The Mulder Effect is a concept that was coined in 2020 by an assistant professor at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Dr. Olivia Burgess, and it says, in essence, that the presentation of real-deal, hardcore scientific concepts and thinking, alongside creative, exploratory, questioning and dreaming sorts of intuitive thinking—as was often demonstrated on the science fiction TV show, The X-Files—can inspire folks who wouldn’t have otherwise been interested in scientific fields to become interested, and thus invest themselves in the pursuit of the unknown.
This term-coinage occurred in support of STEAM industries—science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics—which is an evolution of the concept of STEM, which stands for the same, but without art.
STEM has received a lot of focus and investment from university systems, but also public schools and even governments around the world, of late, because these hard sciences feed into some of the most vital (for economies, but also R&D and general knowledge about the universe purposes) fields, and countries like China have been absolutely killing it in this regard, investing heavily in STEM-oriented education.
That’s made the US (and many other Western nations) feel like they’re falling behind, in some cases wondering out loud if they’re maybe wasting time on more creative pursuits, like visual arts and music; hence, the need to come out in support of STEAM rather than just STEM.
There’s another X-Files-referencing concept that the Mulder Effect was derived from (much as STEAM was derived from STEM), this one called the Scully Effect.
In the show, Mulder was the character who “wanted to believe” in the mystical and unproven, and that led him to question, explore, and not always need hard evidence for things that he intuited.
Scully, on the other hand, took a more rigorous scientific approach to things that didn’t always make sense, or which weren’t immediately explicable, and that’s part of what made them such a compelling on-screen pair.
Scully was also, importantly (especially when the show first came out, in the early 1990s), a strong and competent woman who used science to back her arguments and to question assertions made by people who didn’t always put in the work she was willing to put in.
And especially at a moment in which the majority of competent, science-minded on-screen personalities were lab-rat men who wore white coats and had all the trappings of cartoonishly anti-social nerds, this character and her evolution throughout the course of the show’s eleven seasons and two feature films has served as a common cultural Schelling Point for many women who grew up to become scientists of various kinds.
The company behind the X-Files, 21st Century Fox, eventually decided to team up with the Geena Davis Institute (which does gender-related research) and a culture-tracking research body called J. Walter Thompson Intelligence to aggregate data about the impact the Agent Scully character might have had on STEM industries and careers.
What they found (and to flag this more concretely, these studies were funded by folks who are not unbiased in their opinions on the subject matter, which doesn’t mean the numbers are flawed, but it does mean they probably decided to look into aspects of this that they knew would be favorable to their intellectual property) is that among women who were familiar with Agent Scully, 63% of them said that character’s traits and behavior within the X-Files world increased their confidence in deciding to step into male-dominated STEM professions, and 91% said that Scully was a great role model for young women and girls.
Respondents also used a variety of positive descriptors for Scully’s character, like “smart,” “intelligent,” and “strong,” descriptors that—especially in the early 1990s—were mostly associated with male on-screen characters.
Again, the questions asked here are a little cherry-picked, but this lines up with other findings that suggest on-screen representation, and the nature of on-screen representation, can shift personal and cultural opinions, moods, and self-perceptions, as was the case with the TV show Will & Grace, which featured the first openly gay main character on a sitcom in the US.
Will & Grace has been associated with increased acceptance of homosexuality in the US due to what’s sometimes called the “contact hypothesis,” which basically says that people who have friends who are gay are more likely to support gay rights, and seeing gay characters on-screen (and portrayed as normal, likable people) can trigger the same psychological responses, as if those characters are our friends.
The idea, then, is that Scully may have played the same role for young women when she first showed up on screen, serving as a sort of smart, capable, strong role-model for people who might not have had the same—at least not as overtly and colorfully—in their real lives. And that may, in turn, have helped open up a lot of fields for women who may not have otherwise felt comfortable committing themselves to those sorts of career trajectories.