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UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

How to recruit women and girls to the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classroom (Milgram 2011)

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    See findings section of this profile.

    Evidence Rating

    Not Rated

Citation

Milgram, D. (2011). How to recruit women and girls to the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classroom. Technology and Engineering Teacher, 71(3), 4-11.

Highlights

    • The study's objective was to suggest successful strategies for increasing the number of women and girls in STEM classes.
    • The author used studies of other programs and lessons learned from personal experience to inform a set of suggested strategies for improving the recruitment of women and girls into STEM classes.
    • The author suggested that women and girls benefit from seeing female role models in STEM, receiving positive encouraging messages, and being assured that women in STEM can maintain a work/life balance. The author also described specific strategies that schools and programs should implement to improve recruitment of females, including reaching out to counselors and communicating the program’s emphasis on recruiting females, personally encouraging female students, developing outreach materials that display females and that incorporate the color pink, and taking into account how females’ perceptions of and motivations toward STEM differ from those of males.

Reviewed by CLEAR

May 2016

Topic Area