Female mentors, role models would help attract women to STEM fields

In order to attract more women to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, there need to be more female role models and mentors in those fields, suggests Elena Di Martino, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Calgary. The lack of female role models in STEM fields was recently explored in a blog post by 3 Canadian statisticians who looked at the number of female engineering professors at the top 20 Canadian universities (by size of engineering departments). They found that only 2 universities—uOttawa and uVictoria—had more than 25% of professors who identified as female. uAlberta was at the lower end of the scale, with just under 10% of professors teaching engineering identifying as female. A recent US study found gender bias in hiring led to fewer women employed in STEM fields. StarPhoenix