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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, @07:58PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:58PM (#515667)

    Oh please, you weren't reading my posts even before that. You're just upset because I called you out. It's the same bullshit that feminists have been spewing for years to rationalize why they aren't responsible for anything.

    Half of your post was in response to things that weren't said.

  • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday May 26 2017, @02:47AM (1 child)

    by charon (5660) on Friday May 26 2017, @02:47AM (#515801) Journal

    Sorry you think I wasn't paying attention. In the context of this thread, I think it was quite clear that I'm not talking about the great majority of men who are perfectly capable of platonic relationships with women without score-keeping or expectations. I was talking about the men EF brought up who buzz like flies around women (my god, even the ugly ones?) solely because they have vaginas. The kind of guy who helps a girl not because he wants to help another person out, but because maybe it will get him laid. So if you think I'm not talking about you because you are very egalitarian and free thinking and post feminist (because who needs feminism anymore, it's already gone far enough), good. You can not respond to me anymore because you're not part of the problem anymore. Bravo, #notallmen.

    Just one last note: the ad hominems you used were all female related. I thought it was pretty funny that your best insults all implied that existing as a female is a negative state.

    Cheers, from your friendly neighborhood ungrateful cow.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @02:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @02:59AM (#515805)

      No worries, I'm just rather used to women that think it's OK to waste men's time without giving anything of any sorts. Obviously, this kind of thing doesn't obligate sex as payment, that would be fucked up. But, there's a general lack of awareness in women that men haven't got unlimited time and money. Saying no is hardly a problem as long as you're generally down to earth and reasonable.