There is a brief survey about factors influencing young women's persistence in science (between High School and College). Please contribute to the study by filling out this survey.

Why do relatively few women show an interest in science (outside of biology and the social sciences), math, or engineering at the college level?  Why are women turned off, and what could be done in high school to boost their numbers among science majors in college? Our research addresses these questions, and you can support it by filling out a very brief web survey.

On the path toward science careers, a critical transition point lies between high school and college where disproportionate numbers of young women abandon an initial interest in science, mathematics, engineering, or technology.  The Science Education Department at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study this important issue in a systematic way.  A 3-year project, titled  "Persistence Research in Science and Engineering" (PRiSE) and headed  by Dr. Philip Sadler, will collect and analyze data from approximately 4,000 college freshmen at 20 institutions, with the goal of identifying the factors that strengthen the interest in pursuing science in college, particularly for female students.

In the initial phase of the project-where we generate testable hypotheses about factors influencing young women's persistence in the sciences-we wish to look beyond the hypotheses that we find in the scholarly literature.  We believe that practicing scientists, especially those who teach at the college level, have a tremendous amount of insight into this issue.  Hence we turn to you, asking you to respond to our web-based survey, which will take only a few minutes of your time. The survey is found at:

http://mo-www.cfa.harvard.edu/prise/scientistssurvey.html

Thanking you very much for your consideration and help.
Sincerely yours,
Gerhard Sonnert, Ph.D., Project Manager
Zahra Hazari, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics