We analyze social media discussions to understand the issues experienced by women in Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering (STEM), both in the classroom and at work. To do so, we identify two relevant discussion forums on the Reddit social media platform: r/womenEngineers and r/xxSTEM, and we perform topic modelling to discover frequently discussed topics. Our analysis leads to three main findings. First, women discuss harassment, inequality, and lack of representation. These issues were found to persist in both academic and professional environments. Second, women express a lack of confidence and feelings of being an imposter as well as having to change their appearance and behaviour to fit in with their coworkers. These issues again did not disappear after academic life but tended to persist into professional careers. Finally, some women were faced with a lack of parental leave policies at their organizations.
Keywords: Women in Engineering, STEM, Social Media Mining, Text Mining, Gender Imbalance
In recent years, marketing various Science, Technology,
Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs to young women has
become important to post-secondary institutions in an attempt
to even the gender gap [
Prior work has studied gender diferences in STEM academics
and careers from various perspectives, including diferences in
biology, aptitude, attitude, motivation, interests, performance,
choice, socio-cultural factors, and opportunity [
In the context of data-intensive work on gender issues, there
is work that analyzed gender diferences in undergraduate
Engineering applicants [
To fill this gap, we contribute to the research on gender issues
in STEM by analyzing the Reddit social media platform. We
identified two Reddit discussion forums — r/womenEngineers and
r/xxSTEM — designed for women to share their experiences in
STEM academics and workforce, and to ofer advice to others
considering or newly entering the STEM workforce. Specifically, the
goal of this analysis is to identify topics that are frequently
discussed by women in STEM. To do so, we perform topic modelling
of the content of the above Reddit forums between December
2015 and February 2019, using Non-negative Matrix Factorization
(NMF) [
Our analysis leads to three main findings. First, women discuss harassment, inequality, and lack of representation. These issues were found to persist in both academic and professional environments. Second, women express a lack of confidence and feelings of being an imposter as well as having to change their appearance and behaviour to fit in with their coworkers. These issues also did not disappear after academic life but persisted into professional careers. Finally, some women were faced with a lack of parental leave policies at their organizations. Our social media analysis confirms the findings obtained by qualitative prior work and provides more specific details into the barriers faced by women in STEM.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains our dataset and method; Section 3 presents the results; Section 4 discusses our findings and compares them to prior work; and Section 5 concludes the paper with directions for future work.
Reddit is a social media platform divided into discussion forums referred to as subreddits. A subreddit contains posts that initiate a discussion, and comments on the posts. This analysis is based on Reddit data from December 2015 to February 2019, downloaded from a publicly available database stored on Google Big Query1. 1https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/
There are over one million subreddits in total. To find those which are most closely related to our study of issues experienced by women in STEM, we first identified all subreddits containing at least one of the following terms in their title: “women”, “engineer”, “STEM”, or “feminism”. We selected these words to capture elements of STEM, specifically engineering, as well as feminism. We then read a sample of recent posts in each of these subreddits to determine the topics being discussed among posts as well as common themes in the discussions. We selected two subreddits for analysis — r/womenEngineers and r/xxSTEM — that included discussions of gender issues in STEM education and workplace. Examples of subreddits that we examined but discarded are r/Feminism (containing discussions of gender issues, but not related to STEM), r/AskEngineers (containing questions about engineering education and careers, but not from a gender perspective), and r/AskWomen (containing women’s perspective on various issues, but not related to STEM).
Table 1 contains some statistics for each of the chosen
subreddits. The number of unique users is the number of users who
created at least one post or comment on the forum, whereas
onetime users are those who only created one post or comment. Over
half the users on both forums are one-time users, a trend
previously observed in social media by [
We inspected a sample of posts and comments from the two selected subreddits. We observed that a post starts a conversation and the sharing of experiences, but the comments on each post provide more insight into experiences and issues faced. Additionally, there are more comments than posts in total. As a result, we selected only the comments for further analysis. 2.2
Our method to analyze the comments made on r/womenEngineers and r/xxSTEM is summarized in Figure 1 and detailed below.
Data pre-processing: We discarded comments of the form
“[REMOVED]” and “[DELETED]”, indicating that they were
removed by Reddit moderators. For the remaining comments, we
used Ekphrasis [
Topic Modeling: Next, we run the Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm to segment the comments and identify underlying topics. NMF groups the comments into k clusters, with k being a user-specified parameter, and identifies a set of representative terms, which we refer to as topic keywords, for each cluster.
To decide on the number of clusters or topics, we experimented
with k ∈ {10, 50, 100, 200, 300, 400}, and computed the coherence
of each choice [
We plot the coherence as a function of the number of topics in r/womenEngineers and r/xxSTEM in Figure 2 and Figure 3, respectively. The y-axes of the figures start at 0.9, not 0, to emphasize the diferences in coherence. For r/womenEngineers, k = 50 has the highest coherence. For r/xxSTEM, highest coherence occured at 200 topics, but the coherence at 50 topics was nearly as high. Standard data science practice dictates an afinity for a smaller model, and to maintain consistency across subreddits, we chose k = 50 for both subreddits.
To verify the choice of k, we manually inspected the representative terms of each cluster for each tested value of k. For k < 50, NMF returned terms that suggested several topics per cluster, whereas larger values of k produced clusters of repeating topics.
Topic Analysis: In this step, we manually examined the keywords returned by NMF for each topic, and we analyzed the comments belonging to each topic. Finally, after inspecting the topic keywords and reading a sample of comments assigned to each topic, we manually extracted five frequently discussed themes that will be discussed below. models. 3 3.1
Table 2 and Table 3 show the topic keywords produced by NMF for five largest topics for the two subreddits, as well as the number of comments categorized under each of these topics. For r/womenEngineers, the terms suggest frequent discussions of classroom experiences, job interview experiences, parental leave, and pay. For r/xxSTEM, the representative terms suggest discussions of gender bias and gender gap.
We identified the following five themes that frequently occurred in the discussions on both subreddits. Notably, these five themes were present both in discussions of academic and workplace issues.
(1) Representation: discussions of the lack of representation of women. (2) Personal: an experience that was unique to the person; e.g., an encounter that was sexist or classified as harassment. (3) Confidence: imposter syndrome or other internal battles, i.e., feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt. (4) Interests: expressions of interests that have allowed women to continue or discontinue their engineering career. (5) Equality: comparisons to another gender or person. 3.2
We now discuss the above five themes in more detail, starting with r/womenEngineers. Table 4 summarizes the types of issues discussed under each theme in the context of academics and careers.
In terms of academics, we found Equality to be frequently discussed. This includes women comparing themselves to their male peers and discussing experiences in which they were treated diferently. We give an example comment below.
Equality: “I recently worked with a male project partner on an electronics project for grad school, he didn’t know how to hook up the multimeter to measure current. Was that failure of knowledge because he was male? Nope, he just didn’t have much hands-on experience with hardware. I think a lot of women growing up do really well in school (which is often theory heavy) but aren’t necessarily ofered the practical experience outside of school. Men are assumed to like tools and technology from a young age so it’s more likely their family members give them gifts that align with those things and invite them to talk about and participate in engineering related projects. So, it can seem like women aren’t as good but the actual reason isn’t gender but societal influence.”
The Personal theme was also frequent. In these comments, women were recounting experiences of harassment from their school life.
Personal: "Guy in charge of the school machine shop who sets all the equipment for his size at 6’3” where I am 5’3”: why are you on your tip toes, you cut like a girl (how does one cut like a girl on a band saw?)"
Next, the topic of Representation included comments discussing the lack of female classmates, faculty members, and role
Representation: "I went to school in a mostly male major, and I’m currently working in automotive manufacturing. It’s great having male friends, but every now and then I just want to be able to sit down and talk about nail polish colors with other girls. It’s good for your health, plus there’s a lot of conversations that are girls-only.
My company is really small, so there’s not too many women I can hang out with after work. But it makes it so much more worth while when I get that little break and I hangout with other girls!"
Confidence discussions frequented around the theme of imposter syndrome and self-doubt. Women discussed the guilt they felt for receiving scholarships and in general any form of academic success.
Confidence: "That being said, I have also sufered from “Imposter Syndrome” a lot recently, so I completely understand where you are coming from. It’s intimidating being in a field dominated by men where you basically stick out like a sore thumb. All you can do is your best and seek feedback/guidance whenever possible."
Finally, Interests included discussions about the impact of engineering on the community as well as the reasons why the individual has chosen to pursue an engineering education.
Interests: "I was pretty lucky. Several adults recognized my aptitude for engineering before I knew engineering was a thing. I was encouraged by my dad and several teachers to continue developing my skills in math and science, because I always excelled in those.
Once I realized that I could use those skills (which I also genuinely enjoyed) to help contribute to new technology, I felt it was a perfect ift. I always had a passion for learning, so I wanted to be at the vanguard, learning all the time."
At the career level, many comments referred to Personal experiences. This includes sharing experiences of sexism, harassment or other uncomfortable encounters. We show an example below.
Personal:“I know it sucks to hear, but you need to grow tougher skin and stand your ground. You need to pull that guy aside and frankly tell him that you’re not interested. If he continues to harass you, that is where you would consider going to the Title IX department. Continuous harassment being saying inappropriate things to you, gossiping about you behind your back, or sending you sexually explicit images/messages. I had to go there to file a claim against a GTA who blatantly sexually harassed me and they’re nothing but welcoming.”
For the theme of Equality, women compared themselves to their male coworkers and commented on the wage gap.
Equality: "I was in the same boat as you. I was paid way less than my male colleagues had more education - master’s degree vs colleagues having bachelor’s or some no degree. I was the only female engineer and other female engineers who started in my department were moved to non technical positions. (No idea if that is what they wanted just something I noticed) I was given the soft jobs, less technical and after over a year of asking for the more interesting technical jobs, I ended up applying to other jobs out of the company and left for job that paid me 20% more and for more Topic 47: go would make thing also say school ask difer experi lot find woman someth men class talk much could student well someon like sure back work male start think engin Topic 0: like feel general seem person thing someth respons interview scienc right black field sometim part understand life crap yeah uncomfort awkward fashion may gender expect math unfair non shadow struggl Topic 3: number year graduat school go age start semest senior program week percent kid leav hour month never back gone bachelor three worri junior money pay employe class next long Topic 2: engin degre field mechan comput studi mani life mind electr industri scienc sub probabl area graduat hey better tech male see chang thread relat societi live question lot design role Topic 33: wear shirt casual jean ofic blous dress slack black pant heel cardigan button comfort nice shoe color flat hair occasion cloth busi manufactur boot usual feminin tend fashion coupl tech Topic 46: think want need way ask also could see even someth talk difer take person someon experi find use question point start right lot guy give meet never may team happen Topic 7: women men stem gender issu confer woman bias male field tech societi support group mani secur hire career us young think lot equal gap reason problem posit cultur treat event Topic 9: week last start next project today back bridg pe hour plan review trip still weekend busi big finish coupl current alreadi excit hous glad super new fire home friday laterg Topic 42: program degre phd scienc year appli comput internship univers requir start master interest graduat cs math stem also lab student mani data undergradu languag research applic ofer cours field colleg Topic 23: school grad student high undergrad gpa appli depart physic stress math colleg univers year lot went back choic learn first late graduat still strong professor anxieti guy start top major technical and interesting work. And I’m good at it :)"
Representation again discusses the lack of female coworkers or what it feels like to be the first female employee hired at a company. One comment example is below.
Representation: "If you aren’t able to find that within your own organization, look to similar ones. At my last job I was the only woman in our entire department, and the only women more senior than myself were in HR and Marketing (not that I was that senior, it’s just that I worked at a brewery and there just aren’t a lot of women). So I attended professional events like SWE and also industry specific events, and found women who were in those higher level positions but with diferent companies. I also met women just through the vendors and contractors I worked alongside. One of the biggest mentors I had was the COO of one of our vendor companies, and I met her because she happened to come on site one day to see how our installation and testing was going."
Confidence discussions again related to the imposter syndrome and understanding one’s worth within the company.
Confidence: "The larger point to understand here is how the system being tilted in your favor doesn’t do you any favors. Now a feeling of imposter-syndrome goes from being an anxiety-inducedfabrication to justified and you can’t really tell how much of it is justified vs. emotional until you’re on the job and start accomplishing tasks. Because the tilt of the system has pulled you ahead of yourself you cannot perform. Because you cannot perform you cannot be trusted with critical tasks. Because you are not trusted with worthwhile tasks you do not improve."
In a career context, discussions of Interests included reasons why women decided on their careers, and reasons for leaving a job. Furthermore, commenters discussed the consequences associated with deciding to start a family and the potential glass ceiling issues associated with promotions and career growth.
Interests: "The worst issue was at my last job when my boss and I sat down to discuss my "5-year plan" and mentioned how I may want to get switch jobs due to the heavy travel in a few years when I meet a man and want to settle down. I told him nope that I love my job and don’t plan to leave because of the travel and possible children (which is light years away, if at all). He said well, we’ll keep it in mind that you might want to slow down." 3.3
This analysis was repeated in the same manner for the second subreddit, r/xxSTEM. Table 5 summarizes the academic and career issues discussed on this forum.
For Academic issues, many discussions were Personal. This included recounts of comparisons and assumptions made about a student based on their gender or recounts of harassment. We give an example comment below.
Personal: "Of course you got a job at [company]. You’re a girl." – classmate. "Girls get all the scholarships." - classmate "Being a woman must have helped you get the job." - my FEMALE co-op coordinator "I never hire women. All they do is get pregnant and go on maternity leave." - my sister’s boss
Discussions of Equality described how to be seen and not treated diferently from male peers. An example of this is below.
Equality: “In my high school, girls were actively discouraged/not allowed to take these classes. I wanted to take wood shop, but wasn’t allowed. I ended up doing theatre and learned to build sets instead.”
One commenter discusses her early exposure to STEM and its impact.
Equality: "I was lucky my parents did this while I was growing up. I helped my Dad with his construction projects, he helped my sibling and I with our homework (math & sci included), he took us to his work and other future engineering events, we had legos and K’nex, and his friends/coworkers were fairly diverse engineers. I was not aware that women were an oddity in STEM until late in highschool"
Representation discussions followed similar themes present in r/womenEngineers.
Representation: "Of the 104 people who are “members of the department” (PhD candidates, instructors, professors, research faculty, and post docs) only 17 are women. And 9 of those 17 are professors or instructors and thus have keys to private restrooms. It just pisses me of that I’m so non existent to the department that I have to go down 4 floors for a bathroom when my ofice and lab are up here. I’m an undergrad at an R1 school with 40,000 people." Interests focused on the dificulties starting a family in academia.
Interests: "The thing that really annoys me is that academia in general is terrible at taking care of parents, especially mothers. My graduate school didn’t have a maternity leave policy in place until two years ago. They presented that policy at the school wellness meeting and it was SO embarrassing. But even that maternity leave policy is terrible. Only 4 weeks paid leave and that’s only for the mother. Anyways this is a long way of saying I agree with you and I think the above stuf is a lot of the reason why women get lost in the academia pipeline. They are basically actively punished for wanting a family."
Confidence was commonly challenged for female students, which has led them to feelings of self-doubt.
Confidence: "How do you know you got accepted purely on merit and not because you are a woman filling their quota?" Said to me by a woman. I don’t think she knows that 3/4 of my class and every class below me has been female. We’re not filling a quota, apparently women have stronger applications on average."
At the career level, Equality and Personal issues made up most of the comments. Below is an example of a comment discussing Equality.
Equality: “Women are consistently held to an impossibly higher standard compared to men in life in general it seems. So, if your experience in life is that you have to be pretty damn near perfect, you’re not going apply to something that you know you won’t get if you don’t meet all the qualifications for. Whilst your male colleagues, who society just automatically gives more respect to, can aford to apply to things without all the qualifications.”
An example of a positive comment on equality is shown below.
Equality: "Yes it does! But not everywhere. The big tech companies are great and actively work to make women and other minority groups feel welcome. I had a similar experience to you in school, constantly feeling like an outsider. After a few years of work and picking the right companies, I’m happy to say I feel accepted as an engineer— not just a female engineer. Echoing a commenter above, don’t forget to advocate for yourself. You are your own best cheerleader and won’t be happy in any situation if you let people push you around."
Another commenter further discusses comments made to them about wage gaps and other general comparisons to their male coworkers.
Equality: " 1. "Have fun making .75 for every dollar a man makes." 2. "You’re only here to get your Mrs. degree." Which is a degree made up to imply that I’m only in college to find a husband to support me. I am currently on a web development team and my supervisor is female, but the rest of my team of 2 besides me are male. It is so important for more women to be in the engineering/computer science field. Best of luck, engineering is tough but it’s worth it!"
Personal experiences including sexism were common as well as general gender bias.
Personal: "I never reported my harassers. Other women at the company reported their harassers and those women never worked there much longer. I wish I had been brave enough to do it but I saw the pattern of report, quit or be fired and decided I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I was the only woman on the team for a long while. I left the job this past August and moved to a way less hostile environment."
Although women know there are a lack of role models in their ifelds, there are those who are determined to see this change. One comment reads:
Representation: "I came here to say this, a lot is based in gender expectations and a lack of inspirational role models, you rarely see women in these roles in the media and that needs to be challenged and improved. It’s one of the reasons that I do outreach. It annoys me but I know that by being there I am showing that women can and do have jobs like this."
A recurring theme in the discussion of Interests was again focused on maternity leave policies and how this impacts the choice of company in the future.
Interests: "The culture will vary company to company. I would recommend reaching out to mothers/women you can identify on LinkedIn or through other networking and contact them directly to ask about this info. This is the kind of thing where you really do have to talk to employees outside the interview context to understand the company culture and how that influences use of maternity leave policies."
Finally discussions of Confidence again revolve around selfdoubt.
Confidence: "We have a weekly status meeting as a team, and I always make sure to talk about 2-3 things I did. The problem is if someone else talks about something before I get a chance, there’s no need to repeat what’s already been said. I definitely have a confidence problem. I still feel really unsure of what I’m doing, which is why I usually seek confirmation from someone else. I think I’m really afraid to mess up or seem like I don’t know what I’m doing. " 4
In general, this analysis revealed negative results. One reason for the lack of positive discussions is that anonymous social media platforms often provide a way to vent, or discuss problems and invite guidance and support from those who have experienced similar situations.
Below, we reiterate our main findings, organized around our ifve themes, and compare them to those reported in prior work.
Confidence: Women shared their problems with confidence
in their academics and careers or experienced some type of
imposter syndrome and self-doubt. Past studies support this finding
and report that women start college with a lower self-confidence
[
Representation: We found that support and mentorship are
critical to combating the confidence issues women may face.
Women noted that mentorship was dificult to find in a
maledominated workforce. We found that women were frequently
asking for resources in which they can find the support that is
lacking in the workplace environment. Past studies support this
ifnding and suggest that under-representation may discourage
females to pursue or continue in STEM [
Further to this, we found that improper forms of education
counselling may prevent women from pursuing a STEM related
career. Studies show that a female student’s choice not to pursue
a career in STEM is not due to their lack of technical skills, but
rather the perception of a lack of skills by parents, counsellors and
students themselves [
Interests: In the discussions of interests, we note that women
discussed the implications of starting a family while also trying to
succeed in their career. Studies have noted similar circumstances
afecting women’s careers, such as raising children,
accommodating a spouse’s career, or caring for elderly family members
[
Other posts noted that starting a family would result in missed
opportunities and chances to be promoted. Their managers
suggested they take jobs with less responsibility and no travel, so
they can be ready for family life. This disparity was discussed by
Hewlett [
Equality: Our results indicate that some women were treated
unequally by their classmates, coworkers, faculty, and managers.
Diferences in terms of career advice, kind of work assigned,
wage, and promotion, have been noted. Past studies found
similar instances of inequality. Researchers found that male faculty
were more likely to ignore emails from prospective female
graduate students than males [
Personal: Our results indicate that women feel pressured
to change themselves to fit in with their male colleagues and
peers. This includes providing advice on clothing that would
allow women to be taken seriously, and avoiding unwelcome
harassment or interactions. Past studies support this finding
[
In our analysis of the subreddits r/womenEngineers and r/xxSTEM, we have found that there is valuable information being discussed by women at various points in their STEM careers. Beginning at an academic level and proceeding into their professional career, women have noted diferent reasons for dissatisfaction and attrition. A trend that we were not expecting to see was the many discussions of beginning a family while also being a woman in engineering. Unequal treatment from male coworkers as well as employers not having a maternity or paternity policy in place have also placed a strain on women.
These findings motivate the need for policies to efectively support working mothers and allow them to succeed in their career without dealing with a glass ceiling mentality and sacriifcing the want for a family to advance professionally. This issue combines both the lack of equality in the workforce and the lack of representation. Women are commonly faced with the decision between their career and a family and are therefore unable to move up the corporate ladder. They cannot situate themselves in a position where they are able to become mentors and role models for the upcoming generation of engineers.
It is important to continue to examine the experiences of women in engineering in a forum in which they can speak freely. In future work, we will carry out a similar text mining study on other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. Furthermore, comments on platforms such as Glassdoor or LinkedIn can provide unique insight into specific employers and industries. Finally, as we mentioned earlier, comments on social media platforms have a tendency to be negative. An interesting direction for future work is to analyze positive discussions that specifically point out programs and initiatives to improve women’s satisfaction and persistence in STEM.