Social belonging, connectedness, and certainty in one's abilities are particularly important to students achieving positive outcomes in their academic careers. Students’ sense of belonging can be affected by personal identities such as gender and sexuality. Members of socially stigmatized groups can experience negative perceptions of their social status in academic and professional domains leading to state of belonging uncertainty. I will present the results of a study surveying general chemistry students. The objective of this study is to gather a statistically relevant data set on whether student's gender or sexuality has an effect on their sense of belong uncertainty (i.e. their sense of social belonging) and/or ability uncertainty (i.e. sense of ability to succeed) in chemistry. We intend to look for a correlation between sense of belonging and intent to continue studying chemistry. While there are some studies that have been done on gender in STEM, there are no specific studies focusing on chemistry and almost no studies at all on LGBTQ+/gender and sexually diverse (GSD) students in chemistry or STEM as a whole.  I hope to help bridge this gap and provide insight into how LGBTQ+ students fit into chemistry programs and help develop an environment where all students feel they belong and can succeed. <br/>

Affects of gender and sexual orientation on belonging uncertainty in general chemistry

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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