Despite aggressive recruitment initiatives attempting to promote gender diversity in the sciences, men continue to dominate faculty representation across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs in the United States. While plenty of gender diversity proposals often focus on micro-level interventions that target internal shifts in women students' sense of belonging, worthiness, and developing their science acumen, many women in STEM are urging the field to focus and prioritize its efforts on a comprehensive and systemic overhaul. What good does it do to push women into STEM fields without accounting for and remediating the structural factors such as sexism, racism, and overall hostile work environments that drive women students away from traditional professorial careers in STEM in order to maintain their sanity and self-respect? Looking at the results of recent studies, it may not be much.

Women faculty are underrepresented across most STEM fields. When accounting for the low percentage of women of color, the statistics become even more disconcerting. Both Hispanic and Black women represent a combined 1.6% of all engineering faculty, and Asian women account for 4%. With such glaring gender and racial discrepancies across faculty positions in STEM, many have tried to investigate why — finding various barriers like familial obligation, lack of same-gender role models, and more. But it may be the overt and implicit forms of discrimination they face on the daily that has potentially long-lasting implications for gender equity across STEM.

In fact, a recent study in a special section of the new Psychology of Women Quarterly found that among 685 women undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory biology course, 60.9% had experienced gender bias and 78.1% experienced sexual harassment within the past year that decreased their STEM motivation and their desire to pursue STEM professionally. Still, some women students persisted. Researchers also found that women students who had family and peer support around their STEM ambitions were likely to see increases in STEM motivation and their desire to continue with a STEM career.

But what happens later to those women, even with their peer and family support, who do persist despite numerous encounters of bias and harassment? Is it still persistence if they graduate, but their sense of self is fragmented by the discrimination they face? For Olivia* and Whitney*, two doctors of engineering, this situation is all to familiar.

As a child, Olivia didn’t have any aspirations of becoming an engineer. “For me, I’d always seen engineering as building bridges — more stereotypical stuff. School didn’t emphasize academia or other career paths associated with the sciences,” Olivia tells Teen Vogue. That was until Olivia was selected to attend a special seminar during her junior year of high school that changed the course of her life.

Her school had arranged for three women engineers to discuss their career paths with all of the girls in advanced math and science classes. Olivia recalls fondly, “The chemical engineer got up and she had this really cool job, and I left saying, ‘This is what I want to do.’” One bachelors degree with a double major in both chemistry and chemical engineering, a competitive national fellowship, and a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from a top university later, Olivia did just that. But the road was far from easy and didn’t look or feel like what Olivia expected.

When Olivia started college, she joined a research lab under one of few women engineering professors who introduced the idea of graduate school to her — an idea that had never crossed her mind. And by her senior year, multiple people were urging her to apply. Olivia now recognizes that she ignored several red flags when making her decision to attend graduate school, but because she respected the women professors advising her and her desire to be a role model to other young women students, she applied and later enrolled in a PhD program. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with a PhD,” she says, “but because I was a high-performing female engineer, a lot of people insinuated that I needed to keep doing engineering in academia as if I could fix this problem. It’s nice that people think you can be a part of the solution, but no one considered if that was the best for what I wanted to do with my career.”