A Social-Psychological Approach to Increasing the Achievement of Women in Math and Engineering: A Randomized Field Experiment

Gary Walton

One of the most persistent group differences in education is the lack of women pursuing quantitative fields. In a randomized experiment, my research will test three social-psychological interventions to boost women’s real-world achievement in math and engineering. Each intervention addresses a consequence of being targeted by negative intellectual stereotypes. The first intervention is designed to buttress women’s sense of belonging in math and engineering, particularly in the face of adversity (such as social isolation) that could otherwise lead them to doubt their belonging or “fit” in quantitative fields. The second intervention is designed to buffer women against threats to their sense of self-integrity—their view of themselves as good, virtuous, and efficacious. The third intervention combines the active ingredient of the first two. Measures will assess academic outcomes (e.g., grades and retention in math and engineering) and mediating psychological processes. Participants will be male and female university students enrolled in math and engineering programs. This experimental design allows me to compare the effectiveness of each intervention strategy to each other and to a control condition. It also allows a test of the separate and joint processes by which the interventions trigger long-term benefits. Indeed, the combined treatment is predicted to be most effective in improving women’s achievement in math and engineering, because it should trigger both a more secure sense of belonging and a more secure sense of self-integrity. This research has the potential to inform psychological theory and to create novel, theory-based remedies to increase the number of women pursuing quantitative fields.

About Gary Walton

Gregory Walton received an A.B. in Philosophy from Stanford University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University in 2005. He is currently a post-doc at the University of Waterloo. His research investigates the role of social-psychological processes in students’ academic motivation and achievement. One major lesson from this research is that students’ sense of their belonging in school shapes, for better or ill, their scholastic motivation and achievement. In one study, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey L. Cohen, Walton tested an hour-long intervention to boost students’ sense of belonging in college. This intervention nearly eliminated the achievement gap in the subsequent term between Black and White first-year college students. Indeed, its positive effect on Black students’ grades persisted even years later. His research has been funded by Yale University, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the American Psychological Association, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. From 2005-2006, Walton served as a Legislative Fellow in the Office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the United States Senate, where he focused on children and family issues including education. The American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Foundation, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsored his fellowship.