A new study led by Nilanjana Dasgupta, a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, finds that women engineering students who were assigned peer mentors who were women are significantly less likely to drop out of engineering majors than women students who had male mentors or no mentors at all.
The study involved 150 women engineering students per year for four years. The authors found that 100 percent of these students who were assigned peer mentors who were women remained in engineering majors. But 18 percent of the first-year students who had male mentors dropped out of engineering. For students who were not assigned a peer mentor, 11 percent dropped out of engineering.
The study found that in the first year of college, women’s performance in engineering and related classes was not at all correlated with retention in the major. “What was correlated with retention were their feelings of belonging and confidence,” Dr. Dasgupta says. “Women who felt that they fit into engineering and felt confident about their ability persisted in these majors.”
Professor Dasgupta is a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Yale University. She joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 2003. The study was co-authored by Tara C. Dennehy, a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.