Women and gender non-conforming introductory STEM students navigating gender, faculty expectations, and college support systems.

Women and gender non-conforming students remain underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) majors within higher education, and gender disparities persist in advancement to high-paying STEM careers (Maloy et al., 2021; NSF, 2015; Riegle-Crumb et al., 2018). This three-article style dissertation uses qualitative interviews with 29 women and gender non-conforming introductory STEM students and 11 STEM faculty to investigate how these students navigate through their introductory STEM courses. Women and gender non-conforming students in this study faced academic, familial, and gendered pressures to succeed in introductory STEM courses. Many of the students in this study described feelings of oppression and marginalization in their classes, most often from male peers. For the many students who felt gender was salient in shaping their experiences in STEM courses, these students responded to gendered pressures in STEM by avoiding their male peers and instead seeking out female peers and female-based groups and forming connections with their female instructors. However, the gender non-conforming students did not find the same comfort in joining cisgender-based identity groups with other women or developing friendships with classmates. While student respondents all felt pressures to succeed within their STEM classes, they varied based on first-generation college student (FG) and continuing-generation college student (CG) statuses in the help-seeking process and development of student-faculty relationships. While all respondents felt more comfortable engaging with women faculty, FGs reported that they were more likely to engage with faculty viewed to be “approachable,” especially non-engineering faculty who appeared to be less intimidating. FG expected faculty to reach out and understand student challenges; however, almost all faculty reported they did not individually reach out to students and, instead, with large class sizes, communicated information to entire classes. Faculty also expected students to proactively develop faculty-student relationships and seek help without faculty individual outreach. My findings suggest that women and gender non-conforming students experience gendered oppression within their introductory STEM classes, which manifests in gendered pressures and often, extra work for these women and non-binary students.