, chatting amicably among themselves. Scheduling this meeting—and getting more than one faculty member in a room at once—had taken me almost a month. Determined to make the most of their time, I collected my thoughts and skimmed the meeting agenda for a fifth time. Our group's goal, simple but unprecedented, was spelled out in bold at the top of my notes: “We want to build a university course from the bottom up.” > “Students should be advocates for their own education.” We didn't know what would come out of the meeting. We wanted to create a course because we believed the introductory chemistry curriculum did not sufficiently prepare students for work in a research lab. But we worried the professors would see us as naïve children. Wha

Gender gaps in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) college majors receive considerable attention, and it is increasingly recognized that not all STEM majors are equal in terms of gender disparities ([ 1 ][1]–[ 4 ][2]). For example, the male-to-female ratio among U.S. college majors in biology, chemistry, mathematics, and many other STEM fields is now about 1-to-1 ([ 2 ][3], [ 5 ][4]), whereas in physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS), the ratio appears to have plateaued at about 4-to-1 ([ 2 ][3], [ 4 ][2], [ 5 ][4]). Here, we make two important contributions, showing (i) how gender relates to pursuit of a PECS degree throughout the achievement distribution and (ii) that student characteristics that predict PECS pursuit in the literature are not equally predictive of the gender gap throughout the achievement distribution. We find that a surprisingly large number of low-achieving men are majoring in PECS, relative to women, and this cannot be explained by an exte