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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:55PM (3 children)
That's a lie. A flat-out lie.
Stop culling your applicants with irrelevancies and you'll be overwhelmed with candidates that can do the job.
In computers or electronics, unless you're doing high end, bleeding edge – and I mean really out there – chem or physics work, I doubt you are doing anything I couldn't do. But I also bet you'd find me un-hirable. I quit high school, I'm 60, I'm not particularly healthy, and I got got in trouble with the law in my late 20's, which the system never allows anyone to forgive or forget, because retribution > rehabilitation in this country. Any one of those instantly closes doors in my face, just depends on what the employer finds out first. Not one of them says I couldn't do a great job.
Every time I see the claim you just made it makes my head want to explode due to the degree of prejudicial culling that lies behind it.
Lucky for me, I have always had an entrepreneurial streak, so I didn't have to depend on HR departments. Knowing I was un-hirable provided the kick I needed to build up my own successful businesses. I never stopped applying for jobs or keeping my hand in with the job shops though; in fact, I made a hobby of it; that's why I know for certain that it isn't that no one can find technically qualified employees. Companies are not actually looking for them.
Again, your claim is purest, unmitigated nonsense. There's no shortage of skills. There's a bad attitude in tech, that's all. Yours.
Try this one day:
o Advertise the skills you need. C, Ruby, RF design, whatever, and be specific on this: Hardcore, expert-level skills.
o Offer a reasonable salary for the job. Not even extreme. Just reasonable.
o Allow for remote workers. No one smart wants to move to your overpriced enclave. Otherwise, huge salary. HUGE.
o Specifically point out there are no other qualifications for the job
...then hire a few tens of interviewers, because you're going to get drowned in contacts.
Oh, don't want to go there?
Huh. Imagine that.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:56PM (2 children)
We offer over market salary, company stock, allow remote work, some is 100% remote, full paid medical benefits. I'm big on growing from within, but we actually need experts and what we do is hard, partly because we're doing high end, bleeding edge internet infrastructure work. We have a full team of "junior" people (read mid-career) and they are fantastic, but they aren't the positions we need filled. Most of our workforce is older (I think our median age is somewhere in the mid 40s) and has worked with some of the best companies in the business. We've reached out to numerous people, some college level graduates and none have responded, even the ones claiming to be looking. We can barely find people with the minimum skills needed to do the work to bring in and interview. Our requirements aren't that crazy but the skills requested are the bare minimum needed and it's hard to find those people in the mix we need them in. I'm the one doing most of the looking in my "off" time as well, so I can promise that the requirements aren't more than the bare minimum needed for the job.
The past legal troubles suck, honestly, I agree with you on that one, I'm only aware of one prospect who failed a background check, but it was a security related job and the issue was recent. In a previous life I was a recruiter, so I know those stupid requirements you're talking about and I make it a point not to waste anyone's time. I have a short phone screen that last 15 minutes tops. So yeah, while I can see what you're saying, and I've definitely seen it, but that's not always the case. There really are jobs where skilled technical people are needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:58PM
If the market is shit, that doesn't mean much. How about some numbers, or even just what percentage of a senior manager's salary does a senior tech get?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:50AM
Take the following as seen from the chair of a 65+ year old retired electronic engineer ....
I believe the problem a lot of us are having in STEM is a lack of a *particular* skill. Most likely a technology that is less than ten years old.
I know there are a helluva lot of us older geezers out there, children of the 60's, that were brought up on vacuum tubes, relays, motors, industrial stuff, and the abundance of all these skills ( cause they have not changed much... mostly the addition of solid state components and microcontrollers ) has driven the value of this skillset way down.
I feel I can build damn near any kind of factory automation... HMI/PLC based stuff... but it takes me time to do it right, and by now, one can get general purpose off-the-shelf type stuff that can be assembled by those who only know how to use the user interface. Like the guy who uses a phone, but has no idea how to replace a cracked display.
So, the company has no need of people who may know a controller in and out, they just need one who can hook it up, and turn it on.
For $20/hour.
People like me will build anything... even doing the component design, building the SMPS - magnetics and all - to order, layout PCB, solder the whole shebang together, and program the thing to read any sensor imaginable and control any load imaginable. But it takes time to do it.
It took a lifetime to learn how to do all this.
Especially with all the thermodynamics / refrigeration / energy conversion studies I have done. All that capacity. No market.
Yet I find it too expensive to be employed given the expense I have to expend to pay others to do what I would have done had I not sold my time to someone else for substantially less than what I have to pay others.
Think I could afford to hire others to help me design and build the computer for my van? Or the geothermal ice-bank for my house? On the kind of pay business expects me to work for? I feel I am worth at least $100/hour, given my experience. They don't want that. They want a specific thing that is within my capability, but want me for $20/ hr. I cannot pay a mechanic $100/hour doing something I could have done? Makes no sense whatsoever to me to work for someone else for less than what I have to pay others to work for me.
I have retirement pay coming in now, so I am not forced to join in this race to the bottom. When I was entering the workforce, there was a real need for analog/digital engineers...with commensurate pay. Now there's so many of us its like trying to buy a light bulb at Home Depot. We come in every shape, size, and color imaginable. All cheap.
Its a mad race to the bottom out there right now. You may come in with a wealth of skills tutored to you in university and learned over a lifetime. The employer has ONE thing he wants done, the least expensive way possible. This is like trying to sell a complete mechanic's tool set to the guy who wants to borrow a screwdriver. You may think your collection of tools ( including power tools ) is worth at least a couple of thousand dollars, while the employer says "thank you", goes over to the dollar store next door, and gets the screwdriver. You spent all that money on a complete toolset for nought.
( If you are going to invest all that money in an engineering degree - a complete toolset of engineering skills - it would be best you understand entrepreneurship - as you can't count on anyone else to hire you. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]