Mentoring In Stem Through A Female Identity Lens Heroes Make A Difference For Women

With the stagnant low percentages of women in STEM careers, identifying practices to satisfy the growing need for professionals in those fields is critical to improve recruitment and retention. Supportive relationships, like mentors and sponsors, have been shown to both inspire women to pursue those careers and to help them succeed in them. This book explores how developing supportive connections helps students, faculty, and teachers see STEM professions as being a place for women to grow and succeed. Early chapters provide essential mentor characteristics and explore engineering education gender inequity from a teacher's perspective of stereotypes, stereotype threat, and bias, offering culturally relevant teacher mentoring approaches to promote equitable pre-college engineering education. Middle chapters describe K-12 mentoring programs: mentorship initiatives empowering young South African Women and girls to advance to mathematical-related careers; programs, methods and activities to achieve the desired goal of making young students aspire to become scientists; and engagement year-round in grades 9-12 combined with 40 years of iterative evaluation created a finely-honed enrichment program for low-income Black women in urban public high schools. A longitudinal undergraduate mentoring program for mentoring early college students in Louisiana provides further insights in that section. The final four-chapter section describes mentoring programs for professors and teachers: reciprocal mentor relationships and role shifting within an informal peer mentoring group; differences between mentoring relationships and sponsoring relationships within academia; the impact of culturally responsive mentorship (CRM) on the development and expression of a pre-service teacher’s woman of science identity; and a program that aims to recruit and retain STEM pre-service teachers and STEM teachers of color. With several longitudinal mentoring programs, several programs for women of color, this book fills a gap to help grow the numbers of women in STEM.

With the stagnant low percentages of women in STEM careers, identifying practices to satisfy the growing need for professionals in those fields is critical to improve recruitment and retention. Supportive relationships, like mentors and sponsors, have been shown to both inspire women to pursue those careers and to help them succeed in them. This book explores how developing supportive connections helps students, faculty, and teachers see STEM professions as being a place for women to grow and succeed. Early chapters provide essential mentor characteristics and explore engineering education gender inequity from a teacher's perspective of stereotypes, stereotype threat, and bias, offering culturally relevant teacher mentoring approaches to promote equitable pre-college engineering education. Middle chapters describe K-12 mentoring programs: mentorship initiatives empowering young South African Women and girls to advance to mathematical-related careers; programs, methods and activities to achieve the desired goal of making young students aspire to become scientists; and engagement year-round in grades 9-12 combined with 40 years of iterative evaluation created a finely-honed enrichment program for low-income Black women in urban public high schools. A longitudinal undergraduate mentoring program for mentoring early college students in Louisiana provides further insights in that section. The final four-chapter section describes mentoring programs for professors and teachers: reciprocal mentor relationships and role shifting within an informal peer mentoring group; differences between mentoring relationships and sponsoring relationships within academia; the impact of culturally responsive mentorship (CRM) on the development and expression of a pre-service teacher's woman of science identity; and a program that aims to recruit and retain STEM pre-service teachers and STEM teachers of color. With several longitudinal mentoring programs, several programs for women of color, this book fills a gap to help grow the numbers of women in STEM.

Success Strategies from Women in Stem: A Portable Mentor, Second Edition, is a comprehensive and accessible manual containing career advice, mentoring support, and professional development strategies for female scientists in the STEM fields.This updated text contains new and essential chapters on leadership and negotiation, important coverage of career management, networking, social media, communication skills, and more. The work is accompanied by a companion website that contains annotated links, a list of print and electronic resources, self-directed learning objects, frequently asked questions, and more.With an increased focus on international relevance, this comprehensive text contains shared stories and vignettes that will help women pursuing or involved in STEM careers develop the necessary professional and personal skills to overcome obstacles to advancement. Preserves the style and tone of the first edition by bringing together mentors, trainees and early-career professionals in a series of conversations about important topics related to careers in STEM fields, such as leadership, time stress, negotiation, networking, social media and more Identifies strategies that can improve career success along with stories that elucidate, engage, and inspire Companion website provides authoritative information from successful women engaged in STEM careers, including annotated links to key organizations, associations, granting agencies, teaching support materials, and more

Women have made significant strides towards gender equality, particularly in education completion and labor force participation rates. Women make up about half of the total population in the United States, receive 57% of the awarded undergraduate degree as of 2010, and are evenly represented in STEM education, earning 50% of STEM bachelor degrees in 2012 (The World Bank Group, 2014; AAUW, n.d.; The National Science Foundation, 2015). Nevertheless, when it comes to translating their STEM degrees to the workforce, women remain seriously under-represented in both jobs held, and in leadership positions. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between education and work-place practices that might be pushing women out of STEM fields, and those supporting women to stay. This study is a focus on the latter, particularly looking at the role of mentoring in professional stem fields. Drawing on literature from women in leadership, gender and STEM, and mentoring in the workplace, this study specifically asks what relationship formal mentoring has to women's career trajectory in STEM fields, and more specifically, how mentoring relationships are formed, how they change over time, how mentoring impacts career development and what significance these factors have on retention of women as STEM stars.

The purpose of this project was to create and study an online mentoring community that connected fifth and sixth grade girls and female STEM mentors. The project was designed to give girls who were interested in science the chance to communicate online with women who were successful STEM professionals. The community provided the girls a venue to ask the women questions about their careers, their interests, and their science identities. Through this venue the girls were able to explore various STEM careers, be exposed to role models, and potentially increase their interest in science for the future. Mentoring has been shown to have a positive impact on girls and help improve their attitudes toward science and interests in STEM. The project examined the nature of the online mentoring process as well as the participants\U+2019\ perceptions of the opportunities and constraints of the community. The girls were members of an after-school academy and the mentoring took place through the Internet using a secure educational social networking program. The program spanned a four-week period between April and May 2013.

Gender and racial equity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a serious concern. The absence of girls, women, and people of color in STEM has a deleterious effect on the livelihood of all communities. Thus, broadening participation in STEM has become a major focus of U.S. organizational and institutional policy. Initiatives include efforts to broaden underrepresented groups' participation in academic STEM, including focused attention on recruiting and retention of women at the faculty rank. Therefore, mentoring programs have served as one way to enrich the experience of STEM faculty women in higher education. While a number of studies have articulated positive outcomes of mentoring, scant attention has been paid to the socio-cultural context of STEM. Thus, discourses surrounding mentoring programs for faculty women in STEM are replete with unchallenged assumptions about knowledge, power, and identity. This study used critical theory, an application of institutional theory, and Foucault's articulation of power to qualitatively assess the various discourses that frame the experiences of STEM faculty women who participated in an external mentor program at an R1 University in the Pacific Northwest. Ten faculty women and five department chairs (all men) were individually interviewed to gauge their experiences with the mentoring program. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodological framework, three main discourses surfaced to frame the way faculty women and male department chairs spoke of the mentoring program: Discourses of Competition, Discourses of Collaboration, and Discourses of Gender. Results indicated that these discourses may serve to propagate competition in STEM environments, reify deficit views about women's capacity in STEM, and perpetuate a formal and traditional structure of academic STEM that benefits mainly white men. Implications of this study rearticulate the necessity of viewing STEM 'participation' as a spectrum to benefit all humans.

Women, Work and Transport is an international collection that brings together researchers with global expertise in gender and transport work to provide original evidence of the experiences of women working in all transport modes across countries in the Global North and the Global South.

The essays in “The Crisis of American Democracy: Essays on a Failing Institution” seek to answer central questions about American democracy, such as: if American democracy is failing, what are the causes of this failure? What are the consequences? And what can be done to fix it? These standalone essays present diverse perspectives on some of the impediments to achieving a true democracy in the present-day United States of America, as well as prescriptions for overcoming these obstacles. Leading academics from across North America, contribute their perspectives on this timely debate.

This book introduces the concept of critical mentoring, presenting its theoretical and empirical foundations, and providing telling examples of what it looks like in practice, and what it can achieve. At this juncture when the demographics of our schools and colleges are rapidly changing, critical mentoring provides mentors with a new and essential transformational practice that challenges deficit-based notions of protégés, questions their forced adaptation to dominant ideology, counters the marginalization and minoritization of young people of color, and endows them with voice, power and choice to achieve in society while validating their culture and values.Critical mentoring places youth at the center of the process, challenging norms of adult and institutional authority and notions of saviorism to create collaborative partnerships with youth and communities that recognize there are multiple sources of expertise and knowledge. Torie Weiston-Serdan outlines the underlying foundations of critical race theory, cultural competence and intersectionality, describes how collaborative mentoring works in practice in terms of dispositions and structures, and addresses the implications of rethinking about the purposes and delivery of mentoring services, both for mentors themselves and the organizations for which they work. Each chapter ends with a set of salient questions to ask and key actions to take. These are meant to move the reader from thought to action and provide a basis for discussion.This book offers strategies that are immediately applicable and will create a process that is participatory, emancipatory and transformative.

'Topos in Utopia' examines early modern literary utopias' and intentional communities' social and cultural conception of space. Starting from Thomas More's seminal work, published in 1516, and covering a period of three centuries until the emergence of Enlightenment's euchronia, this work provides a thorough yet concise examination of the way space was imagined and utilised in the early modern visions of a better society. Dealing with an aspect usually ignored by the scholars of early modern utopianism, this book asks us to consider if utopias' imaginary lands are based not only on abstract ideas but also on concrete spaces. Shedding new light on a period where reformation zeal, humanism's optimism, colonialism's greed and a proto-scientific discourse were combined to produce a series of alternative social and political paradigms, this work transports us from the shores of America to the search for the Terra Australis Incognita and the desire to find a new and better world for us.