A mentoring program created by women engineering students at Georgia Institute of Technology to train and empower the next generation of girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is bearing fruit, underscoring the importance of fostering community and having role models in order to support women pursuing STEM degrees and careers.
In creating Stempower during their first year in Georgia Tech’s Grand Challenges Living Learning Community four years ago, founders Kaitlin Rizk, Brenna Fromayan, Natalie Leonard and Wendy Ng sought to build an organization that would demystify STEM and increase confidence and interest in STEM among girls ages 8 to 12 earlier in their educational development.
Stempower now has chapters at Stanford University, Purdue University, the University of Tennessee and other campuses across the United States and in Uganda and Kenya. More than 200 girls have participated in the program since 2016, and surveys administered by the founders indicate that 80 percent of the girls are now more interested in STEM and 63 percent have increased self-efficacy.
Mentoring and hands-on workshop sessions hosted bi-weekly work to overcome three primary factors the founders said push women out of STEM: a lack of self-confidence, a lack of community and a lack of role models.
“We decided to create a mentorship program that paired college-aged women with pre-teen girls because we noticed that their confidence tends to drop right before middle school,” said Fromayan, an industrial and systems engineering student and vice president and co-founder of Stempower. “We wanted to intervene before that time to try to boost their confidence and provide relatable role models for them in STEM.”
Such efforts play a role in retaining women in STEM, said Dr. JoAnn Browning, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), who reinforced the idea of exposing young girls to “strong female role models” and encouraging them to keep all of their career options open.
Stempower’s mentoring program runs for four-month intervals in the spring and fall and pairs groups of girls from Girl Scouts of America and other local schools and organizations with women mentors from a nearby college or university. Each Stempower mentoring session has a different theme and includes STEM activities and lessons on classroom confidence, such as the importance of raising their hand to ask questions, goal-setting and supporting other women.
