Signaling Safety: Characterizing Fieldwork Experiences and Their Implications for Career Trajectories : Lived Experiences in the Field

Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.

Recent conceptual and methodological advances in behavioral safety research afford an opportunity to integrate past and recent research findings. Building on theoretical models of worker performance and work climate, this study quantitatively integrates the safety literature by meta-analytically examining person- and situation-based antecedents of safety performance behaviors and safety outcomes (i.e., accidents and injuries). As anticipated, safety knowledge and safety motivation were most strongly related to safety performance behaviors, closely followed by psychological safety climate and group safety climate. With regard to accidents and injuries, however, group safety climate had the strongest association. In addition, tests of a meta-analytic path model provided support for the theoretical model that guided this overall investigation. The implications of these findings for advancing the study and management of workplace safety are discussed.