UNESCO has raised the decline in enrollment of young people in STEM as a significant concern and the pandemic has shown that future workforce development must reflect the diverse communities that STEM serves. There have been long standing worries about the stereotype of a purported ‘male, pale and stale’ STEM and medical workforces. We’ve just published work that investigates ways of understanding the motivation of students who undertake STEM degrees, including medical degrees STEM(M).

The focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines in both education and labour market projections is ubiquitous across developed nations. Although the STEM acronym has been criticised as an umbrella term, it has helped to focus discussion about career aspiration in these fields. The study reported in this blog was conducted in Australia, where there has been a great emphasis on increasing focus on STEM across all levels of education through various policies and strategies, such as, the National STEM School Education Strategy. Given the concurrent interest in medical sciences, the study adopted the Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) definition of STEM(M), which includes medicine and health as well.

There has been a continuing concern about the  rates at which women in Australia are engaging with STEM careers and these concerns are not abating despite years of discussion and action. There are also second-order impacts of the lack of representation of women in STEM professions; these continue to impact workplace culture and impede gender equal innovation.

The study investigated why university students choose to major in STEM(M) disciplines and how their study and career-related confidence compares with that of their peers. This is important because many existing gender equality programmes encourage students to commence STEM(M) fields of studies. We were curious to unpack the study choice and career development motivations of STEM(M) students on STEM(M) courses and to see whether these factors differ according to gender.

The study engaged 12,576 students enrolled with Australian universities. The findings suggest that STEM(M) students’ career decision making is guided by their interest in the subject and their intentions to help people. Within the STEM(M) cohort, students in medicine and health were more confident in their career decision making than either their STEM or non-STEM(M) peers. Of interest, they were less aware of alternative career pathways and less prepared to reorient their careers should this be necessary. Female students reported greater confidence than male students in their career decision making, career identity and career commitment. Implications include the need for career narratives beyond the STEM industries and for career development initiatives which are mindful of disciplinary and gendered difference.

Students’ focus on subject interest and helping people highlights the importance of social utility and diminishes that of social status and personal utility features. We find STEM students to be significantly less confident than their peers in terms of their self-awareness and understanding how their program might relate to their future life and work. Within the STEM fields, we find the Natural and Physical Science students to be least confident in understanding their personal strengths and challenges relative to career.

Differences in gender suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to STEM(M) career decision making is unlikely to be successful; rather, these approaches need to be mindful of gendered difference and differences between STEM, STEM(M) and specific STEM disciplines. Female students were markedly more self-aware relative to career than their male peers. Male and female health and medicine students also reported high confidence levels compared to STEM students, indicating that they have different traits than other students in STEM and that there is little value in the STEM(M) grouping from the perspective of career and study pathways advice.

With reference to career identity and commitment overall, female students showed significantly higher mean factor scores than male students. Once again, STEM(M) students reported higher commitment factor scores than other students in STEM. Both STEM and STEM(M) students reported greater confidence in their career awareness and decision making than their non-STEM peers. They were also more confident than their peers in their ability to succeed in their careers and they felt better prepared to reorient their careers should things not go as planned. While health and medicine students were more confident in their career decision making overall, they reported less confidence in their occupational agility: they were less confident in their ability to forge alternative career pathways, less aware of alternative pathways, and less prepared to pursue alternative careers should this be necessary.

There are implications here for careers practitioners and university recruiters. Growing interest in scientific and technology related professions supports ideas of the knowledge economy in western democracies and yet it coincides with a decline in high school students’ engagement in science. This raises “fundamental questions about the best way to educate a workforce in the next 5–10 years” (Camilli & Hira, 2019, p. 5). Learners’ vocational engagement in STEM is assumed to be influenced by social perceptions of STEM careers as well-regarded, relatively stable and personally rewarding. Indeed, career development theory has to-date assumed that the career interest drivers for STEM disciplines are not linked with “People Contact” (as in the Australian Career Interest Test (Athanasou, 2011)) or with ‘Social /Helpers’ in the influential RIASEC Holland codes.

The study suggests that social status and career stability are far less influential than assumed, and that careers practitioners and university recruiters would do well to consider the alignment of STEM careers with communion or social utility. This innovation in orientation about STEM(M) careers could begin to approach the promotion of STEM(M) careers from a very different starting point.

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The full peer-reviewed article was published in the Australian Journal of Career Development and is available open access in its accepted form on ResearchGate accounts by reader individual request.

Authors were Dawn Bennett,@lizziebknight, Mike Dockery, Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre and Sherry Bawa, Curtin University, Australia.