Comparing the motivations of women and men physics degree recipients.

Understanding the motivations of women who major in physics has been a large effort over the past few years. Two years of the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP), 2015 and 2019, had surveys with open-ended questions soliciting the main motivation(s) for why the CUWiP attendees joined physics for their undergraduate major. The 2125 responses, all from women, were coded with self-efficacy and expectancy value theories. Recently, the same project had the opportunity to collaborate with the organizers of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) yearly graduation survey to all undergraduate physics students in the United States. These data contain 117 responses from women and 301 responses from men to the same open-ended motivation question, all of which were coded using the motivational codes developed from the CUWiP analysis. In this talk, we present the results of the motivational coding of the AIP responses, compare the motivations of men and women, and contrast results from the AIP data, which included both men and women, and the original CUWiP codes.