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Employers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics—commonly called the STEM industries—. In its 2024 jobs report, the National Science Board found that almost 3-to-1 in STEM jobs that require at least a bachelor's degree and over 8-to-1 in STEM jobs that don't, such as electrical, plumbing or construction work.

Despite women being just as for many STEM roles as men, if not more so, and the fact that STEM jobs offer than non-STEM jobs, men continue to dominate this section of the workforce.

I am a social scientist who , and since 2019, I've led the . One question we've sought to answer is why employers continue to struggle with recruiting talented women to the STEM workforce.

Our team recently carried out a study where we discovered that how caregivers, especially mothers, talk about STEM topics may significantly .

Are you a math person?

As a researcher, whenever I give a public talk, I like to ask the audience, "Who here is not a math person?" Without fail, several hands shoot up faster than if I had asked, "Who wants free money?"

It turns out that most people are well aware of their own relationship to STEM fields and may see themselves as a math, science or "STEM" person, or, commonly, not a STEM person. Researchers like me call this kind of self-identification a "STEM identity," and . Although any given person can have a very high STEM identity or a very low one, most individuals fall somewhere in between.

Having whether a student will choose to pursue a career in STEM. Research shows that if children don't develop a high STEM identity by eighth grade, they are .

This finding raises the question: What childhood experiences shape children's STEM identities?

Individuals come to identify with different groups by of those groups. In many cases, people learn about the characteristics of a group through direct experience. For example, elementary-age children often when they encounter mostly female teachers at their school. Most children, however, never spend enough time with a scientist to form a stereotype directly.

Children learn most of what they know about STEM professionals indirectly through . Once children have formed a stereotype in their minds, they then compare themselves to these stereotypes to determine .

In the United States, five decades of the " reveal that children asked to depict scientists overwhelmingly draw them as male—illustrating . While a growing body of research shows that in recent years, gender-based stereotypes of STEM workers , STEM workforce employment patterns contradict this finding.

A missing explanation?

Since social stereotypes about scientists are becoming less gender-biased, our team realized that something else must be causing children to carry male-biased views of STEM into young adulthood. The Talking Science team believed that understanding why some women see themselves as STEM people and want to obtain STEM jobs held the key to understanding the gap between decreasing social stigma and the persistent lack of women in STEM.

To understand this phenomenon more deeply, our team interviewed 20 college students, 13 of whom identified as female. We intentionally selected these students because of their positive STEM identities and enrollment in college STEM programs.

During 60-to-90-minute interviews, we asked participants to list the various people who positively or negatively shaped their academic and professional interests. We then asked students to label each of them as either a "STEM person," "not a STEM person" or somewhere in between. Finally, we invited each student to explain why they assigned each label.

The students mentioned 102 individuals—including parents, aunts, siblings, friends and teachers—as influential in shaping their STEM identities. Our team then assigned a gender to these individuals based on pronouns and other descriptors the interviewees used.

A gender gap clearly emerged. Women were only about 40% of those described as STEM people and 70% of the individuals described as not STEM people. This latter group almost always included our interviewees' mothers.

Updating stereotypes about STEM workers

When first examining the data, we assumed that college students didn't recognize their mothers as STEM people because of gender stereotypes. Some students were reluctant to describe their mothers as STEM people even when both parents worked in STEM professions—in one case, both parents even held the same college STEM degree.

After closer examination, we noticed that a few students labeled their fathers as not a STEM person. These fathers shared one thing in common with mothers labeled the same way: They all played the role of primary caregiver.

Even in cases where mothers or fathers held a college degree in a STEM field, students consistently diminished the STEM identity of the parent who took on the bulk of the child-rearing responsibilities. As a result, we recognized that something other than gender contributed to students' perceptions of their parents' STEM identities.

When pressed to describe why they did not see their primary caregivers as STEM people, our interviewees generally pointed to two things: failure to display STEM interests and failure to display STEM knowledge.

When asked about their parents' STEM interests, most interviewees described parenting as an all-consuming task that doesn't leave room for STEM. However, this view generally did not apply to both mothers and fathers, but rather to the parent taking on the role of primary caregiver.

Similarly, most students pointed to the parent who often engaged in conversations about STEM topics as more knowledgeable, and this view also tended to exclude the primary caregiver.

Why what parents demonstrate matters

Children who grow up with the expectation of becoming a primary caregiver may associate their own caregivers' limited displays of STEM interests and knowledge as par for the course. And because the role of , it's possible for some girls to grow up believing that being a committed parent and a STEM person are incompatible roles.

Of course, STEM workers have families, and many, both men and women, are primary caregivers at home. But stereotypes are hard to break. If STEM industries want to attract more women, or if parents want their daughters to grow up to become STEM professionals, then children need to see parenthood and STEM jobs as compatible.

When parents talk to their children about their STEM-related interests and share their knowledge, children are more likely to learn that they can grow up to be both a parent and a STEM person. This approach can have an outsize effect on young women who grow up with the expectation of raising a family one day.

Creating opportunities for children to encounter female role models who are in the STEM professions is vital . Our study suggests it's also crucial for children to see scientists and engineers as parents and caregivers with children of their own.

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