ABSTRACT Gender inequities in access and promotions in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and careers pose challenges for women to persist and excel in the field. However, limited scholarship examines how women's STEM pathways are shaped by informal and formal STEM education in the K–12 period. Drawing upon focus group interviews featuring 42 women who have engaged in extracurricular STEM activities, this paper examines how STEM boundaries are shaped in school and after‐school STEM education and how women interact with gendered STEM boundaries by conforming, resisting, and seeking changes to them. Our study reveals that STEM acts as a gendered boundary object, where formal and informal boundaries systematically exclude women by creating barriers to their entry, persistence, and equitable benefit‐sharing in the STEM field. Women's narratives highlight the dynamic, evolving nature of their interactions with these boundaries, influenced by gendered knowledge and multiple agents including mentors, teachers, and peers. Drawing upon feminist institutionalism and sociological boundary theories while focusing on K–12 educational institutions, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that reinterprets STEM as a gendered boundary object and demonstrates how its boundaries are actively constructed and policed through everyday interactions. In doing so, we invite future scholarship to interrogate and reimagine the structural and cultural boundaries of STEM in order to foster greater inclusion and equity for women.
Haque et al. (2026) studied this question.