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A pair of researchers with the University of Massachusetts has found evidence that suggests women are more likely to continue to pursue a degree in engineering if they have a female mentor. Nilanjana Dasgupta, an instructor, and her Ph.D. student Tara Dennehy paired first-year female engineering majors with older mentors for a year and then looked at the impact mentoring had the decision to continue pursuing their degree as they moved into their second year. They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Far fewer women than men receive bachelor's degrees in the STEM fields (just 13 to 33 percent), despite women comprising approximately 56 percent of all students attending college in the United States. Dasgupta and Dennehy note that the disparity is most notable in engineering. They suggest the reason that women choose to drop out or to change majors is because many such environments are unfriendly, or even hostile to female students. Quite often, female students are made to feel as if they do not belong. They note also that some efforts have been made to make such environments friendlier, but thus far, little progress has been made. They wondered if female students in such fields might benefit from having a female mentor. To find out, they enlisted the assistance of 150 people (male and female) working as engineers to serve as mentors for 150 female engineering students during their freshman year. The students met with their mentor once a month and were interviewed by the research pair three times during their first year and then again, a year later.
The researchers found that the female students were much more likely to continue to pursue their engineering degree if they had a female mentor, but not if they had a male mentor (18 percent of them dropped out) or no mentor (11 percent dropped out). They report that all of the female students given a female mentor chose to continue with their major their second year. They also note that mentoring appeared to have a lasting impact, as most of those assigned female mentors reported plans to continue with their engineering degree into their third year.
Paper: Tara C. Dennehya and Nilanjana Dasgupta, Female peer mentors early in college increase women's positive academic experiences and retention in engineering, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1613117114
Additional coverage at UMass, TheAtlantic, insidehighed.com
(Score: 4, Interesting) by julian on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:44PM (17 children)
There's a shortage of female mentors because there's been a shortage of female students. There's been a shortage of female students because we said there's supposed to be. By said, I mean we've had this narrative marketed to us by advertisers.
WRT CS, the percentage of women started to crater in the early 80s when computers started to become household commodities. They were marketed as toys or hobby items for boys who took to them readily and were thus primed to go on to study CS at university. Before the 1980s, CS was much more of a collaborative project. Owning your own computer was out of the question, and operating and managing computers took teams of people working together. The Internet didn't exist, so research and collaboration was more likely done in person.
These things have all changed and they've changed in ways that men find more desirable--or at least tolerable. The women who enjoy CS today are, bluntly, more like men in their personalities and preferences (which is NOT to say they are unfeminine in every way).
Make CS more personal and collaborative and you'll see more women return. Female mentors, I'm sure, help too. And, crucually, market STEM toys and hobbies to girls as early as possible. It was largely an arbitrary decision to market them to boys in the first place.
(source: NPR - When Women Stopped Coding [npr.org])
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:11PM (4 children)
Only if they move to India. Thats the other thing. I talked a cousin out of getting into IT, I'm an old timer and I can make it until I retire, but that kid is never gonna make it, there's too many people and all the jobs are offshoring or outright closing or consolidating.
We don't have enough jobs for the men... adding a bunch of unemployed women isn't going to help anything.
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:26PM (3 children)
Probably true, but the point of an education is not to find employment. Whether or not there are jobs in CS after you graduate is orthogonal to moving the field forward, which is the project of academia. I'm not really concerned about the private sector side of things.
Which is why university should be free at point of use and paid for by those who do find employment. Combine that with a drastic reduction in overall throughput of students would fix the mess we're in. The daft idea that everyone has to go to college, financed through loans, is an absurd experiment that needs to end.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:33PM (1 child)
That's very utopian. Not saying I disagree. Major changes like that can't be rolled out without a full system reset first.
CS is weird because all progress in the field comes from academia but in IT the vocational entrance ticket is a CS degree and all progress in that field comes from outside academia.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:36PM
I believe there's actually been a couple states that have already made such changes or similar for publicly-funded universities, so it's hardly impossible even here.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:20AM
The powers that be sure have us believing it is!
I did this for that reason 50 years ago. Did my thing. Got experience. Learned a helluva lotta ways that do not work, even though they look right.
Got my bullshit detector working pretty good.
Now, I have the luxury of going back to school, sans the counselor or the matriculation requirements. Now, I am free to pursue what interests me. I even had one of the registration people at the college tell me I had enough hours to earn several degrees, but did not meet requirements for one. He asked me why I was wasting my time not studying a planned curriculum leading to a degree. I was not interested in being that narrow, nor did I want to do PhD dissertations. I just wanted to explore all the different sciences. I ended up taking courses in welding, auto mechanics, geology, all sorts of stuff. I was doing it for fun - because I was interested in it.
( Note, this was several years ago... I could take courses for $12 / semester hour, which was waived for low income due to layoff from aerospace industry. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:24PM (5 children)
This is the main explanation as far as I can tell. Some people just have to power thru, get into the system and then bring up the next generation. Once upon a time all academia was all men all the time. Women got in there somehow and it's going slowly, but they are making it. This is also the answer to when they talk about why there are so few female professors/doctors/whateveryourtitleis in academia. It is slowly changing. It takes time. It can't be changed over night or even a few years. The urge to rush the change will probably have bad effects - as then women that get promoted then will always have be somewhat tainted, the question will always linger - did you get promoted due to gender or competency.
In large this also has to do with attrition from studying. Some people can buckle down and slog thru even when things get hard. Some give up as soon as anything gets hard or they fail at something. I don't know if this is worse for one gender or another. But from my experience I have seen a lot of men just bite down, suck it up and get on with what needs to be done. Much more so compared to female students that seem to get utterly crushed if they fail at something -- it's like it has never happened before to them and they don't know how to deal with it. Perhaps a female mentor in those moments would have done wonders for them.
I wonder if it's the same for boys/men, are they doing better if they have a male mentor to compared to a female one? Could this be why boys are failing in school these days? To many female teachers/mentors in the early stages of development (kindergarten, daycare, pre-school, elementary ... ) and not enough male role-models. Female teachers try to turn boys into girls, because they are less trouble. Boys don't seem to respond very well to that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:39PM (4 children)
Boys are failing in part because there aren't many role models, but masculine traits have also been pathologized. Things like recess, PE and music have largely been cut and it's no wonder that boys are struggling when those were things that boys need in order to maintain focus and attention during the rest of the class.
What's more, teachers usually use methods that worked on them, or at least defer to them, and as fewer and fewer men are involved in primary and secondary education, there's more of a pro-girl bias that's been allowed to encourage.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:02PM
It is a sad state indeed when you go to any given dive-bar, and look towards the bar from behind it, and realize that you can't discern the women from the men.
Protip: Don't grow a beard unless you're an actual fucking man skilled in at least some of the manly arts. If you can't change a tire or fix anything, or aren't an actual mountain man whittling your own axe handles and eating squirrels, don't grow the beard. The bobbleheaded look is for underage girls, not manly men. To earn your beard you must be able to do more than yap incessantly and communicate entirely in terms of hashtags and movie quotes. Being a wizard-themed Renaissance enthusiast is the minimum requirement to wear the beard.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:40AM (2 children)
PE is garbage and has no place in an environment that's supposed to be educational, since there's no real education there. You can learn how to play any sport or do exercises on your own; that takes a few minutes, tops. We should focus on more important things, like mathematics and science, but we can't even get that right. Music and PE should be elective, at best. Making that kind of nonsense mandatory is what drives people away from schooling, and that usually is a good thing since schooling tends to be abysmal. The more homeschooling and self-education, the better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:02AM (1 child)
The point of PE is to get some exercise and hopefully find at least one physical exercise that you enjoy. There's ample evidence that PE helps with concentration as well as blood flow to the brain which both help with education. Not to mention that it tends to increase the growth hormones that help the brain grow.
Just because you sucked at sports, doesn't mean that the class was a waste of time. Like music it's not obvious why it's helpful, but it is an essential class for raising children that are well adjusted and able to handle rigorous study.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:31AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:21PM (1 child)
While there's certainly quite a bit of truth to what changed in CS in the 80s and how it impacted gender roles, the fact is that this study isn't dealing with a broad college freshman group and what they're deciding to major in -- it's dealing with a subset of declared majors in various engineering departments. So, regardless of whatever social pressures or ideologies go into shaping whether women want to go into CS (or various engineering disciplines), these particular women in the study had decided they were interested.
And more dropped out of those majors when they didn't have a (female) mentor. And even more dropped out when they had a male mentor. I don't know exactly what to make of all of it, but I'm not sure we can just blame the 80s for it all.
(Score: 2) by migz on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:26AM
How many of the men dropped out? Did they get mentors?
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:49AM (3 children)
Over large populations, gender preferences stand out strongly. Men have a preference for things, women have a preference for people.
The women who enjoy CS today are, bluntly, more like men in their personalities and preferences (which is NOT to say they are unfeminine in every way).
As the field took off, the numbers increased past the ready supply of women who happen to prefer (or are at least neutral to) things. (there is lots of overlap, so woman who can be happy in CS are out there, but not is as large a number) During the dot com boom, woman (and men) who were not happy in CS entered the field anyway because the pay was high and climbing quickly.
Girls and women pick other things on average when given a choice. Forcing numbers equality means forcing women into CS who don't want to be there, or who at least would be happier elsewhere - and displacing someone who does. Why is this about forcing an ideology instead of removing barriers and letting individuals follow their desires? That'll result in more women in people facing areas, and more men in thing facing areas - and that's ok.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:35AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:07PM
Maybe it's not a social stigma to be a female programmer over there? In the U.S. there's this whole "neckbeard"/"ew nerds" stereotype.
In which case it's not really academia's fault, but the fault of the population as a whole.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:27PM
At least for me, your supposition is true. My wife "thinks like a dude", as I tell her, and I really think that's one of the reasons we get along so well. She's logical, isn't prone to emotional outbursts, etc.