SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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) 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]