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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: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:15PM (5 children)
Says there right in the header, username "Ethanol fueled". Not "Weak sauce fueled". Try harder.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:52PM (4 children)
charon never replies, so I'll just do it myself.
See my post is the way testosterone mentors some testosterone. If I wanted to schmooooze people with BS I'd have gone into marketing. I'd probably have kicked ass there too.
It actually paraphrases a conversation I had with a coworker. Look at the error message, dude. Header name is #include . Compile again.
That is male communication. That's just how its gonna be in the field.
Now I know from experience having been with my wife for 20+ years that when she has a computer problem (and she programs a specific type of embedded system unrelated to my work BTW) she's like "Let me get a glass of girly wine and complain about my husband's lack of lawn mowing and eat some chocolate on the couch with some ice cream while watching a romcom" Thats just how women blow off some stress after a problem. I can't even parody it right, not without chopping off my balls.
You're never going to have as close of a relationship between genders at work than across. Not while still human species. Too much human biological differences. Men and women can work together, they just can't work together like two men or two women, with the inevitable result that there will be some noise in statistical data, and surprise, there is!
If Charon is a woman that makes my post funny, the only way it could be funnier is if Charon isn't a woman. The point is it doesn't matter if Charon is a woman or not, the relevance is the communication style between men and women is wildly different and pretending there are no biological differences is going to fail.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:25PM (2 children)
"Header name is #include . Compile again."
I think SoylentNews swallowed your <>.
Tip.. type "& # 60 ;" without spaces. Wonders of HTML ! ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:46AM (1 child)
I prefer & lt ; (with spaces removed), easier to remember, shorter to type
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:41AM
Agreed. Forgot it.. ;)
(Score: 3, Funny) by charon on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:55PM