Broadening the Participation of Women in STEM

The result of extensive research into the reasons girls are less interested in engineering than boys, Engineer Your Life shows high school girls and adults in their lives how varied and creative engineering can be and what a different engineers make in the lives of others.

Insights from the COMPUGIRLS project have provided significant evidence that lack of motivation is a misrepresentation of our girls’ lived experience.

LAESE uses a number of Likert scale items to identify longitudinal changes in the self-efficacy of undergraduate students studying engineering. LAESE can be used with any students studying engineering. A high school instrument, based on LAESE, was developed and tested by the Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE) Project.

The link provides access to the LAESE, information about the LAESE, and reviews on this instrument.

On February 28, STELAR hosted authors of three papers featured in our recent ITEST special issue published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology (JOST).

Early experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are important for getting youth interested in STEM fields, particularly for girls. Here, we explore how an after-school robotics club can provide informal STEM experiences that inspire students to engage with STEM in the future. Human-centered robotics, with its emphasis on the social aspects of science and technology, may be especially important for bringing girls into the STEM pipeline. Using a problem-based approach, we designed two robotics challenges.

Social and economic development of a country is closely linked to the educational level of its female population. As women in the developing world are generally under-represented in science and technology, this training module aims to address the inherent gender disparities in this field, with a specific focus on Africa.  This training manual developed and distributed by UNESCO is written to teach educators about gender disparities in science.  Six units provide training, career guidance information, and activities.

This Toolkit for Gender Indicators in Engineering, Science and Technology, designed for guidance in collecting sex-disaggregated data in scientific and technological activities, aims at helping decision-makers, researchers, and practitioners understand gender issues better and formulate successful policy and programming. It intends to promote a common approach in the systematic collection of sex-disaggregated data in science and technology.