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: 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