Friendship networks predict girls’ STEM fit and interest through subjective belonging
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Girls report lower belonging in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) than boys, which may carry costs for girls’ later STEM participation. We hypothesized that being socially included within a STEM context supports feelings of belonging—which then contributes to stronger intentions to pursue STEM, especially for girls. To investigate, we recruited girls and boys (N = 1,330; Mdn age = 12; 41% White, 35% East Asian) attending week-long Canadian STEM summer camps. We gathered precamp and postcamp STEM intentions (fit and interest), plus postcamp objective social inclusion and subjective belonging (with distinct metrics computed for female vs. male peers). Consistent with previous findings, girls had lower STEM intentions than boys. In addition, we found that, for girls, being more socially included (particularly by male peers) was associated with stronger STEM intentions, mediated by subjective belonging. For boys, social inclusion (via belonging) was less predictive of STEM intentions. These results highlight how childhood friendships may impact early intentions to pursue STEM education and careers, especially for girls.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it