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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: 2) by Spamalope on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:49AM (3 children)

    by Spamalope (5233) on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:49AM (#515287) Homepage

    Over large populations, gender preferences stand out strongly. Men have a preference for things, women have a preference for people.

    The women who enjoy CS today are, bluntly, more like men in their personalities and preferences (which is NOT to say they are unfeminine in every way).

    As the field took off, the numbers increased past the ready supply of women who happen to prefer (or are at least neutral to) things. (there is lots of overlap, so woman who can be happy in CS are out there, but not is as large a number) During the dot com boom, woman (and men) who were not happy in CS entered the field anyway because the pay was high and climbing quickly.

    Girls and women pick other things on average when given a choice. Forcing numbers equality means forcing women into CS who don't want to be there, or who at least would be happier elsewhere - and displacing someone who does. Why is this about forcing an ideology instead of removing barriers and letting individuals follow their desires? That'll result in more women in people facing areas, and more men in thing facing areas - and that's ok.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:35AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:35AM (#515369) Journal
    I'm tired of this nonsense being repeated. If computing is an inherently male pursuit, why do Romania, Iran, Israel, Korea, and India have far more even gender distributions for the subject than the UK and US?
    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:07PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:07PM (#515490)

      Maybe it's not a social stigma to be a female programmer over there? In the U.S. there's this whole "neckbeard"/"ew nerds" stereotype.

      In which case it's not really academia's fault, but the fault of the population as a whole.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:27PM

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:27PM (#515407)

    The women who enjoy CS today are, bluntly, more like men in their personalities and preferences ...

    At least for me, your supposition is true. My wife "thinks like a dude", as I tell her, and I really think that's one of the reasons we get along so well. She's logical, isn't prone to emotional outbursts, etc.