Sociology Research Highlight

Daphne Pedersen and Joe Jochman

Drs. Pedersen and Jochman are part of a UND team that was recently awarded a $2 million NSF grant to support undergraduate students in STEM. They will be leading the social science research component of the grant, investigating best practices in student recruitment and retention. Their focus will be mentoring relationships, and the development of science identity as means of improving student success in academic and career pursuits. Past work by Pedersen and Jochman indicates that the quality of mentoring relationships, faculty recognition, and scientific training, especially research involvement, are critical to persistence in STEM, sense of belonging to the university and community of scientists, and the intent to pursue a STEM career after graduation. Small interactions with faculty, especially those that are authentic and inspire a sense of trust, go far in countering student stress and feelings of imposter syndrome, and give students confidence to build scientific knowledge and skills.

Justin Berg

Justin Berg presented at the UND Multicultural Conference for Belonging and Inclusion last October, with a co-PI from an NSF grant. They shared information on UND STEM faculty inequity. For example, UND female STEM faculty have the same success rate in being awarded external grant funding (about 3 in 10 proposals, on average) but they submit only 17% of the total proposals that come from UND, which results in them bringing in only 12% of the total external grant funding. There are several explanations for their low submission rate: 1) UND female STEM faculty talk about resources (e.g., lab space, equipment), mentoring, and collaboration opportunities favoring men; 2) they talk about being “voluntold” to do service more than men, which constrains their time; 3) they often get bigger class sizes and more advisees than men, which also constrains their time; 4) men can decline tasks without comparative consequences, whereas female STEM faculty will be labeled as difficult if they do so. Some solutions that their research team proposed includes: 1) more college level grant specialists that would have a good ROI as more grants are awarded to women faculty; 2) awareness training for leadership (chairs, deans) as they decide on service and teaching tasks; and 3) implementing department level mentoring programs to stimulate advanced research training and collaboration opportunities.