CECS and the City Episode 1: Mentor Me.
Most
people agree that we need more women to start and stay in STEM fields,
especially engineering, computer science and maths. I definitely agree. I think
women, men, businesses and the world in general have a lot to benefit from
increased participation of women. One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about
is how many more? Is 50% realistic? Would a success story in Australia see
numbers increase by 5%? 10%?
I
don’t want to convince girls to do something they don’t want to do. But I do
want them to know more about STEM careers and feel empowered enough to take
those sorts of paths.
I’m
going to use engineering as my example here, because I have the stats and it’s
what I’ve experienced. But most of what I say applies to the physical sciences,
maths and computer science. Perhaps even especially to computer science!
ANU
engineering has just under 20% women in the undergraduate population, which is
pretty good compared to other Australian universities. In 2015, 14.4% of
Australian engineering undergraduate commencements were women [1]. So knowing
that ANU is doing a bit better than average, should we stop there? Hell no! MIT
has an undergraduate engineering population of 46% women [2], Brown has almost
40% [3], and there are many other great engineering colleges and universities
in the USA with numbers in the range of 30-45% [4]. So it’s definitely
realistic for us to bump those figures up so we can lead the Australian
statistics in the same way MIT is leading the USA’s.
So,
now that we’ve established that…what can we do?
As
we sat in the New York Academy of Science (NYAS) on the 40th floor of the World
Trade Centre overlooking the city scape, we heard about some really great
things happening in this space.
The
NYAS runs mentoring programs for high school students around the world,
scholarship programs for undergraduates, networking opportunities between women
of all ages and heaps of other things. All of their initiatives focus on the
long term. The 1000 girls, 1000 futures program is a 3-year online mentoring
program. They’re really showing what a big organisation can do with a little
funding!
Kimberley Bryant, set up Black Girls Code in the USA. It started out as a
bit of creativity for her daughter and her friends, and has now turned into a
program that transforms thousands of girls into creators of technology, not
just consumers of it. She showed us what one person can start, even when
they’re not intending to do so!
The
examples of awesome programs kept on going all day. It was pretty clear that they
all had one common element. Mentoring! It seemed to be the number one driver at
all stages. We need to provide mentors from kindergarten up until retirement
day. These can be teachers, role models,
supportive family members, older students, bosses, professionals, anyone.
Mentoring
can manifest itself in a whole variety of ways, some of which are organic and
not necessarily over the long term. Mentoring can be as small as telling your
cousin how cool it is she did well on her maths test each time you see her, or
helping a College student know what degree options are out there. At ANU, we’re working on the opposite kind of
mentoring. The kind that involves a long-term structured program with input
from a huge team of mentors.
Since
leaving New York, we have expanded our first year women in engineering and
computer science mentoring program which we are hoping to open up to all
genders next semester. We have set up programs for later year students to be
mentored by professionals from PwC and Cisco. We have more new programs in the
pipeline too, from ANU students mentoring Canberra primary school students, to
peer-to-peer mentoring between students in Cambodia and Australia. We’re
creating a network and we want as many people to get tangled up in our web as
possible!
I
encourage you to join our network, or start your own. Go find a mentor. Or,
better yet, find someone to be a mentor to.
Emily
[1]
Australian education network http://www.universityrankings.com.au/gender-balance-ratio.html
[3]
Brown University https://www.brown.edu/academics/engineering/undergraduate-study/admissions
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