Nicole Else-Quest, assistant professor of psychology, is the author of an April 9 post in the “Huffington Post” blog entitled “Contextualizing the Conversation on Women and STEM.”
Else-Quest is the lead author of a recent study that found that female students perform as well as males in STEM classrooms, but report less confidence about their abilities. It also found that Asian American students outperform other ethnic groups.
In her piece for the Huffington Post, she argued that “the national conversation about women and STEM cannot progress until it considers gender within the context of other social identity variables, such as ethnicity, class, and immigration.”
“We don’t think of ourselves as only having gender or only having race. We think of ourselves as multifaceted and complex individuals – because we are multifaceted and complex individuals,” she writes.