DENVER ― Recruiting more women to STEM fields, and particularly to the traditionally more male-dominated fields, takes a little ingenuity. Representatives from Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in North Carolina shared their method at the League of Innovation’s annual STEM Tech conference, in Denver this week.
Women at North Carolina community colleges earned 28 percent of the associate degrees in computer and information sciences, and 10 percent of the degrees in engineering and related fields in 2011, according to the Department of Education’s IPEDS data.
At A-B Tech, women made up only 12 percent of students in information-systems security, computer engineering, computer information, electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, and networking and sustainability in the 2010-2011 academic year.
With an NSF grant of nearly $200,000, which the college received in the fall of 2012, A-B Tech was able to bring up the number of women in those seven targeted STEM programs from 39 to 75, nearly doubling their numbers. The recruiting efforts resulted in an overall enrollment increase among male and female students alike.
“I learned that women do not see themselves in STEM professions,” said Pamela Silvers, primary investigator and chair of business computer technologies. “They don’t picture themselves as being in a technology or engineering profession. So we knew that we needed to create an outreach campaign.”
The first problem, Silvers said, was one of perception. While many women were willing to go into nursing with the goal of helping others, few realized that a profession such as IT would feature the same amount, if not more, customer interaction and collaboration.
To counteract these perceptions, Silvers and her team decided to rethink their existing recruiting and marketing materials. Whereas students shown in previous marketing material were only 10 percent female, Silvers said they sought to equalize it and show more women.
