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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @06:50AM
Exactly what I was thinking.
Norway is generally considered one of if not the single most 'gender equal' society there is. And something they discovered is that they were able to shift gender standards by putting enormous resources and effort into pushing women in a direction they were not otherwise going. That push was successful. However, the second that they stopped putting that pressure on women everything went back to "normal." The moral is of course you can handhold people through any process. But the moment the handholding stops, people are going to continue with what is the path of least resistance for their own personal goals, views, and capabilities. I'd be quite interested in seeing the longterm work results of Norway's program - though I'm unsure if that's been published. In particular do women who earned a degree in e.g. chemical engineering go onto become engineers or trend back towards teaching and other more social careers?
As a young man trying to encourage my wife who I met in college to do better for herself, I pushed her towards computer science. We both ended up graduating with degrees in CS and from a top 10 university. Now more than a decade later I'm a software engineer working on a startup, and she's a grade school teacher turned grade school director.