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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:31AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:31AM (#515264)

    How many of these shit articles is Soylent obligated to post in a week?
    It's lazy clickbait. So, you say, just don't read them. The problem is that these sorts of articles become *addictive* to the story submitters and pretty soon that's all the site posts. Don't believe me? Look at the vast majority of the web. Don't do it, Soylent!

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:53PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:53PM (#515663) Journal

    I submitted this story. I submit a lot of stories as my way of trying to help the community. The same day I submitted this story, I also submitted:

    Nissan Leaf EV Enters 10,000-Mile Mongol Rally
    Study by MIT Economist: U.S. has Regressed to a Third-World Nation for Most of its Citizens
    Elon Musk Says New Tesla Autopilot is 'Smooth As Silk'
    The Truth About Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: He Wasn’t Very Good at His Job
    Twitter Co-founder: I’m Sorry if We Made Trump’s Presidency Possible
    Japan's Fertility Crisis is Creating Economic and Social Woes Never Seen Before
    Speeding Up Quality Control for Biologics
    IBM Man Goes Deep On Why They're All Shiny OpenCAPI People

    It was a rather slow day for purely sci/tech articles, which I prefer to political- or any other kind of story. But the queue was low and these didn't seem terribly off-mission. I had no expectation of how much discussion this story would generate; sometimes I form a notion of how much interest a particular story will generate, but I'm as wrong as often as I'm right. This story seemed like a reasonable one in the Career/Education category. That's all.

    Soylent doesn't need to generate page views or pump up advertising because it's a community-run site. There is no profit motive, there is no ulterior motive.

    If you have other stories you think the community is missing and might like to discuss, please submit them.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.