2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Keywords: Undergraduate, Gender, Engineering. Since the early 1980s, women slightly outpace men in earning bachelor’s degrees in the United States. Today, women earn roughly 57% of BS degrees[1]. However, women remain severely underrepresented in the STEM fields. The National Center for Education Statistics noted that 437,302 STEM BS degrees were conferred in the U.S. in 2020-21 with women accounting for 38% of those degree earners[2]. The representation of women across the STEM disciplines varies greatly. In engineering fields specifically, only 12% of the AA degrees and 24% of the BS degrees went to women in 2020-21[3]. This is important for two reasons: the growth of STEM jobs is expected to outpace non-STEM jobs and STEM occupations continue to rank higher on the pay scale as compared to non-STEM[4]. Same article shows that women in STEM jobs tend to earn less than men, and this gap is wider than in the broader labor market.
To address this disparity, colleges and universities must lend an eye to the recruitment and retention of women in STEM majors. Mentoring has been shown to be beneficial to undergraduate students. The National Academy of Sciences released a report in 2019 describing the science behind mentoring programs[5]. They found that students with a mentor are more likely to succeed in their major. The study also showed that women who were paired with other women mentors had a higher chance of a positive experience in the workplace due to the shared relational struggles faced. Additionally, Wu et al. examined the impact of mentoring on entering female undergraduate students who were interested in engineering[6]. They randomly assigned these students with either a female peer mentor, a male peer mentor, or no mentor. Over the course of their collegiate experience through college graduation and one year post-graduation, Wu et al. found that pairing the entering female students with female mentors was associated with a significant improvement in participants’ psychological experiences in engineering, aspirations to pursue post graduate engineering degrees, and emotional well-being. They also found that these mentees found success in securing engineering internships and increased retention in STEM majors through college graduation. Similarly, Zurn-Birkhimer and Serrano showed that first-year women who participated in a Women in Engineering mentoring program earned their BS degrees at higher rates than those women who chose not to participate and at higher rates than their men peers[7].
Mentoring has been long shown to be beneficial to both students and the organizations providing such programs, as it is an important method to increase retention. This presentation will discuss undergraduate mentoring programs for women in STEM at two distinct institutions: a large land-grant R1 institution and a private medium-sized research institution. Topics that will be discussed include mentoring program structure, participant and programmatic assessment, intentional planning of programmatic topics, implementation of strategic community building activities, and development of a research plan.

References:
(1) Fry, R. (2019, June 20). U.S. women near milestones in the college-educated Labor Force. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/20/u-s-women-near-milestone-in-the-college-educated-labor-force/.
(2) The NCES Fast Facts Tool provides quick answers to many education questions (National Center for Education Statistics). National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.). https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=899.
(3) Coe - Undergraduate degree fields. (n.d.). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta.
(4) Fry, R. (2021, April 1). Stem jobs see uneven progress in increasing gender, racial and ethnic diversity. Pew Research Center Science & Society. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/04/01/stem-jobs-see-uneven-progress-in-increasing-gender-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/.
(5) National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25568.
(6) Wu, D.J., Thiem, K.C. & Dasgupta, N. Female peer mentors early in college have lasting positive impacts on female engineering students that persist beyond graduation. Nat Commun 13, 6837 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34508-x
(7) Zurn-Birkhimer, S., & Serrano, M. (2022, August), Longitudinal Analysis of First-Year Engineering Students' Active Participation in Women in Engineering Program Activities and the Relationship to Engineering Persistence Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. https://peer.asee.org/41485