Instructions Please answer the following question. The question asks you to name
ID: 2267967 • Letter: I
Question
Instructions
Please answer the following question. The question asks you to name and comment on a contemporary STEM-related issue. It is not important what these issues are other than that they are contemporary (relevant to today's society) and that they are Science, Engineering, Technology or Math related. Each response should be a few sentences in length. Credit will not be given for questions that are not contemporary, not STEM-related and not elaborated upon.
1] List and briefly summarize (a few sentences) one current event that is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) related which currently affects or will affect society at large.
Explanation / Answer
LIFE BALANCE IN STEM RESEARCH CARRERS
In career discussions, female undergraduates said that if they were to attend graduate school in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and were to follow a career based on their research training, they would have to give up having a family. A subsequent survey showed that many students, both men and women, thought work–life balance would be more difficult to achieve in a STEM research path than in other professions they were considering. Their views of STEM research being less family-friendly were more pronounced on issues of parental leaves and caring for children than finding a spouse/partner and landing two jobs in the same locality. To provide role models of work–life balance in STEM professions, we convened panels of dual-career couples who described how they worked together to raise their children while advancing their scientific careers. Our selection of panelists and topics of discussion were based on findings of social science research on work–life balance. On a survey with the same questions administered afterward, the changes in paired responses of male and female students with respect to all four issues showed a significant shift toward thinking that a research-based STEM career would be no more difficult than other careers they were considering.
INTRODUCTION
Given today’s reliance on science and technology in almost all sectors of the world economy and the need to solve serious global problems, the low percentage (24%) of U.S. college graduates who earned degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), 27th in the developed world, is alarming.o illustrate the deficit, in 2011, when the level of U.S. unemployment was relatively high, with 3.6 unemployed people for every job posting, there were twice as many job postings for STEM skills as there were unemployed people.Exacerbating the problem is the fact, documented just recently, that only 26% of college students who graduate with STEM degrees are employed in STEM occupations. Assuming the trend continues, based on the count of students earning bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering in 2012, that means 200,000 STEM college graduates per year will not end up in STEM occupations (using the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of STEM degrees and occupations). Understanding and addressing reasons why students who succeeded in obtaining a STEM degree move on to occupations outside the field will help mitigate the current and worsening shortage of STEM workers in the United States.
For the past four years, our institution has conducted a program with STEM undergraduates doing interdisciplinary research on problems relating to the life sciences. Because these students performed exceptionally well in their academic and research work, we hoped they would choose to attend graduate school in STEM and, from that base of advanced research training, proceed to diverse careers in academia, government, or industry. Their graduate-level research training could lead them into scientific/engineering research in academia, government, or industry; or their training could be applied toward commercialization of research, bioethics, public policy, or science writing, Thus, knowing that part of the solution to the STEM shortage is to increase diversity among students in STEM fields we listened very carefully when, in discussions about career choices, the women pursuing majors in engineering, computer science, and the physical sciences voiced serious concern about being able to manage family along with a career in a STEM profession.
Multiple Aspects of Work–Life Balance
The students’ concerns that they would not be able to raise a family while also developing a career based on graduate training in STEM fields are addressed in social science research as one aspect of work–life balance. Besides their roles at work, individuals are also sons and daughters, siblings, friends, members of social organizations, and eventually spouses/partners and then parents, with the relative importance of these work and nonwork roles changing and varying in importance through the life stages For instance, the importance of social life and hobbies may give way to family responsibilities as a person commits to a life partner and the couple has children. Research recognizes that work and personal life domains can impact one another in positive and negative ways For instance, individuals experience conflict when aspects of work such as stressful relationships with managers or coworkers or long unpredictable work hours make it difficult to manage family time; or when caring for family reduces efficiency at work. Enrichment results when fulfillment at work (e.g., self-esteem, financial security) and transfer of skills, behaviors, and perspectives at work help a person be a better family member; or when the need to attend to family provides workers with focus and sense of urgency that result in greater efficiency at work. Work–life balance is thus defined as feeling effective and satisfied in both work and personal life domains. Individuals try to minimize or manage conflicts between work and nonwork, and to maximize the benefits that spill over from work to nonwork and vice versa. As individuals’ roles in the work force and in the family change with time, different aspects of work–life balance take priority.
Work–Life Balance Gender Differences
Research shows that, today, work–life balance is an issue for both men and women however, studies show that conflicts and rewards associated with dual roles of men and women at work and in the family are different. Work-to-family enrichment, spillover of positive experiences at work that lead to a richer family life, was found to be significant for men but not for women. Family-to-work enrichment, when a fulfilling experience as a family member spills over to work, was significant for women but not for men. Women are more likely than men to adjust their work—modifying work schedules, taking part-time work, choosing less demanding work, shifting careers, or turning down opportunities for career advancement—to accommodate family commitmentsThese differences are ascribed to men and women having internalized divergent societal expectations, that men have primary responsibility for work and women have primary responsibility for the family resulting in women still carrying the larger share of housework and child care even when they have full-time employment. Gender differences regarding balancing work and family were already apparent in college students even though the students were not married, had no children, and did not have full-time employment. In that study, 39% of the women, compared with only 7% of the men, estimated below-median work commitment along with above-median family commitment Men and women also differed in their timing with regard to their thoughts about marriage and parenting; men were more likely than women to have not yet given thought to these issues, and women more likely than men to have already made decisions as to whether they would marry and have children.
Importance of Work–Life Balance to the Millennial Generation
Traditional college students today belong to the Millennial generation. Millennials, compared with Boomers and Gen-X, tend to place more value on jobs that “leave a lot of time for other things in life” That study was based on surveys of STEM workers taken when they were still attending high school and showed that Millennials’ desire for better work–life balance starts long before they consider having children. In part of a worldwide survey of Millennials, it was evident that members of this group were willing to work hard but also wanted work–life balance. For residents from Canada and the United States, the top answer to the question “If you could prioritize your life, what would you emphasize?” was “To spend time with my family,” with 56–60% making this choice compared with 35% choosing “To have a successful career.” “To be able to have time to enjoy my hobbies” and “To have many good friends” were selected by <25% of the North American respondents, showing the greater importance of balancing work with family rather than with personal interests.
Relevance of Work–Life Balance Issues to STEM
A partial solution to the deficit of STEM workers is for employers to help workers balance work and family. In a study of men and women who graduated from a large public university from 1965 to 1990, 32% of the women and 16% of the men left science after starting science careers, with the women outnumbering the men two to one Inability to combine family with a scientific career was one of the top reasons given by the women, who either stopped working outside the home or shifted to nonscience occupations. Indeed, in a study of physics and chemistry doctoral graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and scientists in academia and industry, women (39%) were twice as likely as men (20%) to have made choices that compromised their careers in order to meet family needs Early in their careers, the challenge was that of finding employment for both partners in the same geographical area, made more difficult by the location of many institutions that employ research scientists in small cities and rural areas. The next challenge was usually associated with the birth of children, reflected in women who had children more likely to leave scientific occupations compared with women who had no children, whereas men who had children were more likely to stay compared with men who had no children. Data from studies undertaken to determine the loss of women from careers in academic science show that women (29% of graduate students and 12% of postdoctoral associates) more than men (7% for both groups) worry that a science career will keep them from having a family Another study established that the perceived as well as actual inability to have the desired number of children was the major contributor to career dissatisfaction among male and female scientistsThese apprehensions are especially acute for Ph.D. scientists in academic careers, because the delay in childbearing to pursue graduate studies results in the pre-tenure years, when faculty members must amass an impressive body of research, coinciding with women’s peak fertility years.
Importance of Self-Efficacy with Respect to Future Work–Life Balance on Career Choices
Family role models are major influences on young people’s attitudes toward workCollege students who grew up in a family in which both parents shared housework and child care had lower anticipation of work–family conflicts and stronger self-effiicacy, that is, belief they could manage both work and family, compared with students who had grown up in traditional households in which their mothers did most of the housework and caring for children because work–life balance is in part dependent on the type of work a person does, a young person’s perception of future work–life balance may have some influence on the person’s career decisions. Self-efficacy, defined as a person’s beliefs concerning his/her ability to perform a task or behavior successfully, influences career choices by determining the types of career exploration that the person will attempt and results in higher levels of persistence when faced with obstacles.. Inasmuch as a person anticipates lack of future work–life balance as an obstacle to a desired career, having a concept of oneself forging a career while enjoying family life contributes to self-efficacy with respect to work–life balance; and self-efficacy with regard to work–life balance has been shown to actually result in lower levels of conflict between work and nonwork Such self-concept can be developed by exposure to positive role models.
METHODS
Knowing of our female undergraduates’ concerns that research-based careers in STEM following graduate study would not be compatible with raising families and understanding that work–life balance is also an issue for men, we worried that many of our students who were being groomed for careers requiring graduate research training in STEM would opt for other professions that they perceived to be more family-friendly, a common strategy for reducing future work–family conflicts We realized that, to encourage our students to choose graduate studies in STEM upon graduation, we needed to assuage their anxieties about work–life balance in STEM professions. On the basis of research on how young adults make career decisions, we designed an intervention to provide our students with positive role models of STEM professionals who balance work and family and thus to help them make choices based on reliable information. We also conducted surveys before and after the panel events to determine the efficacy of the intervention. This was done each year, resulting in a total of four cohorts of students.
Intervention: Work–Family Panel Discussions
To provide the role models, we invited two to three dual-career couples, each with a female STEM professional who we knew shared household and child-care responsibilities with her partner. We wanted the students to consider that they did not have to work and raise a family by themselves. We wanted them to realize that the ability to balance work and family depended on both partners This was also in line with a UK Parliament report that stressed the importance of choosing dual-career couples instead of women alone as role models, so as not to convey the idea that only a “superwoman” can have both a scientific career and a family. We invited couples with young children, because we wanted the role models to be as close in age to the students as possible, and these couples could address current practices for parental leaves, access to day care for infants, and other assistance now provided by employers not available in past decades. The couples on our panels happened to be either both STEM faculty members or a STEM faculty member married to a healthcare practitioner. Although some couples served on the panels in multiple years, the set of couples changed from year to year.
When issuing the invitation, we briefly described the kinds of questions or topics to address; and during the panel session, we occasionally prompted the panelists with questions. On the basis of our understanding that students were more concerned about their future roles as spouses and parents than having leisure time for hobbies and friends, we asked our panelists to focus on how they balanced work and family, to recount how they met, and how they landed two jobs in the same location. We knew that their talking about their experiences would show students how institutions’ hiring practices help dual-career couples. We asked panelists to follow with a discussion of parental leaves and of how they manage sharing of child-care responsibilities. Except for the physical setup, with panelists sitting in the front of the room facing the group of 25–30 students, we kept the event informal, providing an atmosphere in which the panelists could be relaxed and the undergraduates could be comfortable with asking questions. The panelists’ stories described the milestones in their family lives and careers and how they managed work and family through each transition. Their real-life narratives illustrated workplace and family characteristics that improve work–life balance: the advantage of having control of work schedules.the value of flexibility both in the workplace and in the home. Partners who were both in academia talked about how scheduling their classes at different times gave them the flexibility to deal with emergencies relating to children. They spoke about taking turns assuming more responsibility in the home when the other had a critical deadline to meet at work. The situations, circumstances, and experiences the panelists shared with the students provided rich examples of how scientists and engineers manage their family lives while also advancing their careers.
Undergraduate STEM Students in the Study
The research students who attended the panel discussions were undergraduates in the STEM disciplines on our campus. Of the 127 students in our program, 45% were majors in the life sciences, while 55% were majors in the physical sciences, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Both sets of majors were about evenly divided between juniors and seniors. Forty-six percent of the students were underrepresented by gender or ethnicity in their disciplines. At the time of the panel discussions, the students had completed nine weeks of full-time summer research with stipend support, followed by five months of research for independent study credit during the Fall and Spring semesters. A total of 52 men and 50 women, comprising 80% of the program participants, attended the panel discussions and filled out surveys before (prepanel) and after (postpanel) the panel discussion. Each year there was a new cohort of students; thus there were four cohorts with 11, 9, 20, and 12 men and 8, 15, 14, and 13 women, respectively. All students were of traditional college age with birth years from 1990 to 1994, placing them in the Millennial generation. None was married and none had children. We also asked the students about their career goals, specifically whether they were planning to proceed to graduate school, whether they intended to remain in STEM, and how important the issue of balancing future work and family was to them.
Surveys on Work–Family Issues
In the prepanel survey, we gave students four specific issues of work–life balance to consider. The issues reflected the types of concerns voiced informally by students in the first cohort and were presented in the form of questions: (Q1) meeting their future spouses/partners, (Q2) finding two jobs in the same location, (Q3) the impact on their careers of taking parental leave, and (Q4) having time to spend with children (Figure 1). Thus, Q1 and Q2 focused on issues relating to their future spouses/partners and Q3 and Q4 focused on issues relating to children.
With graduation from college in a few months for some or a little more than a year away for others, important career decisions were imminent for the students. In addition to graduate studies in STEM, many were also considering graduate studies to prepare for professions in other areas such as healthcare, finance, and K–12 education. Except for the availability of positions in some of these professions having wider geographical distribution that would make it easier for both spouses/partners to advance their careers, we knew from the literature that those professions also posed challenges to work–life balance For instance, as medical students and residents seek work–life balance, there is intense competition for medical residencies in specialties in which work is conducted within set hours Even K–12 teachers, who have jobs that are generally considered to be family-friendly, report typical 60-h workweeks during the school year and the need to work at another job in the summer to supplement income Thus, although in general, a career in STEM would be no easier or harder than the other professions they were considering, we surmised that the students’ apprehensions originated from them having little to no contact with STEM professionals outside of the college campus and thus having only glimpses of STEM professionals’ private lives. We formulated the anonymous survey in such a way that students would visualize themselves both working as STEM professionals after having completed an advanced degree with research training in a STEM discipline and in alternative professions. The students were instructed to indicate with checkmarks on a two-sided scale the relative ease or difficulty of managing work and family in research-based STEM careers compared with the alternative Those who were not considering a career other than in STEM were asked to think in generic terms of such an alternative. Administering the survey immediately before and after the panel discussions gave the students an opportunity to reflect on the panels’ information in the context of their own lives. We kept track of individual students’ pre- and postpanel responses so we could determine what effect, if any, the panel discussions had on the students’ views.
Scoring Surveys
Responses on whether balancing family with career would be easier or harder in a research-based STEM profession compared with an alternative career were scored as follows: much easier (3), easier (2), a little easier (1), same (0), a little harder (+1), harder (+2), much harder (+3) with a STEM career.
Data Analysis
Given that social science research pointed to differences in how men and women viewed and coped with the challenge of balancing work and family, we analyzed the survey responses of the men and women separately. Because the students’ responses in the surveys did not conform to a normal distribution, we used the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance by ranks for nonparametric data to examine patterns among cohorts. Where there was no significant difference among cohorts, the data were combined for further analysis. To compare responses of the men and the women, we used the Mann-Whitney U-test. To determine whether the panel discussions had an effect, we analyzed pre- and postpanel responses of each individual using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. In addition, contingency table analyses were performed to test for gender differences in postgraduation plans, alternative careers, and the importance of balancing work and family. An alpha level of 0.05 was used for all statistical tests.