Am I 'Confident Enough' to Succeed in STEM?

The Myth of Imposter Syndrome

In 4th grade I won the elementary school science fair for this project entitled “What Soil Do Plants Grow Best in and Why?” (sand, clay, or dirt). My results were that bean plants grew best in clay soil because it retained more nutrients. This was my first science project ever, and I felt a thrill of discovery digging through gardening books from the library and then finding the solution to explain my unexpected results!!

The GC From Hell

I have been told by multiple male mentors that “I lack confidence in myself.”

Let’s got back in time to 10 years ago when I was working on my Master’s degree in Engineering. I had to use a delightful instrument called a “gas chromatograph” to take measurements on the volatile fatty acid composition of some food waste samples. Unfortunately, the gas chromatograph or “GC” as it’s called by us labbies, is a notoriously finicky instrument, that has to be carefully calibrated after each use and often fails to work all together. There were times when one male grad student reported that he wanted “to beat the instrument with a baseball bat”.

An Agilent GC system is priced at over $12,000.

We obtained a new GC for free from another lab, because the instrument was not working and they wanted to get rid of it. My PI was convinced that it could be fixed (GCs are very expensive) and I was tasked with fixing it. Now, I had 0 experience fixing such a machine—I was terrified and started reading the manual, googling, and calling the company. I hesitantly tinkered with it and was able to get it to turn on and hook up with a program, but it didn’t really run or take samples. After a few weeks of this, my PI simply stated that I had “no confidence” in myself and assigned a male graduate student (baseball bat guy) to help me.

I had to spend several hours with this guy laboring over this machine. To this day, we got it to work, somehow. It only measured 2 types of acids and not as much as the PI wanted, but to this day I could not tell you how it was done. In the end, I had to send the samples to another lab to measure the acid I needed (ethanol and lactic acid) so I wasted a ton of time over it.

I always felt totally confident in my ability to do my research and complete my dissertation. I knew that I could get the math or whatever concept I needed to learn with enough practice and attention.

Indeed, I don’t go around with a huge ego. Yet, I have gotten this comment a couple of times in the subsequent years. No, I’m not confident in how to repair stuff mechanically because it’s not my area of expertise, I’ve never been trained on it, and don’t have the inclination or time for it.

Except, then I actually felt “bad” for not having a huge ego! I’m a pretty mild-mannered and very quiet person. Even as far back as 7th grade my teacher said to me you’re so smart you need to speak up more! (we had several disruptive kids in the class).

The suggestion that I need to “be more confident” are rooted in A) masculine default traits in STEM and B) an atmosphere rooted in meritocracy myth and other forces that can confuse the actual feelings women are experiencing. They thought that if I just “was confident” I could magically (with no experience) fix this machine.

Confidence comes from our environment

“Confidence” can very much be affected by one’s environment. In negative, or hostile environments, confidence can be easily eroded. Often this is denoted as “imposer syndrome”, which turns the burden towards the individual to work on themselves, to fix their own confidence.

For decades, science has been used to justify sexism in STEM, arguing, based on inadequate studies, that intelligence is a fixed trait easily measured by exams like the SAT. By their reckoning, men have higher math and science scores in the upper quartiles at a young age which translates to the large gender disparity we see in STEM workplaces. This belief is known as the “entity theory of intelligence”; this theory argues that individuals have a certain amount of intellectual ability and cannot change it. However, the “incremental theory of intelligence” argues that intelligence is malleable and can be increased through education and effort. Many studies argued that the gap between math scores among men and women decreased when both groups were exposed to advanced math classes and, unsurprisingly, studied more. The environment in which the individual exists is the theorized to have a significant impact on cognition and behavior. In environments where raw ability is valued over effort, faculty and students can believe that women do not have natural ability in STEM. Consequently, women are devalued, excluded from social interactions, and given less advice and support.

This comes to the “puzzling” STEM major gap. In some majors, like biology, women are well-represented at an undergraduate level, but in majors like physics or computer science this is not the case. Most officials blame the pipeline, rather than the institutional environment. Leslie et al 2015 examined the experiences of American faculty, postdocs, and graduate students across 30 academic disciplines in the United States including STEM and the humanities. They disturbingly found that fields with lower numbers of women and African Americans in fields were aligned with the belief that aptitude and natural giftedness resulted in success in the field. Even humanities fields like Philosophy which are male dominated aligned with this as well as Computer Science, Physics, and Math.

Figures from Leslie et al 2015. Red circles (mine) indicate majors with low numbers of women (left) and African American or Asian American students (right) and high entity-beliefs.

In entity-oriented environments, women have lest trust in their institution, and students in these environments are more likely to have negative experiences, less motivation, experience increased sexism and racism, lower sense of belonging, and overall have less confidence.

Rebecca Wang, 2022 Stanford engineering alumni wrote to the student newspaper about how easily confidence can be undermined. Despite “knowing” that studies on intellectual aptitude between men and women were B.S., she still internalized this pressure to demonstrate perfection, and that if she made mistakes, it would undermine perceptions of her aptitude for engineering. Based on her account, her environment was very “entity-orientated”.

In oversized, overwhelmingly male-dominated classrooms, I was scared to raise my hand, scared to make mistakes, scared to look like I had less knowledge than my male counterparts. They instead enjoyed those privileges like rights, and thus accumulated more gains from their educational experience than women. While it’s become increasingly common knowledge that female students do just as well and sometimes better than male students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects, and that enrollment in secondary education has mostly evened out among these genders, STEM equality for females generally ends here. Even with these statistics, females feel the pressure to prove themselves to males in STEM fields, and the fact that boys think boys are smarter than girls in science classes doesn’t help. For women who feel these microaggressions in the classroom, realizing their full potential and experiencing the same rewards as males in the same major is incredibly difficult from the start. The burden of knowing that we must prove ourselves causes us to fear making mistakes, because, as student Olivia Li at the University of Wisconsin articulated, “people could use that as an example that women aren’t capable.”

However, support can help students rebuild confidence. Based on interviews conducted by Freedman et al 2023, a biomedical student reported that they continued in their major when they were facing doubt, because of supportive advice from female mentors:

...there have also been times where I have been told to rethink my path to medicine because I am a woman. I have been told that I will be constantly torn between work and home if I have a family in the future...These comments have sometimes gotten the best of me and made me truly think about whether or not going into medicine is the right fit for me, considering that I envision myself having a family in the future. However, I have heard from strong women through [name of club] about how you truly can make it work if you want to have it all. You don’t have to settle for being an average doctor or scientist because you are a woman and a mother. Instead, you can be great, if not extraordinary at both.

It’s too easy to internalize

Ohio University Electrical Engineering classroom, 1980, Ohio University Photographer Archives

And I realized…If I “lacked confidence” in myself would I really be pursuing a PHD??? IN Engineering???

The “genius” scientist is stereotyped as having ideas falling from their mouths, are able to figure stuff out by themselves, are self-reliant. These are often male-coded traits that become the so called ‘masculine default’ in STEM fields.

Masculine defaults in STEM —Brilliant ideas, valuing self-oriented over other-oriented work, valuing independence over interdependence, belief that intelligence is fixed.

Women often have more conservative (or realistic) views of their capabilities while men are more likely to be overconfident in their mathematical abilities. Men are more likely to feel entitled to high grades. We also live in an extroverted world where bold, aggressive, shouting to the sky, is a sign of ‘genius’.

If somebody cannot demonstrate this flagrant confidence, then they may be pinned as having ‘imposter syndrome’ or merely not being confident enough.

Conclusion

I’m not great at mental math and can’t do much science calculations in my head, yet I can spell long words and internalize their definitions easily. Does that make me “dumb” in math? (no). I struggled so much with geometry, but with a lot of practice I was able to succeed and do really well in it and ended up really enjoying it. The same with Physics and now I use those principles!! People learn differently—I am a very visual learner and need to write stuff down or see it printed out; I struggle with remembering auditory knowledge I learn and need to take a lot of notes. Most people fail to account for different learning styles, and processing speeds when assessing ‘intelligence’. In fact, knowing my limitations and expertise is a sign of maturity.