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posted by on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the mentors-you-can-relate-to dept.

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


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:04PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:04PM (#515117)

    This is a horribly done paper with massive failures in it's methodology.

    Worst of all offenses is that the author makes no effort to eliminate bias in the selection of mentors and educational institutions. For all we know, a single professor could single-handedly have accounted for the entire observable effect simply because the sample of professors is abysmal, or likewise the faculty culture of a single college might be to blame.

    Another thing that strikes me is that some of the questions are poorly chosen. For example, the question "How much do you identify with your peer mentor?" is a horrible choice, as female students are far more likely to identify with female mentors simply by virtue of being naturally more similar to them than their male ones. It is also in no way indicative of the factor it's meant to measure (Evaluations of mentor-mentee relationship).

    On a side note, the author does not establish a baseline with male students. No doubt various gender identarians will jump at the opportunity to claim "see girls are being driven out of STEM", even through the source data does not in any way suggest so, it is entirely possible that a similar effect might be observable among males.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:21PM (#515153)

    That's because this paper is more to advance a political ideal than to advance science.

  • (Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:05AM

    by Hawkwind (3531) on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:05AM (#515270)

    Yeah, one of the items not covered here is that no positive effect [insidehighered.com] was shown when women were mentored by men. At least from my neck of the woods where the Engineering college is top 5 in the number of women ladder rank faculty, and graduate students, it was a long haul where men open to the idea of women engineers mentored the women. Now one can look and see a positive feedback loop where I'm at (correlate current number of women to an increased number in the near future) but successful mentoring was carried out by men.

     
    I haven't felt the desire to look closely at this study but it does arch my eyebrows. Thanks for providing some observations about it.