We’re now in the final stage of this project. I’ve concluded archival research, I’m getting final feedback on my main essays and writing a short conclusion, and I’m making plans for how to share the finished version of the website. First up: you’re invited to join us in the Bethel Library on Tuesday, October 7 (1:20pm) for a “Prime Time” talk introducing the project and some of its key themes.
Finishing a project that had a fixed duration necessarily means realizing which aspects of the women’s history of Bethel have slipped through the cracks. Indeed, the main goal of my short conclusion will be to suggest topics that I didn’t address adequately, but could be the subject of follow-up projects by other researchers — including our students!
But as a last substantive post at this research blog, I thought I’d say a bit about a topic that is important, even though I couldn’t quite find a place for it in the final set of essays: the growing role of women in STEM fields at Bethel.
As I noted in an early blog post on “Bethel’s Most Gendered Majors,” programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have a mixed record of enrolling women students. In the College’s first year in Arden Hills, the 1972-73 yearbook listed zero women graduating with degrees in biology and math-physics, but a majority (60%) of those studying psychology. By the publication of Bethel’s last yearbook in 1989, the women’s share of psychology grads was largely unchanged, while biology grads were up over 40%. But the still-new computer science program had relatively few women (18%).
As we get closer to the present, we have more reliable data on such graduation outcomes: those reported by Bethel to the U.S. Department of Education. Here’s what that department’s IPEDS database reports about women’s shares of Bethel bachelor’s degrees in four STEM fields over the past twenty years:
As you’d expect, the numbers jump around year by year. But the trend lines match what I would have expected: biology has joined psychology as a consistently majority-female program, as has their shared program in neuroscience, whose Class of 2023 was four-fifths women; despite occasional gains, women are still distinct minorities in CS and physics, plus our newer engineering programs, where women made up 18% of grads in 2022-23. That mirrors national trends, where women earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology, but only 20-25% of those awarded in computer science, engineering, and physics.
One factor that’s no doubt helped to drive women’s enrollment in STEM fields is the hiring of more women to teach in those programs, with all of Bethel’s STEM departments consciously seeking to diversify their faculties in the past 20-30 years. “I would like to think that if they see examples of women faculty that that might encourage them to enroll as a biology major,” that department’s chair, Amy Dykstra, told us during our 2024 oral history project. (“I didn’t have any female biology teachers when I was in college that I remember,” she added. “I just never let it stop me. I just always felt like I could compete with the men.”) This year women dominate the rosters of full-time professors in the departments of Biological Sciences (8 of 10) and Psychological Sciences (6 of 7), and Chemistry and Physics & Engineering each have multiple women on their faculties.
The Math and Computer Science department is currently back to having an all-male faculty, but Alyssa Hamre Kontak remembered being “adopted” by that department’s Patrice Conrath, Becky Seaberg, and Deborah Thomas when she became the first woman to teach physics in 2012. Kontak told us that she advises Bethel’s Women in Physics & Engineering club in order “to make sure that all of the women in our department feel welcome and feel like they’re connected, especially for the women who are in classes that have a smaller number of women.” But she also emphasized the support she has always received from her male colleagues. Similarly, 2024 graduate Naomi Henderson noted in an email interview with me that while “it was rare to have a female professor” on the math side of her combined secondary education degree in that field and music, she “never felt less than because I was a woman. Consistently, math professors responded to us as students, with not much varying between genders.”
An older science/music double-major echoed Henderson’s sentiments in a similar email conversation I conducted earlier this year. Initially attracted to chemistry but also drawn to the mathematics in physics (“It’s amazing that God governs the universe with the incredible regularity and beauty of mathematics”), Deb Haarsma ’91 told me that taking a class with physicist Dick Peterson “sealed the deal” for physics. (She stayed an extra year to complete a second major in piano performance.) Haarsma remembered there being only four physics majors in her year — herself, her friend Melissa Terpstra, and two men — and three male professors who “encouraged me at every stage and were great mentors.” As she went on to graduate school in astrophysics, taught at Calvin College and served for eleven years as president of BioLogos, a leading faith and science group, Haarsma was sometimes “one of only a few women in the room…. Yet in those roles, my experiences were nearly all good. I felt respected and valued by my male peers and affirmed in leadership positions. (I do know, however, that these fields are not perfect and that some women have much worse experiences.)”
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Today I’d especially be glad to read some reminiscences and reflections from women who studied or taught STEM fields. Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 