Negotiating conflicting discourses. Female students’ experiences in STEM majors in an international university in Central Asia

2021

Closed access Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.1080/09500693.2021.1875150
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of female students enrolled in STEM majors in highly internationalised university to understand how the various sets of cultural gender-related expectations shape their experiences. We were interested in how different cultures existing within the university and outside the university influence the girls pursuing education in STEM majors and how they deal with the conflicting discourses in this unique context. It was identified in the study that three conflicting discourses and, subsequently, various actors -faculty, potential employers, peers, and parents shape young women's experiences in STEM education and career in contradicting ways. Such a clash between different values and influences results in girls’ ambiguous understandings of their future careers as they progress in their studies. The results of the study offer some important insights into women's experiences in STEM education, which have significant implications for higher educational administrators, faculty, and policymakers in non-western and larger international contexts.