Science & Tech

How moms may be affecting STEM gender gap

Research suggests encouragement toward humanities appears to be very influential for daughters

Samantha Laine Perfas

Harvard Staff Writer

August 12, 2024

7 min read

Women have been underrepresented in science and technology fields, and new research suggests a somewhat surprising possible contributing factor: the influence of moms. A recent paper by Michela Carlana, Harvard Kennedy School assistant professor of public policy, and Lucia Corno, an economics professor from Cattolica University in Italy, studied 2,000 Italian students — ages 11 to 14 years old — to quantify the role parents play in nudging their sons and daughters toward either STEM fields or the humanities. The Gazette spoke with Carlana about the paper. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your paper looks at the role parents might play in helping steer children toward academic paths. What did you find?

Parents play a role in shaping educational choices of children. In particular, mothers have the strongest effect on their daughters in pushing them away from STEM fields and into humanistic fields.

It’s not mothers in general. The gap is largely driven by those mothers who explicitly recommend a humanistic field who tend to push girls away from STEM. Interestingly, we did see a positive effect of mothers suggesting STEM fields, but it’s very small, not statistically significant.

What about the impact of fathers on their sons?

Photo courtesy of Michela Carlana

There is a similar effect for fathers who are in STEM fields pushing boys to choose STEM fields, but it’s not as strong as the connection between mothers pushing their daughters toward the humanities.

Can you tell us a bit about your testing methods?

We used a randomized control trial: In one group of mixed male and female students we asked students to choose their field of study. Another group was encouraged to think about their mom’s suggestions before choosing their field of study. And one was encouraged to think about their dad’s suggestions before choosing the field of study.

This is how we see that even in a low-stakes environment, just like thinking about what your mom or your dad would recommend affects the choices of these students.

Is the influence of parents due to them encouraging their children to enter these different fields or is it just the parents themselves are modeling the gap that already exists?

We can’t distinguish the two. But we do see that even for a child with similar abilities in STEM and humanities, mothers are systematically more likely to advise their daughters into humanity fields compared to their sons.

Overall, we see that dads are way more likely to recommend STEM compared to mothers. Even within the same family with similarly abled children, one is pushed more toward STEM because of his gender. Likely, some of these differences are capturing stereotypes in broader society.

When students were asked to think about what their parents would recommend, you discovered that they were very accurate in predicting their parents’ preferences. What does that tell us about the cues kids pick up on from their parents?

To be honest, we were surprised. We didn’t know how much kids would know about the recommendation of their parents. We surveyed both the parents and their kids so we could match their actual responses to their perception.

The kids were pretty accurate in knowing what their parents thought. So maybe parents are talking about their preferences, but even in daily interactions, when helping with homework, when the kids are thinking about their educational path after middle school, these messages are being received.

In Italy, we have a very segregated system for a STEM track versus a humanistic track. You will be in different schools based on your decision, so it’s very high stakes and will strongly affect your probability of going to college.

Students choose that track at 14 years old. It’s not like in the U.S. where you go to college and then you’re free to explore; in Italy, you’re choosing very early on in life. Because of this, I think there are lots of discussions with parents and their kids about their future. If we ask the kids, almost half say that they’re not sure about what they want to do.

But still, they may pick up informally what their parents do, or friends of their parents do. Kids pick up all this information early on, even in the types of toys we expose them to since early childhood, the “right” toy for a boy or girl. In the U.S., there has been more awareness in recent years. But around the world, I think there are still a lot of deeply held stereotypes.

“The kids were pretty accurate in knowing what their parents thought. So maybe parents are talking about their preferences, but even in daily interactions … these messages are being received.”

Did you find that kids feared disappointing their parents, based on their choices?

In most cases, we told students we were not going to reveal to their parents what they said. But in some, we told them that we were going to tell their parents their decision. And we saw that the results were a bit less dramatic, but the same overall.

My takeaway from this is that they may be concerned about their parents’ opinion, but even if the parents don’t know, there are still deeply ingrained stereotypes that affect their choices, regardless of whether their parents are aware.

Another part of the study that was interesting was that it asked students how confident they felt pursuing different fields, as opposed to what fields they wanted to pursue. Why did you focus on confidence levels rather than preference?

We did this because other research shows the importance of confidence in a field of study. Studies on the implicit bias of teachers show that when a girl gets exposed to a teacher with stronger implicit association — associating a boy with a scientific field — the girls develop lower self-confidence. Not only do they have lower ability by the end of the exposure, but also they believe they are less good in math as a consequence of the exposure to stereotypes.

Now, compare a teacher they only see in school to a parent who has a very deep influence since the first days of life. That’s part of the reasoning in thinking about how the confidence of the students could be shaped by their parents.

But with parents, you can’t really have that randomized exposure, so we were trying to create some causality in having students think about the preferences of their mom or dad.

The study took place in Italy. Do you think your results are unique to Italy? Or might you see the same tendencies elsewhere in the world?

I think it’s very widespread and there have been papers replicating a version of these findings on the role of gender bias in other countries. Italy is by far not an exception, unfortunately.

Was there anything about the study that surprised you?

It was extremely shocking that even a very simple intervention, like thinking for a few minutes [about what their parents want], could have such a deep impact on the choice of children, and that it affected the fields they believe they are better at.

How do we help parents understand they have deep impacts on the choice of the field of study of their own children? We want to increase the awareness of parents, and I’m thinking with my co-author about what to do as a next step.

We have a small-scale pilot study with around 200 parents in which we showed them the results of this research. And they were all shocked and were like, “Oh, now I need to be very careful when I talk with my daughter because even if I don’t explicitly say things, they are picking up what we associate between gender and field of study.”

For me, the next step in the research is thinking about how we can solve this deep problem. We observe gender gaps in choice all over the world. We may be more careful in hiding our stereotypes, but these things are so deeply ingrained that evidence shows that thinking is still present. We have a long way to go.

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