Conceptualizing the Female Coping-Practices Against Gender Stigma: The Case of STEM Major in Russian Higher Education

The paper examines coping practices developed by female students in order to overcome the stigmatization of women in the IT field and reduce the psychological discomfort that arises in response to discriminatory situations that are traumatic for their identity. Stigma is defined as a configuration of attributes inherent in female students that are deeply discreditable in certain situations (Goffman 1963). In the IT institutional space with a dominant male culture, the main discrediting attribute is the gender of females.The identified coping practices is systematized for scale elaboration. A body of work focused on the study of adaptation strategies to the stress encountered in the higher education environment from one side, and gender stigmatization in a patriarchal society from the other are discussed in the theoretical framework. Mixed methods research with an exploratory sequential design (Creswell and Plano Clark 2018) is used. At the first qualitative stage, 23 semi-structured interviews were conducted with female students studying at the Faculty of Computer Science at a top-rated Moscow university, in the spring of 2023. The following practices identified on the qualitative stage - rationalization, avoidance, resistance, professionalism, apply an anti-female approach, and transferring to another program or working with a psychologist. A survey was conducted at the second stage of the research. 312 out of a total of 555 female students take part in the survey (RR=0.41). The identified coping practices were tested by factor analysis and ordered according to the level of their acceptance of the traditional social order of a patriarchal society. The supposed poles of the coping practices continuum are decomposed into 2 independent scales - the scale of acceptance and adaptation of sexist stigma (the coefficient alpha 0.864) and the scale of resistance to stigma (0.825).