Abstract:

Even though for some women in Turkey can rarely find the opportunities to study at the university, most of whom have canalized to the majors which are not related to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors. However, there are important studies, which clearly show that even though the women have the ability in STEM areas, they do not like to choose these fields. In their choices, there are different reasons which strong have effected in their career path.

In order to understand the Turkish women’s hidden reasons of not choosing the STEM areas, a well rounded research had conducted in Istanbul, the most developed city in Turkey, in which two different universities STEM departments had chosen together with non STEP departments in order to compare the reasons.Firstly,by using Strategic Talent Management and Career Decision (STMCD) Assessment (Sart, 2013),the competences, potential, strengths, and weaknesses of the young people (490) between 18 and 24 had checked and analysed The results showed that there were not any significant differences between the male and female students in the competences, potential,strengths,and weaknesses.Most (96%) had mentioned that they had chosen their career path with the effects of their social environments.

In order to analyze the main reasons of the career choices, deep interviews were done with the young people who were coming from the STEM departments, so were not the STEM departments. The study sample consisted of 80 undergraduate students: Among them, 54% are female. In the study, a phenomenological analysis was conducted and 16 research questions were taken into consideration during the semi-structured interviews. Then the data were overviewed critically by using Atlas.ti 7 to elaborate deeply the main reasons of the career choices in STEM and non-STEM areas.

The results of the depth analysis showed that most of the participants (88%)accepted that they were significantly affected by their social environment, particularly those who were not chosen the majors in STEM areas.Those (43%) who were studying in STEM majors, however, pointed out that before choosing the STEM areas,they felt alone and scared. More importantly, some (25%) of the participants had mentioned also their professors’ negative attitudes and behaviors towards the female students in STEM areas. Those, who were successful, on the other hand,had also mentioned the negative attitudes of their male classmates in the departments where almost 20% of the female students had left the departments.The results of the participants who were not coming from STEM areas were analyzed and showed that STEM areas were launched them negatively by their families, their teacher at the high schools, and their counselors. The first argument mentioned was that STEM areas were for male students since the women were not capable to work hard in these departments. Most (89%) of them strongly clarified that they became aware after they came to the university where they did not see any difficulty in studying STEM areas. The participants had mentioned that those graduates from STEM department had much better chances than those who were not coming from STEM areas to find better jobs and to have career path. According to the most (93%) of the participants, the awareness about the importance of the STEM departments were significantly low in Turkey so that a new strategy was needed to promote the STEM areas in order to increase innovation.

Keywords:

Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics (STEM), Gender Differences in STEM areas, Gender based Careers Differences in STEM areas, Career Counselling.