Cal State San Bernardino’s Women in Engineering Club will host a talk by Donna Garcia, associate professor of psychology, on Thursday, May 10, from 4-5 p.m. in the Santos Manuel Student Union, Room 215. The event is free and open to the public. Parking at CSUSB is $6.

Garcia’s talk, “Understanding the Effects of Cultural Representations on Women's Participation in STEM: An Intersectional Approach,” will explore how cultural representations of STEM are often seen as masculine and, as a result, have powerful effects on women’s participation in STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Moreover, Garcia will discuss how this affects women in various ethnic groups; little is known about how cultural variations in perceptions of gender across ethnic groups might exacerbate or mitigate the social identity effects of the male cultural representations in STEM.

“In my talk, I will present some of my collaborative published and ongoing work to understand how gender intersects with ethnicity to influence perceptions and experiences of women in STEM,” said Garcia. “I will also discuss the implications of an intersectional approach for understanding the relationship between gender and STEM participation.”

Because dominant cultural representations of gender are based on white prototypes of male and female, there are likely ethnic differences in the extent to which individuals internalize mainstream representations of gender into their self-concept. Accordingly, social identity research that focuses on predominantly white women’s experiences in STEM might provide an incomplete picture of how gendered cultural representations influence different ethnic groups of women in STEM.

“To redress this limitation, my colleagues and I take an intersectional approach to examine whether cultural representations of STEM as masculine have different implications for women whose ethic group is well-represented in STEM (European or Asian American) versus women whose ethnic group (e.g., African, Latina or Indigenous American) are underrepresented minorities in STEM,” Garcia said.

The talk is sponsored by the Women in Engineering Club, a newly registered CSUSB student club, which is an IEEE Women in Engineering Student Branch Affinity Group, also recently chartered. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) is one of the largest international professional organizations dedicated to promoting women engineers and scientists, and inspiring girls around the world to follow their academic interests in a career in engineering and science.

For more information about the Women in Engineering Club at CSUSB, contact the student chair, Arusyak Hovhannesyan, at wie.chair.csusb@gmail.com, or George M. Georgiou, the faculty adviser, at georgiou@csusb.edu.