Need a Research-Based Blueprint for Recruiting Women?

This week I came across a well-organized and user-friendly resource that includes articles on women and gender and technology education — research that can help guide your efforts to recruit and retain women in your technology classrooms.

ATE Central is a freely available online portal and collection of materials and services that highlight the work of the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects and centers. These National Science Foundation-funded initiatives work with educators from two-year colleges to develop and implement ideas for improving the skills of technicians and the educators who teach them.

I included below a few studies that were new to me and might interest you, as well.

For more resources on recruiting and retaining women in technology classes, check out IWITTS Proven Practices Collection, which includes over 100 journal articles and proven practice case studies. Learn below how with our website redesign we’ve made this collection even easier for you to use.

Resources from ATE Central

Gender Differences in the Values of Minority High School Students that Affect Engineering Discipline Choice & Recommendations for Attracting Minorities to Environmental Engineering: Nine gender separated groups each attended the hour and a half session about environmental engineering and wastewater treatment. This paper details gender differences in the questions raised by students during the introduction to wastewater treatment session and suggests different ways to interest girls and boys in engineering.

Preparing Women and Minorities for the IT Workforce: The Role of Nontraditional Educational Pathways: This study examines the role of nontraditional educational pathways in preparing women and underrepresented minorities for the information technology (IT) workforce. It was sparked by the finding that the nation’s number one producer of bachelor’s degrees in information technology and computer science (IT/CS) was not a major research university, but instead was Strayer University, a for-profit institution with many campuses in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Not only was Strayer the top producer overall, but it also produced the largest number of women and African American graduates with baccalaureates in IT/CS.

Resources from IWITTS Proven Practices Collection

Our Proven Practices Collection provides educators a research-based blueprint for recruiting and retaining women and girls in the technology classroom. You’ll find hundreds of annotated journal articles and proven practice case studies.

The Collection is now tagged with keywords and organized by topic so you can quickly find what you need. Main topics include Recruitment and Retention, with ten retention sub-topics, including Learning Style and Spatial Reasoning.

We also added five new case studies from the CalWomenTech project which provide valuable insights into what individual programs did to work towards their goals of recruiting and retaining more women.

If you have any comments or questions about our IWITTS Proven Practices Collection, please leave your thoughts here.