Reducing Gender Bias and Sexual Harassment in STEM:
A Suite of “ready to go” Course Materials for Faculty


Are you teaching undergraduate or graduate courses in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics? Are you concerned about the well-documented sexism, gender bias, and sexual harassment that continues to occur in STEM disciplines? Do you want to do something to help? This website is for you.


Research shows that in the case of gender bias and sexual harassment, remediation efforts such as workshops, sensitivity trainings, and mandatory trainings are limited in their effectiveness. An alternate way to address this issue is to educate future STEM professionals on the causes, consequences and prevention of gender bias and sexual harassment early in their training, most optimally at the undergraduate level. When one or more (or better yet many) instructors include content on understanding and reducing gender bias and sexual harassment into their existing STEM courses, good things happen. These include:


  1. It shifts education and prevention from one-off, decontextualized trainings to an important, integrated part of STEM curriculum
  2. Undergraduates learn directly from their course instructors which brings context and hands-on strategies for them to identify and respond to bias and sexual harassment during and after completion of their degree programs.

One barrier to this approach is that STEM faculty are not typically trained in the psychology of understanding and reducing gender bias and sexual harassment. This website is a resource to remove this barrier. We provide a comprehensive set of instructional materials including PowerPoint presentations, YouTube videos, active learning exercises, and test questions measuring student learning of the material. These can be adapted to present in small chunks in existing class sessions, or may be assigned to students as part of a flipped classroom. They are adaptable for in-person or online courses.


The materials were developed by Dr. Matthew Paolucci Callahan, Professor of Psychology, and Dr. Lynn Cominsky, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Sonoma State University. Development of the materials was supported by grant 2024204 from the National Science Foundation.