— Pat Mitchell, media industry leader and “Out in Front” speaker at the 2017 Symposium, on twitter.com, calling attention to an article on atlantic.com titled “How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering.”
The Atlantic article cites a year-long study by Nilanjana Dasgupta that found “engineering undergraduates who are paired with a female mentor felt more motivated, more self-assured, and less anxious than those who had either no mentor or a male one. They were less likely to drop out of their courses, and keener to look for engineering jobs after they graduated.”
The article also quotes Lin Bian from the University of Illinois, who says that Dasgupta’s study reveals how “role models inoculate women against negative beliefs during critical transitions.”