New Study: Female Peer Mentors Keep Women in Engineering

Introduction

Women hold a small share of engineering degrees in the United States, and engineering has one of the lowest proportions of women among all STEM fields (Dennehy & Dasgupta, 2017). The authors attribute this scarcity to women’s hostile engineering environments that are subtly or overtly unfriendly toward women, such as nonverbal exclusion from professional conversations, masculine-coded language, and environments that implicitly code the “ideal engineer” as male. While mentoring is commonly used to address this gap, most existing research is correlational, self-selected, or lacks a comparison group, leaving it unclear whether mentoring causes any benefit, or whether mentor gender matters. The authors’ theoretical foundation is the Stereotype Inoculation Model, which likens exposure to ingroup experts and peers to a biomedical vaccine: brief exposure during a vulnerable developmental period (like the start of college) can “inoculate” a person’s self-concept against negative stereotypes, with effects that persist beyond the exposure itself. The authors aimed to test four things: whether mentoring produces genuine causal benefits for women in engineering; whether mentor gender matters, and why; how long benefits endure after mentoring ends; and specifically whether peer mentoring could deliver these effects without burdening the small number of women faculty in engineering.

Methods

The authors conducted a randomized controlled field experiment with 150 incoming women engineering majors at a public university. Participants were randomly assigned within their engineering major to one of three conditions: a female peer mentor (n = 52), a male peer mentor (n = 51), or no mentor as a control group (n = 47). Mentors were themselves blind to the study’s hypotheses. Mentor-mentee pairs met in person roughly once a month for one full academic year, with mentors logging their interactions through online surveys. Data collection spanned four time points: a baseline assessment in early fall before mentor assignment (time 1), a midyear assessment in winter (time 2), a year-end assessment in late spring (time 3), and a follow-up assessment one year after mentoring had concluded (time 4). At each point, researchers measured belonging in engineering, self-efficacy, feelings of threat and challenge (anxiety about difficulty versus confidence in one’s skills to handle it), career aspirations, and global appraisals of the field. Objective grades and major retention data were obtained directly from the university registrar with student consent, avoiding reliance on self-report for these outcomes.

Results

Women without a mentor and those with a male mentor both showed significant declines in feelings of belonging in engineering from the start to the end of the first year. Women with female mentors, by contrast, maintained stable belonging that did not decline at all. By the end of the year, 100% of women with female mentors remained in engineering, compared to 82% with male mentors and 89% with no mentor (Dennehy & Dasgupta, 2017). Having a female mentor (compared to no mentor) protected women’s aspirations to pursue engineering careers specifically because it preserved their feelings of belonging and self-efficacy over time—both of which independently predicted stronger career intentions. Interestingly, women with male mentors actually showed the most stable GPA trajectory across two years, narrowly winning over women with female mentors on this single metric. Ultimately, shared gender identity between mentor and mentee is what drove the psychological and retention benefits observed, and grades are a poor predictor for whether a woman will stay in engineering. A brief, low-cost peer mentoring relationship during the first year of college produced effects that persisted for at least two years, covering the period of highest attrition risk from STEM majors.

Discussion

Shared identity, not mentoring itself, led to these results as mentor quality was equivalent across conditions, yet only female mentors protected belonging, self-efficacy, and career aspirations. These benefits outlasted the mentoring relationship by at least a year. The authors caution against over-extending this to suggest male mentors may matter more once women move past the vulnerable transition into college, when self-doubt about belonging is highest. Grades, notably, were a poor predictor of who stayed in engineering—subjective belonging and confidence mattered more. The authors call for future research testing whether these findings extend to other STEM fields and other underrepresented groups.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

Gender-matched peer mentoring during the first year appears to be a low-cost, scalable intervention with lasting effects—mentors here were unpaid peers, not faculty or professionals. Programs should avoid assuming any mentor is better than none: male mentors here offered no advantage over no mentor at all on belonging or retention. GPA should not be used as the primary signal of retention risk, since it was unrelated to attrition in this study. Given that benefits concentrated in year one and persisted afterward, resources may be best spent focusing mentoring efforts at the point of college transition rather than spreading them evenly across all four years.

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