Mentoring Experiences: A Comparison of Women and Men Graduate Students in Engineering and Natural Sciences

This paper uses qualitative information from two interview sources. First, 48 men and women faculty members in science and engineering at a large public university were asked retrospective questions about their experiences with mentoring during their dissertations. Second, on-going in-depth interviews and focus groups with graduate student participants in a special program provide additional information about students' experiences of mentoring. In this paper, we explore how gender and ethnicity play out in the mentoring process but also how contextual factors impact this process as well. We find that there is a wide variation in experiences, that women report less satisfaction with mentoring and men are more likely to report a relationship with their graduate advisor as more "family like". In addition, programs with high student:faculty ratios tend to be viewed by students post-hoc as less satisfactory in terms of mentoring. Overview The numbers of students pursuing graduate education at the master’s level has increased nearly four-fold since 1966. In engineering, the number climbed from 13,705 master’s degrees and 2,301 doctoral degrees awarded in 1966 to 33,872 master’s and 5,776 doctoral degrees awarded in 2004 (Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology 2006a). While temporary residents’ share of doctoral degrees in engineering has increased dramatically (in 2004 temporary residents accounted for 57% of engineering Ph.D.s), women and under-represented minorities’ (URM) share of engineering doctoral degrees also increased: women earned 17.6% while URMs earned 3.2% of engineering Ph.Ds. Data showing the increasing diversity of U.S. master’s and doctoral recipients of engineering degrees are shown in Table 1. Unlike undergraduate education, which is characterized by a fairly rigid set of prescribed classes with few opportunities available for most students to engage in independent research, graduate education is meant to provide students with an opportunity to learn first-hand about the research process via a more individualized program of study. In addition, undergraduate programs of study involve substantial credits outside their major department while at the graduate level, students spend most of their time in only one department, often working in a specific faculty member’s laboratory. The role of the faculty advisor in graduate school is more expansive: rather than merely assisting the student in maintaining her or his sequence of classes towards graduation, the graduate