Dorms dedicated exclusively to female engineers help foster a sense of community and offer support for students.STEM fields suffer from an image problem. Often seen as a boys club or a path for geeks, colleges struggle to attract and retain women in science, technology, engineering and math majors.
Only about 25 percent of STEM degree holders are women, due largely to a lack of female college students studying engineering, computer science and physical sciences such as physics and chemistry, according to reports.
"I never felt like I was at a disadvantage because there were so many men in the room, but it was definitely noticeable," says Sarah Hefter Flanigan, who earned a bachelor's and master's in aerospace engineering from Virginia Tech and Cornell University, respectively. "You had to learn to interact with people in an academic and social environment where you were outnumbered."
Flanigan's drive to achieve her childhood dream – to be an astronaut and a Hokie – helped her overcome any STEM gender gap, but being outnumbered can be daunting for some aspiring female scientists and mathematicians.
"For me, it was obviously intimidating," says Amyriz Garcia, a civil engineering student at the University of Texas—Austin. "I was in an engineering major and being around engineers is kind of intimidating – especially men."
[See which top-ranked schools grant the most STEM degrees.]
Colleges and universities are working to stymie that feeling via outreach and mentoring programs.
"We're really trying to build that community so if they are the only woman in a class or on a project team they don't feel like the only one," says Tricia Berry, director of UT—Austin's Women in Engineering program. Female students account for just 10 to 15 percent of students in certain engineering majors at the university, Berry says.
Schools such as UT—Austin and Virginia Tech use learning communities to create that sense of belonging. These programs put new students in residence halls with more experienced female engineering students who can mentor them along the way.
Women in these dorms live, study and play together – volunteering for community service and competing on intramural sports teams – giving them the support system male students have had all along, Bevlee Watford, associate dean of academic affairs at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, said at the U.S. News STEM Solutions conference last month.
[Discover the best engineering programs for undergrads.]
Roughly 1,000 of the school's 1,300 freshman engineering students last year were men. Those men can shout down the hall and easily find one or two students able to help them on a calculus problem, said Watford, who recalled feeling isolated as the only engineer on her floor when she attended Virginia Tech in the 1980s.
"No question this is in some way impacting students' ability to keep going through the engineering curriculum," said Watford, noting that the five-year graduation rate for women in these residence communities was 82 percent compared with 65 percent for all students.
Living in an all-female section of a residence hall as an undergraduate at Michigan Technological University helped Kaitlyn Bunker overlook the gender gap in her program.
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