Mentors as Female Role Models in STEM Disciplines and Their Benefits

Several studies have addressed the benefits of mentoring from the mentor’s perspective, especially those related to soft skills. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that either relate the mentoring in STEM areas with female role models or that analyze them from a data-mining perspective. In this work, a questionnaire was elaborated to address the mentor’s benefits related to soft skills and technical knowledge; afterward, a data-mining methodology was used to analyze the mentor’s perceptions related to female role models and STEM reinforcement. In addition, sentiment analysis was performed in order to determine the emotional polarity in the text used by the mentors to describe their mentoring experience. The results show that soft and technical skills are acquired by the mentors, and participating in mentoring programs allows them to perceive themselves as female role models. Additionally, by using decision trees, it was possible to determine the mentors’ characteristics that perceive a STEM reinforcement or that produce attraction. In addition, the results show that the general perception of the mentors’ experience was positive. Finally, the use of machine learning techniques, specifically data mining and sentiment analysis, allowed us to both confirm the results obtained in a qualitative way and to obtain new interesting results.

Having female role models correlates with PhD students’ attitudes toward their own academic success

Research indicates that increasing diversity in doctoral programs can positively affect students’ academic success. However, little research examines students’ responses to female scholars’ representation. The two studies presented here examine how students’ exposure to female academic role models shapes students’ attitudes toward their own academic success (i.e. self-efficacy). Such attitudes are critical because they predict student retention rates. In our first study, we randomly exposed 297 Ph.D. students in one academic discipline to either a gender-diverse (i.e. 30% female authors) or non-diverse syllabus in research methods (i.e. 10% female authors). We examined the effect of the intervention on students’ perceived likelihood of succeeding in the hypothetical course. Contrary to expectations derived from the literature, we found that increasing women’s representation in syllabi did not affect female students’ self-efficacy. Rather, male students expressed lower self-efficacy when evaluating the more gender-diverse syllabus. We also found that students’ attitudes toward diversity in academia predicted their reactions more strongly than did their own gender: gender-diverse syllabi reduced self-efficacy among those students unsupportive of diversity. In our second study, we analyzed non-interventional survey questions to examine the relationship between female role models and long-term academic self-efficacy. Analysis was observational and thus did not assess causality. We found that students with more role models have higher academic self-efficacy, irrespective of student and role model gender. Nonetheless, results also suggested that some students actively seek female role models: namely, female students, and particularly those valuing diversity. Our results ultimately suggest that exposure to female role models relates in surprising ways to Ph.D. students’ self-efficacy. Having more female role models correlates with greater expectations of academic success among certain groups of students, but with diminished expectations of academic success among other groups.

Traditions and Transformations

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.

Misoginia e exaltação da mulher em obras literárias clássicas da Coroa de Aragão

Resumo: O processo de valorização da condição feminina, que apresentava um progresso discreto, mas promissor na primeira metade do século XIII, retrocedeu nos séculos seguintes de modo não linear nem uniforme. Ao mesmo tempo que o chamado “amour courtois” se manifestava nos estratos superiores da sociedade e as mulheres, idealizadas, começavam a receber um tratamento menos brutal do que em outros tempos mais antigos, também se desenvolveu, a nível teórico e psicológico, uma mentalidade de desprezo e condenação da mulher. Duas obras literárias clássicas da Coroa de Aragão XV dão um exemplo muito claro dessa duplicidade contraditória. Em Lo Somni (1399), um capítulo é clara e agressivamente misógino, enquanto mulheres exemplares são celebradas e glorificadas em outro capítulo. Em Curial e Güelfa (c. 1448), o protagonismo feminino é notório, mas várias passagens são extremamente críticas em relação às mulheres, bordejando a misoginia. Palavras-chave: Condição feminina, misoginia, literatura catalã, Lo Somni, Curial e GüelfaAbstract: The process of valorization of the feminine condition, that presented a discreet and promising progress in the first half of the 13th century, regressed in the following centuries in a non-linear and uniform manner. At the same time that the so-called “amour courtois” developed in the upper strata of society and idealized women began to receive less brutal treatment than in earlier times, a mentality also developed, on a theoretical and psychological level, of contempt and condemnation of women. Two classic literary works of the Crown of Aragon give a very clear example of this contradictory duplicity. In “Lo Somni” (1399), one chapter is clearly and aggressively misogynistic, while exemplary women are celebrated and glorified in the other chapter. In “Curial e Gelfa” (c. 1448), the female role is notorious, but several passages are extremely critical of women, bordering on misogyny. Keywords: female condition, misogyny, catalan literature, The Dream, Curial and Guelfa