{"id":4003,"date":"2015-04-06T14:09:21","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T19:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/?p=4003"},"modified":"2015-04-06T14:09:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T19:09:21","slug":"women-in-science-strength-lies-in-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/women-in-science-strength-lies-in-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in science: strength lies in numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/SMCC-english2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-110\" src=\"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/SMCC-english2.jpg\" alt=\"SMCC-english2\" width=\"255\" height=\"126\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How do you encourage women to remain active in science, technology, engineering and mathematics? One route seems to be in creating environments in which female students participate in small groups with high proportions of women, says a new study.<\/p>\n<p>In a U.S. study, 120 female undergraduate engineering students were assigned into four-person groups that varied in gender composition. The researchers found female students spoke up more often in female-majority groups than in female-minority or gender-equivalent groups.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally female students\u2019 self-reported confidence and career aspirations were also higher in gender-equivalent and female-majority groups than in female-minority groups.<\/p>\n<p>The authors finally observed that the presence of women in a group act as \u201csocial vaccines\u201d to decrease women\u2019s feelings of threat and increase their comfort speaking up.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/cgi\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.1422822112\" target=\"_blank\">Original research paper<\/a><\/span>\u00a0published in <em>PNAS\u00a0<\/em>on\u00a0<strong>April\u00a06<\/strong><span class=\"aBn\" tabindex=\"0\" data-term=\"goog_453723367\"><span class=\"aQJ\"><strong>, 2015<\/strong>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em><strong>Names and affiliations of selected\u00a0authors<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<h4>Nilanjana Dasgupta, University of Massachusetts,\u00a0Massachusetts, U.S.A.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How do you encourage women to remain active in science, technology, engineering and mathematics? One route seems to be in creating environments in which female students participate in small groups with high proportions of women, says a new study. In a U.S. study, 120 female undergraduate engineering students were assigned into four-person groups that varied [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[282,2406,1647,2405],"class_list":["post-4003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paper-of-interest","tag-education","tag-equality","tag-human-behaviour","tag-women-in-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4DqbN-12z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4003"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4005,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions\/4005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}