Historical gender barriers are pain points for women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. As a result, quite a few have been discouraged from pursuing STEM careers, according to a book by Marie L. Miville, Ph.D., a leading authority on gender and racial differences in academia.

Dr. Miville's co-authors are Patricia Arredondo, an organizational consultant and academic entrepreneur; Christina M. Capodilupo, an adjunct assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Tatiana Vera, a Ph.D. student working with Miville at Teachers College, Columbia University.

In a recent review by Will Bunch, Women and The Challenge of STEM Professions: Thriving In a Chilly Climate, is described as an overview of the many hurdles that female scientists, mathematicians, and engineers face in career advancement or achieving recognition for their work.

But the book also emphasizes success stories and positive strategies despite those lingering barriers, Bunch said.

In Bunch’s interview with Miville, she said the book started with discussions she’d been having with Dr. Arredondo, a psychologist based at Arizona State University, around statistics showing that many girls who start with an interest in STEM fields eventually abandon them.

According to Bunch, the book notes that the number of U.S. women in engineering has stayed the same since the early 2000s. The rate of female deans, department heads, and faculty at universities has hovered at one-third. But at the center of the book is a focus on the experiences of 10 women in STEM.

One female professor who landed a prestigious university post wasn’t told when department meetings were held – or even given a key to its offices.

A postdoctoral researcher told the authors she felt discouraged from pursuing a career in STEM: “I would have scientific ideas, talk about them with my PI [principal investigator], get little feedback on whether or not they were good. But then I’d hear that they were using those ideas I had talked about and were being done by someone. I was like, wait a minute. I talked about that with him.”

But the postdoc also reported finding her path forward with the help of mentorship, which the book finds often was critical for those women who ultimately find satisfaction in their STEM careers.

Other best practices described in the book include strategies for more assertiveness and for overcoming the negativity of their male colleagues, whose competitiveness often has the effect of stifling female empowerment.

Miville said “there are individual success stories, laws that have been passed, and all sorts of scholarship and fellowship programs that have occurred in the last 50 years that have given a lot of individual girls and women a boost up. But sometimes girls and women still find that the glass ceiling — some of those structures — are still stubbornly there.”

Miville also said the presence of three Latina co-authors and their grounding in psychology aimed to bring some fresh perspectives to the ongoing conversation.