Mind the Gender Gap

Implicit bias in STEM education

Abstract

Gender inequality in the academic context is influenced by implicit bias – namely the process of automatic associations. Implicit gender biases might influence teaching, assessment, review, and recruitment processes and hence equality within higher education. Data on the extent to which implicit gender bias in relation to career choices is present in the general population has been collected during many years in the web-based Project Implicit but has not, to the best of our knowledge, yet been investigated among teaching staff in a STEM-focused faculty at a Swedish university. In this study, we measured the implicit gender bias of 51 participants with teaching experience, ranging from doctoral students to professors at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University (LTH). Our results show that implicit gender bias – where men are more closely associated with STEM subjects and women with liberal arts subjects – is present, even though the majority did not indicate beforehand that they explicitly associate either men or women with STEM. We further show that our results compare well to those of Project Implicit. The main takeaways from this paper are: there is a widespread issue of implicit gender bias among teaching staff at LTH and the population at large; and there is a dire need for increased awareness of such mechanisms to approach the goal of a gender-equal academic environment.