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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: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:02PM (5 children)
You guys are reading it all wrong.
All it means is Stockholm Syndrome is stronger when the victims share an identity.
Lets be victims together is always going to sell better than let me be a martyr by myself.
Something fairly obvious is you assign mixed couples in a corporate environment and HR is going to be shitting itself over sexual harassment terror. Its kind of like the Salem witch trials where once the fear kicks in, the situation goes nuts regardless of reality. So pair me up with a straight dude and little brother and I will get along great, most likely, and I can help him out, pair me up with some college girl and HR is going to be so far up my ass in terror of how much I'm gonna molest her on company time, that they'll see out my nostrils, so I'm going to have as little to do with her as possible. Its not a huge effect but then again the difference in percentage isn't that much, so its quite believable. With little brother I don't have to scream and run out of the room if someone slams the conference door shut to tease me, or we can call each other on the phone or go out for lunch to talk engineering and not be all awkward. I don't need to use my states rather relaxed recording devices laws to record every meeting to prove I wasn't hitting on her. I probably need video to prove I'm not grabbing anything. A lot of money gets made by girls off this sort of stuff and I want no part of it.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:12AM (4 children)
This is what is awesome about San Diego, you don't need to worry about shit like that. Women, when leaning in close to see what you are doing, press their boob against you and make dirty jokes by the water-cooler as the men do. Ex-military lesbos are bro-tier to work with and flirting in the hallways is commonplace. Many women, straight and gay, are technical leads and that includes software/firmware and engineering.
All that bullshit narrative ZuckerJew and his ilk are trying to push flies right out the window once you see what the real world is like.
It's a damn shame that everybody thinks that the tech industry is like San Francisco or New York City -- though you're never gonna see the kind of bullshit anti free-speech protests here as you see in cities like Berkeley and Chicongo. The cops would herd those fuckers into an area the size of a UFC cage and beat the shit out of any who get out of line, and that's not including our many libertarians and conservatives, many with military training, who would be more than happy to stomp Commie scum while the cops look the other way.
(Score: 1) by charon on Thursday May 25 2017, @01:47AM (2 children)
Your office sounds fabulous and I would love for the whole world to be like that. But let's not fool ourselves that it is, or that there are not bad actors both female and male. Let's also note that the reasons you cite are that the women are "bro-tier" and they don't mind swinging their boobs into your arm. Paradise for a man. In a parallel universe, you work in a woman dominated office and spend your day chatting about Twilight and complimenting your co-workers' shoes. All the women think you're great because you're "sis-tier."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:56AM
"sis-tier"
I can't recall ever seeing this phrase used despite seeing "bro-tier" loads of times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @03:57AM
It is not a parallel universe. It is just a reality. The problem is that feminists are very good at ignoring any data that doesn't fit their ideology. A very large reason behind HC's loss is because that data is real and it can vote.
All this research shows is that for all the wailing about patriarchy, women are the real origin and the drivers of everyday sexism. This is just one more research that actually says that gender segregation is in benefit of women, for all the marketing about 'how women perform poorly under male leadership, most probably because "men are assholes"' (your words). Once someone removes their hatred for men out of the equation and look at it from an objective point of view, the research just continues to demonstrate that the so-called patriarchy is older richer men creating pro-women rules while women demand more and more rights in a group. It has got nothing to do with removing sexism and bringing equality. What we are seeing is how biological it is to see a prostitute and her agent fighting over power while a poor man pays for the "privilege" of sex.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 26 2017, @02:28PM
The only problem I have with your anecdote is it fits two wildly different stories
1) "women... boobs are great... blah blah" and that's why its a great place to work
2) "women... boobs are great... blah blah" and it WAS a great place to work until they hired some crazy chick no one got along with, so on her way out for incompetence, she burned her bridges by burning the whole place down in a multimillion dollar sexual harassment lawsuit and getting every male fired. It don't matter if everyone enjoyed the way things were before the invasion. It's kinda like (il)legal immigration that way.
Both stories start the same way, and they are genuinely fun places to work for everyone involved but the latter story conclusion is no fun at all for anyone involved.