Apparently English and history majors aren’t the only students quizzed by relatives and friends about what type of work they expect to find after graduation. Undergraduate females majoring in mathematics report in a recent study that they are frequently questioned about career options in mathematics, and even worse, they aren’t sure what the options are…. Read more »
A helpful way to understand why women and minorities struggle to persist in STEM majors in college is provided by the goal congruency theory from psychology. Jessi L. Smith, Erin Cech, Anneke Metz, Meghan Huntoon, and Christina Moyer used the theory to frame their research published in the 2014 article, “Giving Back or Giving Up:… Read more »
Do women majoring in STEM disciplines in countries other than the United States encounter the same challenges to persistence that we’ve identified in our universities? A June 2014 article in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education by Garcia Villa and Gonzalez y Gonzalez suggests they do. The authors of “Women Students in Engineering… Read more »
A recently published PLoS One article on sexual harassment of trainees in scientific fieldwork is getting a lot of social media attention according to Altmetric. Clancy et al. report in “Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault” (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102172) that a majority of fieldwork participants have experienced sexual harassment, with women… Read more »
Last year, The Huffington Post started the HuffPost Girls in STEM Mentorship Program to match up more than 500 girls with mentors in science and engineering. The news publication has created the Girls in STEM webpage to chronicle the mentorship program and promote discussion on how to attract and keep girls in STEM. The webpage… Read more »
This tagline comes from the PBS website, The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers. The website would be a wonderful resource for STEM undergraduates who don’t have a good grasp of what it means to be a scientist. It also debunks the discouraging stereotype of scientists as nerdy, social misfits, who will never have interesting… Read more »
