2008 Woodie Awards
Girl Power meets GIS in Mesa pilot project
Andrea Kerry
Issue date: 5/29/07 Section: News
Mesa College will be starting a new project aimed at increasing participation by female students in technology classes and facilitate their transition into technology careers.
The 5-year program, known as CalWomenTech, will be funded by a $2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the training for Mesa faculty and staff on how to implement the program will be provided by the Institute for Women in Trades, Technology and Science (IWITTS).
That women are underrepresented in the areas of math, science and engineering courses at colleges and universities has been a cause of much concern, debate and controversy in recent years.
In order to shed some light on the state of gender equity in technology at Mesa College, a study was conducted to evaluate the level of female participation and performance in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) classes.
"Our data clearly showed us that within the GIS classes, male students were more successful in terms of going through the class - that's the retention-whereas a high percentage of women students dropped out in the middle of the class. In terms of the grade distribution, a bigger percentage of the male students did better in their academic performance than the women," according to Dean Otto Lee, of the School of Business, Computer Studies and Technology.
CalTechWomen is a project designed to address such gender inequities. It is administered by IWITTS, which provides expertise in recruiting and retaining female technology students.
Mesa College applied to partner with IWITTS on the project after "they issued a request for proposals from any community college that would be interested in taking advantage of their services. We were just one of 4 community colleges that were selected for them to work with." Lee said.
The CalTechWomen pilot project at Mesa will focus exclusively on GIS. Geographical Information Systems is software that displays a map of any type of database information which has a geographical element by relating the data to its physical location anywhere on Earth.
The 5-year program, known as CalWomenTech, will be funded by a $2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the training for Mesa faculty and staff on how to implement the program will be provided by the Institute for Women in Trades, Technology and Science (IWITTS).
That women are underrepresented in the areas of math, science and engineering courses at colleges and universities has been a cause of much concern, debate and controversy in recent years.
In order to shed some light on the state of gender equity in technology at Mesa College, a study was conducted to evaluate the level of female participation and performance in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) classes.
"Our data clearly showed us that within the GIS classes, male students were more successful in terms of going through the class - that's the retention-whereas a high percentage of women students dropped out in the middle of the class. In terms of the grade distribution, a bigger percentage of the male students did better in their academic performance than the women," according to Dean Otto Lee, of the School of Business, Computer Studies and Technology.
CalTechWomen is a project designed to address such gender inequities. It is administered by IWITTS, which provides expertise in recruiting and retaining female technology students.
Mesa College applied to partner with IWITTS on the project after "they issued a request for proposals from any community college that would be interested in taking advantage of their services. We were just one of 4 community colleges that were selected for them to work with." Lee said.
The CalTechWomen pilot project at Mesa will focus exclusively on GIS. Geographical Information Systems is software that displays a map of any type of database information which has a geographical element by relating the data to its physical location anywhere on Earth.
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