College students’ perceptions of gender stereotypes: making connections to the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields

In this study, we surveyed 499 college students at two different universities in the United States to determine what they believe are society’s current stereotypes about male and female personality attributes. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, ANOVA, and regression. We found that college students do believe that certain personality attributes are stereotypically associated with males while others are stereotypically associated with females within society, and that the strength of these beliefs varied by gender, whether or not they planned to pursue a STEM career, and by parental education. In this paper, we report our findings and relate our results to career choice to better understand how stereotypes might be connected to the shortage of women in many STEM careers.