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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 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]