Analysis Of A Survey Of 162 Stanford Students

We undertook an interview of Stanford students to investigate how the trends we read about in our research were reflected in the Stanford community. 162 students participated in the survey, with the following breakdown:

• 11 Male Non-Technical Majors
• 55 Male Technical Majors
  • 26 CS Majors
  • 28 Non-CS Majors
• 33 Female Non-Technical Majors
• 63 Female Technical Majors
  • 19 CS Majors
  • 44 Non-CS Majors

We defined "technical major" as a science or engineering major, classifying borderline cases such as Psychology or Economics based on the students' self-perceptions. The actual survey can be found here . Questions were designed to gain insight into:

• Influences on students' choice of a major
• Whether students have considered switching majors, and why
• What qualities students value most in professors
• What qualities students value most in classes
• Students' postgraduate ambitions

Influences On Students' Choice Of A Major

Students were asked the question, "What influenced your decision to choose your current major?" The most common reasons cited were as follow:

The most intersting thing to note is that while only one woman out of 68 female engineers cited natural ability as a reason for her choice of major, twelve out of 55 male engineers cited their natural ability. These statements usually came in the form, "I like it. I am good at it." or "I have a natural ability for it."

Another interesting point is that family influence affected women more than men. The numbers cannot accurately reflect the emphasis placed on family by those women who mentioned it. Characteristic comments from female engineers:

My grandfather was an engineer, so I always knew I wanted to be an engineer. --Sophomore, Product Design

My father had a big influence on my decision to become an ME. He is an electrical engineer but he had great mechanical aptitude. Growing up, I saw him working on lots of mechanical and structural projects and he helped me learn about engineering from when I was very young. -- Graduate student, Mechanical Engineering

One last topic of interest are some of the reasons given by non-engineers for choosing a non-technical rather than a technical major. One such reason:

Introductory science courses at Stanford are uninspiring. --Sophomore, History

This is a classic example of the feminine uninterest in science courses which women deem rote, boring, and impersonal.

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Influences Which Cause Students To Consider Changing Majors

Students were asked whether they have ever considered changing majors, and if so, what caused them to consider it? The most common reasons given by engineers were, in order of frequency of citation:

• Course Difficulty
• Exclusion of other interests
• Unfulfilling coursework
• Boredom
• Too much work
• Stereotypes

The number of responses given for each factor was amazingly equal for the two genders, suggesting that Stanford men and women in engineering are equally uncertain about their majors. The real split was between the responses given by technical and non-technical majors. The students majoring in technical disciplines were far more likely to report thoughts of changing their major, while the vast majority of students studying non-technical majors reported complete satisfaction. The only frequent concern of humanities majors was the lack of a job market after graduation; this concern was expressed by a single freshman male CS major, who was concerned that the market would be glutted with programmers by the time he got there.

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Qualities Which Students Value Most In Professors

We tried to determine the qualities of professors most valued by students in several ways. Most straightforwardly, we asked students first who their favorite professor was; this question was followed up with inquiries about the student's favorite male and female professors within their major. The following data is from the responses to the non-gendered, non-major-specific question, "Who is your favorite professor and why?"

Number of Times Qualities Were Cited As Influences on Student's Choice of a Favorite Professor

Not surprisingly, the data shows that technical majors are more concerned with the clarity and quality of professors' explanations; this follows from the nature of the material studied. The most interesting gender-related difference is that pertaining to the approachability (and to a lesser degree, amount of encouraging and caring) of professors. Women cited approachability as a key trait of their favorite professor far more than did men. We expected this from our research. Due to the class sizes of engineering and particularly Computer Science courses at Stanford, the importance of approachable professors to women might be a large factor in the number of women who do not enter or do not complete Computer Science studies.

Students were also asked to name their favorite male and female professor within their major. The responses to this question are quite illustrative. Of the 118 students in technical majors who responded, 64 of them reported either not knowing of any female professors in their major or having never taken a class from one. This means that over half of students in technical majors have had exclusively male professors. Furthermore only about half of the respondents were freshmen or sophomores, meaning that a large number of the students taught exclusivley by males are in their third year of college or beyond. It is no wonder that women to whom female professorship is important may not consider science or engineering.

54 respondents did name a favorite female professor; however, upon examination of the reasons given by students for choosing their favorite, 19 of the female professors named were nominated only because they were the only female professor within the major with which the student was familar. In contrast, every survey respondent in a technical major was able to list a favorite male professor, all of whom were listed for positive personal qualities and not by default.

Not only do the above statistics clearly demonstrate why non-technical majors might have more attraction for women, but they also point out a problem faced by many female professors in technical majors: they must play the role of the token woman. Their accomplishments--like that of being chosen as a student's favorite professor--are often attributed to the fact that they receive special treatment or are subject to lower standards because they are female. It is unfortunate that in the case of this particular study, many of the female professors were chosen for their gender and for no other reason.

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Qualities Which Students Value Most In Their Classes

Students were asked to state their favorite class within their major and their favorite class outside of their major, and explain their choices. The percentages of students citing various qualities are as follow:

First, note that only 13 respondents fell into the category of "Male Non-Technical Majors", so their data should be taken with a grain or possibly an entire brick of salt. In the other data, however, there are a few points of interest:

• Importance of professors
  
  To both technically and non-technically oriented women, professors made a larger difference in the enjoyment of a class than they did to the men. This can be problematic when combined with the findings from the Most Valued Qualities In A Professor section, which shows that science and engineering students are far less likely to know female professors; furthermore, even when classes are taught by female professors, the classes are generally so large that professor influence is minimized (see next point). A characteristic female engineer's comment on her favorite class:
  
  Can't really choose, sorry. I'm not really passionate about any sub-topic within my major, and my "liking" for a class tends to depend more on the prof and on the amount of homework than the subject matter.
  
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• Importance of class size
  
  Important particularly in combination with the point made above is the influence of class size. Over a quarter of non-technically oriented women cited small class size as an important factor in their favorite class. Do technical women care less about class size, or did they not cite it as a factor because they have not had the opportunity to take small classes, and hence their favorite classes are by necessity not small? We believe it is the latter, because most of the science ∓ engineering women who cited small class size cited it with regard to their favorite class outside of their major--from which we conclude that they prefer small classes, but do not have the opportunity to take them within their major. Closer looks at the statments of the engineering women who listed a small class within their major revealed that every one of these classes, without fail, was an introductory seminar. These seminars do not count toward the requirements of a major, though they may fall within the department of the major. This simply means that it is necessary to take many large lecture classes in order to complete a science or engineering degree--a sacrifice many women are not willing to make.
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• Importance of grades to technical majors
  
  Interestingly, not a single non-technical major of either gender reported a correlation between doing well in a class and enjoying it. Although the numbers of technical majors who reported this correlation were small, they seem to indicate the general competitveness of technical majors in general. Logic says that since one does not get graded until the end of a course, grades should not affect enjoyment of a class--unless enjoyment is linked to one's performance in relation to that of one's peers, in which case grades do matter and can easily affect a retrospective attitude. This observation clearly does not come from the data, but is an observation of the writers of this report, as technical majors, which was brought to mind by the data. The studies which describe science and engineering majors as competitve are correct.
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• The meaning of "Learning A Lot"
  
  Within technical fields, males attributed their enjoyment of a class to the amount of material they learned over twice as often as did females. This might imply a reverse correlation between enjoying a class and subsequently learning a lot in it; if this is the case it is unfortunate, since we have seen that women are less likely to enjoy the material in their technical courses simply for its own sake.
  
  A look at the qualitative comments which mentioned "learning a lot" also gives some interesting insight. Comments from males generally spoke of learning many technical concepts; in particular, CS107 was cited by males again and again as their favorite CS class, and almost invariably because the class taught them so much about programming. As one male said:
  
  My favorite CS class was 107--it amazed me with the amount I could learn in one quarter.
  
  Science ∓ engineering women, on the other hand, seldom spoke of "learning a lot" technically, but usually mentioned the concept with regards to a humanitarian interest. One woman's response:
  
  My favorite class outside of my major was Sex, Body, and Gender in Medieval Religion, although I didn't get as good of a grade as I wanted. I liked it because I learned a lot about the history of my religion and the topics were just plain interesting to me.
  
  Perhaps women are more interested in or excited by "learning a lot" in humanitarian areas than technical ones, or perhaps, as studies have suggested, they are less confident in their abilities and do not usually feel as though they have "learned a lot" in a technical class. Or, as has also been suggested by research, women are simply uninspired by most technical material--meaning that even when they do learn a lot of it, such knowledge does not occur to them to be a reason to prefer one class over another.

Postgraduate Ambitions

To gather information on this, we simply asked students to answer a multiple-choice question regarding what they wanted to do after graduation. Options were:

• Earn a Masters degree
• Earn a PhD
• Work at a job related to your major
• Work at a job unrelated to your major
• Other (usually used for responses such as medical, law or business school)

We looked at the responses in the context of gender, class at Stanford (frosh, soph, etc.), and type of major (technical vs. non-). Given the large number of possible combinations of these factors in relation to the number of respondents, the data was difficult to process, but we did notice a few trends in the following areas:

• Industry vs. Academia
  
  We noted that a 60-40 majority of freshman and sophomore women in technical majors intended to continue their education beyond a Bachelor's instead of entering the workforce directly, but among junior and senior women with the same interests, the proportions were reversed. For technically-oreinted men, the proportion was exactly 50-50 for under- and upper-class students. This indicates that some women change their minds as they progress through their major, possibly as they begin thinking about families and children, or possibly because they lose interest in the abstractions of educational engineering and become anxious to put their knoweldge to use.
  
  Another interesting note which cannot be seen from proportions alone is that of the senior females in technical majors, eleven out of thirteen planned to enter the industry in a job related to their major. In contrast, only half of the senior males in the same position planned to work, while the other half was evenly split between PhD and Masters ambitions.
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• Masters Degree Ambitions
  
  The number of survey respondents planning to pursue a Masters degree in a technical field were broken down as follow:
  
  
  
  We also plotted the same data in terms of percentages of the number of students we polled which fell into each category:
  
  
  
  Although the numbers are admittedly very small and non-indicative, the fact both the numbers and the percentages do tend to follow the trend reported in our research is interesting. Women come in with high ambitions which are lowered by the time they graduate; men's ambitions, on the other hand, exhibit little change. An interesting addendum to this observation is that none of the engineering freshman or sophomore males we surveyed mentioned PhD goals, but four junior men and two seniors, out of twenty and nine respectively, planned to earn a PhD.