Influx of Women in Research at George Mason University

Abstract: After discovering a gender gap, favoring women, within the OSCAR department at George Mason University, a research team was drafted to understand the causes, implications, and concentrations of the gap. Through analysis of university data by college, major, and gender, and through the same categories within the OSCAR offices’ own programs, studies of where the gender gap were most prevalent were to be conducted. Literature suggested the possibilities of mentors, faculty attitudes towards research, grade point averages, and societal differences between genders as possible causes of the gap. Within the 10 weeks given to this project, it is too soon to say which, if any, of these causes were at play within George Mason, however, our work with the data helped distinguish where and who the difference affected.

Hi! My name is Reagan Emmerling. That’s me up there in the corner. The first thing to know about me, is that I love dogs; and that I love to journal. Which is why I choose this mode of presentation. I am not, however, a very good artist. So please forgive any artistic shortcomings that you may see in this video. I’m an integrative studies major, with a concentration in women and gender studies, and this is my summer research project on… The boy crisis What I mean when I say ‘the boy crisis’, is that for the first time in history, there are more girls involved in research than boys. This is absolutely fantastic, for such a long time women were completely excluded from education, and now, they can, and are, flocking to it. However, the goals of the OSCAR office, are for their research programs to look like the university; which is about 50/50. So, to create a representative program, we needed to understand where and why there are more women. The first thing that I needed to do was that I needed to be FERPA trained. I was handling classified university information, so I needed to be sure that I was able to handle it responsibly. Second, I needed to do a ton of background research. We had our research guide our questions; which were, do other colleges have this trend? What factors could have contributed? What areas were these trends elevated? We then turned that into an annotated bibliography. From here, we made a hypothesis that made sense based on our previous research. We considered a few hypothesis, but the one we most seriously considered was mentors. It’s been discovered that the more a mentor looks like you physically, the more likely you are to do research. We didn’t really have time to look into some of our others, which were GPA, or other factors. Then, we took broad university data and compared it to the OSCAR data. We compared the college of arts, college of science, the humanities, and engineering. As you can see, the school of engineering is a huge red flag. In the broad university data, you can see there are drastically more men than women. When you look at who is researching, the rates are about the same. Next, we looked at where and what gender our mentors were. That was pretty much all that we had time for in our 10 weeks. But, over the summer, I learned so much. I learned things like, how to manage and understand data, the innerworkings of research, valuable reading work, database searching, and statistical work, and most surprisingly useful of all, lots of experience with excel. So, take it from me, please consider a research project into your future plans. There is so much to gain. Thank you for watching.