The impact of college experience on female students' self-perceived employability in STEM majors

Wen Wen; Lu Zhou; Die Hu; Mingyu Zhang; Zehua Yan; Xiaofeng Tang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1282934

The impact of college experience on female students' self-perceived employability in STEM majors

Front Psychol. 2023 Dec 21:14:1282934. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1282934. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Wen Wen¹, Lu Zhou¹, Die Hu², Mingyu Zhang³, Zehua Yan⁴, Xiaofeng Tang¹

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
² Hi-tech College, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China.
³ Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
⁴ Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Introduction: The under representation of women in STEM fields is a persistent issue worldwide. In China, although women have made significant progress in pursuing STEM degrees in recent years, they continue to face challenges in the workforce. Given the importance of the self-perceived employability (SPE) of female STEM students in China, the research questions are: How do curriculum experience, extracurricular experience, and faculty supportive activities affect the SPE of female STEM students in Chinese universities? To what extent does university stratification affect the relationship between college experience and female STEM students' SPE?

Methods: We analyzed the 2018 data of the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) consisting of a sample of 59,066 students, and six focus group interviews.

Results: The findings suggest that curriculum experience, extracurricular experience and faculty supportive activities have a positive impact on the SPE of female students, but the gender gap in SPE is still valid as reflected by the fact that women have lower SPE than men in each tier of universities and that men benefit more in terms of the increase in SPE from most types of college activities and support except academic ones.

Discussion: This study reveals that the different tiers of universities in China affect female students' SPE in different ways, and provides valuable evidence for academic as well as university administrators and policymakers regarding how college experience affect women and how university stratification can affect female students' college experience and their career expectations and paths.

Keywords: Chinese higher education; STEM education; female college students; gender disparities; hierarchical higher education system.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Youth Science Project, National Natural Science Foundation of China (72104120). The path of effective transformation of educational resources to student development in higher education: based on the mining of multi-source large-scale data.