Online Mentors to Guide Women Into the Sciences
在线导师指导女生进入科技领域

Hundreds of prominent women working in science, technology, engineering and math will become online mentors for college students next month, part of a six-week program to encourage young women to pursue careers in STEM fields.

供职于科学、技术、工程和数学（简称STEM）领域的数百位杰出女性将在10月份成为大学生的在线导师，这个为期六周的项目将鼓励年轻女性进入STEM领域工作。

“I think of this as a MOOC — a massive open online course — and a big mentor-fest,” said Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College and a sponsor of the project. “Getting more women into STEM is my passion in life, and every institution that’s set up mentorship programs for young women has been successful at increasing their numbers, so I think this can make a real difference.”

哈维姆德学院(Harvey Mudd College)院长玛丽亚·克拉韦(Maria Klawe)是这个项目的发起人，她表示，“我把这个项目看作大规模网络开放课程(MOOC)和盛大的导师聚会。让更多女生进入理工科领域，是我毕生热衷的事业，每所为女生设立导师制度的大学都成功地增加了女生的人数，因此我认为这个项目可以发挥真正的作用。”

The program has no curriculum, no exam, no grades and no credit — just a goal of connecting young students with accomplished women working in STEM fields. Prominent universities — including the California Institute of Technology, Cornell, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley — have been quick to sign on, contributing mentors and publicizing the program to students.

这个项目没有课程、没有考试、没有成绩和学分——旨在让大学生和就职于理工科领域的卓越女性建立联系。多所知名大学——包括加州理工学院(California Institute of Technology)、康奈尔大学(Cornell)、佐治亚理工学院(Georgia Institute of Technology)、哈佛大学(Harvard University)、麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)、普林斯顿大学(Princeton University)、斯坦福大学(Stanford University)和加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)——都立即对此表示支持，提供导师的人选，向学生宣传这个项目。

“I thought this was a great idea as soon as I heard about it,” said Dennis Berkey, the president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Young women in STEM, more than young men, have a lot of questions about what kind of career they’ll have, whether the rewards are based on performance or the old boys’ network, whether it’ll let them make a positive impact on the world, and how it will relate to their aspirations for family.”

伍斯特理工学院(Worcester Polytechnic Institute)院长丹尼斯·伯基(Dennis Berkey)说，“我听到这个项目后，认为是个不错的想法。在理工科专业学习的女生比男生有更多的问题要问，关于她们将拥有什么样的职业发展，薪酬是根据工作表现还是人际关系而定，她们是否能给这个世界带来积极的影响，如何处理她们对家庭的期望。”

While women now earn more college degrees than men over all, they lag in STEM fields — particularly computer science and engineering, where they earn less than 20 percent of all undergraduate degrees.

尽管获得大学学位的女生人数多于男生，但是她们在理工科依然表现落后——尤其是计算机科学和工程学专业，只有不到20%的本科毕业生是女性。

To help raise those numbers, Dr. Klawe has lined up six prominent women as lead mentors, including Mae C. Jemison, the first black female astronaut; Jacqueline K. Barton, the chairwoman of the chemistry department at Caltech; and Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer — as well as nearly 300 other mentors. They will answer questions submitted online by students at any of the universities participating in the project, which is known as Women in Technology Sharing Online, or WitsOn.

为了增加理工科专业的女生人数，克拉韦博士邀请六位杰出女性担任她们的导师，包括世界上第一位黑人女宇航员梅·C·杰米森(Mae C. Jemison)；加州理工学院化学系主任杰奎琳·K·巴顿(Jacqueline K. Barton)；思科公司(Cisco)首席技术官帕德马斯里·瓦里奥(Padmasree Warrior)——以及其他近300位导师。她们将回答参与该项目的各所大学的学生在线提交的问题，这个项目被称为女性科技共享在线课程(WitsOn)。

Undergraduates at other colleges can participate by getting a faculty member to nominate them. Although the program is especially designed for women, men will also be able to ask questions.

其他大学的本科生可以通过教师提名来参与提问。虽然这个项目是专门为女生设立，不过男生也可以提出问题。

According to the Web site, the project could even lead to jobs. “We will do our best to connect students who are interested in positions with mentors’ organizations that have positions to fill,” it says.

根据官方网站的介绍，这个项目可能会带来工作机会。网站表示，“如果导师所在的公司出现空缺职位，我们将尽力联系对这些职位感兴趣的学生。”

A test forum in May attracted more than 800 questions in a day, according to Pooja Sankar, the founder of Piazza, a WitsOn sponsor. Young women had a wide range of queries: “How sexist is programming?” “How did you get where you are?” “Do you have time for your family?” “When is it right to correct misunderstandings about women in technology fields and when do you have to just let it slide?” And, inevitably, “Can I work for you?”

作为WitsOn项目的发起人，问答网站Piazza的创始人普加·桑卡尔(Pooja Sankar)表示，测试论坛在5月份每天收到800多条问题。年轻女性提出了一系列广泛的问题：“怎么应对性别歧视者？”“你如何获得现在的成就？”“你有时间和家人相处吗？”“什么时候应该纠正女性在科技领域遭到的误解，什么时候应该对此视而不见？”毫无疑问，最多的问题是“我能为你工作吗？”

Ms. Sankar, who went to engineering school in India, said that given her own awkward experiences in school, she had long wanted to offer support to female students.

桑卡尔就读于印度的工程学院，她表示，自己在学校的尴尬经历让她长期以来一直希望为女生提供帮助。

“I was embarrassed to look at a boy, much less ask a question about homework,” Ms. Sankar said. “I didn’t have a support group, and I thought it was because I was growing up in a traditional society. What was such a surprise, when I was at Facebook and Sheryl Sandberg had a session for women engineers, was that American girls, even if they’d gone to coed high schools, felt the same sense of isolation.”

桑卡尔说，“当时我不好意思看男生，也很少问和功课有关的问题。我并没有后援团，我想这是因为我生长在一个传统的社会。当我在Facebook公司工作时，参加了谢莉尔·桑德伯格(Sheryl Sandberg)为女工程师召开的会议，让我感到惊讶的是，那些美国女孩也有同样的孤立感，即使她们就读于男女同校的高中。”

Jacqueline El-Sayed, a professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering University, said WitsOn could help bolster the confidence of women who think differently from their male classmates — giving answers that are correct but unexpected, and in response getting what some call “the look.”

凯特林大学(Kettering University)机械工程学教授杰奎琳·埃尔-赛义德(Jacqueline El-Sayed)说，WitsOn项目可以帮助那些认为自己与男同学不同的女生培养自信心——给出正确而意想不到的答案，让她们获得成功的机会。

WitsOn’s somewhat unstructured approach is in some ways similar to the earliest massive online courses, created years before Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford and other leading universities started offering free online versions of their traditional campus classes. Like WitsOn, the first MOOCs were meant to help form connections online rather than provide a formal curriculum. The participants shaped the content, often interacting in so many different online threads that no student or teacher could follow all of them.

在某种程度上来说，WitsOn有些松散的方式类似于最早的大规模网络课程，比起哈佛大学、麻省理工学院、斯坦福大学和其他顶尖大学提供传统校内教学的免费网络课程，这些课程创立的时间还要早几年。像WitsOn项目一样，最初的MOOC网络课程是为了帮助建立网络连接，而不是提供正规的课程。这些参与者构成了课程的内容，他们经常通过许多不同的网络纽带进行互动，因此没有学生或教师能听到所有人的声音。

“In a connectivist MOOC, people get out of it what they put into it,” said Stephen Downes of the National Research Council of Canada, a pioneer of the early MOOCs. “It’s something like a Yahoo group or other interest-based community. But it has a start date and an end date, and it pulls people out of different networks and plops them into a new one, which results in new connections and gets people hearing new voices.”

加拿大国家研究院(National Research Council of Canada)的斯蒂芬·唐斯(Stephen Downes)是早期MOOC网络课程的先驱，他表示，“在关联MOOC中，人们付出什么就收获什么。这有点像雅虎小组或其他以兴趣为基础的社区。但是这些课程有开放日期和终止日期，吸引来自不同网络的人，让他们关注新的课程，这会建立新的交流，让人们听到新的声音。”

WitsOn is not the only connectivist MOOC starting this fall. Athabasca University in Alberta — along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Educause, a nonprofit organization focused on information technology; The Chronicle of Higher Education; and others — will present one called Current/Future State of Higher Education.

WitsOn并不是今年秋天唯一开放的关联MOOC。加拿大阿尔伯塔省的阿萨巴斯卡大学(Athabasca University)，以及比尔和梅林达·盖茨基金会(Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)，专注于信息技术的非营利组织Educause，《高等教育纪事报》(The Chronicle of Higher Education)——将推出一个称为“现在/未来国家高等教育”的项目。

Empire State College, a division of SUNY, will offer VizMath, which Carol Yeager, a leader, said would be about “the visualness of math — things like math in art, Escher’s work, and exploring hyperbolic curves through knitting.” Participants will have the option of taking the class for credit at Empire State.