Female peers in small work groups enhance women's motivation, verbal participation, and career aspirations in engineering.

ABSTRACT: For years, public discourse in science education, technology, and policy-making has focused on the "leaky pipeline" problem: the observation that fewer women than men enter science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields and more women than men leave. Less attention has focused on experimentally testing solutions to this problem. We report an experiment investigating one solution: we created "microenvironments" (small groups) in engineering with varying proportions of women to identify which environment increases motivation and participation, and whether outcomes depend on students' academic stage. Female engineering students were randomly assigned to one of three engineering groups of varying sex composition: 75% women, 50% women, or 25% women. For first-years, group composition

SUBMITTER: Dasgupta N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4413283 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature