Development of a Mentoring Program for Women in Engineering Undergraduate Programs

Women are underrepresented in math-intensive STEM fields globally. In the Faculty of Engineering at Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, there is a gender gap in some programs that has increased with time. We have implemented a peer mentoring program for first-year engineering students to foster a sense of belonging and promote leadership skills in women students. This program results from the good practices promoted by the W-STEM project to achieve gender equality in STEM. The mentors are students enrolled in the fourth semester or above. Two leader mentors and two professor advisors train the mentors and develop support activities and events on special dates. Mentors and mentees completed questionnaires at the beginning and end of each mentoring cycle to give feedback. So far, the program has received positive evaluations from the students. The students consider it important to guide and support women in their transition to university. We used text mining on the students’ responses for sentiment analysis and found that the mentees predominantly experienced positive emotions such as trust, joy, and anticipation. Regarding the mentors, trust, anticipation, and fear were the prevailing emotions. The questionnaire results provided interesting suggestions for improving the effectiveness and impact of the program.