College women in STEM may face higher sexual assault risk

College women majoring in STEM fields are more frequently victims of sexual assault than their non-STEM counterparts, new research suggests.

Within science, technology, engineering, and math, the researchers expected that women in male dominated STEM majors (engineering, physics, and computer science), would experience more sexual assault than women majoring in non-STEM fields and gender-balanced STEM disciplines (chemistry, math and biology). Surprisingly, the data suggest the opposite is true. Women in gender-balanced STEM majors reported the most sexual violence.

“Increasing the participation of women in STEM is essential to advancing gender equity, but our study suggests the need to consider additional targeted sexual violence prevention that goes beyond typical campus approaches,” says lead author Dennis Reidy, associate professor in the Georgia State University School of Public Health and director for community engagement and outreach for the Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence.

The study, published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, examined survey data from 318 undergraduate STEM majors at five institutions of higher education across the United States. It found that women in gender-balanced STEM fields experienced nearly three times (2.86) more rapes than those in non-gender-balanced STEM fields. For every attempted rape for all other women, those in gender-balanced STEM fields experienced 3.4 attempted rapes.

Coauthor Laura Salazar, a professor in the School of Public Health, notes that the results of the study are consistent with a “backlash” effect in which gains in gender equality are associated with heightened violence against women.

“We have to acknowledge first that there might be a problem, and that acknowledgement has to come from leadership,” Salazar says. “Professors, department chairs, deans, and other institutional leaders can take action to promote equity for the women in their programs.”

Salazar has developed an evidence-based program known as RealConsent that has been shown to be effective in preventing sexual violence perpetration among male college students. She is currently assessing the effectiveness of a similar program for women.

The authors note that their study is the first to explore differences in sexual assault across STEM and non-STEM majors and also within STEM majors.

The authors stress that their study did not assess the relationship between women and their perpetrators. They emphasize that it unclear who the women were victimized by and that it would be unjustified to draw any conclusions about their male peers majoring in STEM fields.

Much more research is needed to better understand the experiences of collegiate women majoring in STEM fields, they say.

“This study demonstrates that the problem exists, but it doesn’t really explore the why. That’s really the next step in this line of research,” says coauthor Leah Daigle, professor in the department of criminal justice and criminology in the university’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

“If you see an equal number of women and men in your classes, you might think that, by definition, the women are being treated fairly,” she adds. “But that’s not what our study shows. It should be a wake-up call for people to realize that even when people are not in the minority in a group, they can still be at risk for discrimination and harm.”

Source: Georgia State University

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