Description |
Motivating question: Do professors, echoing decades of initiatives to increase female representation in STEM, prioritize striving to increase female retention on the career educational path toward STEM professorship? To test this, we presented (n=364) a national sample of US-based professors vignettes of undergraduates reconsidering plans to go physics graduate school and asked them to rate the extent to which they would encourage or discourage each undergraduates to follow through with their plans. Professors were randomly assigned male or female vignettes via which gendered pronouns were used. To force a trade-off between striving to increase female retention and a second possible priority, two vignettes presented undergraduates showing signs that physics graduate school is not in his/her best interest and a third vignette showed signs of the opposite. Professors were also asked a few questions about themselves: their institution, their field and their gender. Please see the accompanying publication for full details.
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