Mentorship is a powerful tool to open up STEM to women

Martin Canaan Mafunda is a PhD researcher in the physics department at South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal, working in the field of machine learning.

He owes his science journey to his grandmother, who taught him about the importance of counting at a tender age, hence his choice to follow the mathematics and statistics route that landed him in machine learning.

From high school to university, Mafunda observed how few female STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students there were.

“At advanced level, we had only two females in our maths class and the male to female ratio was approximately 5:1. At university level, the male to female ratio was six men to every woman,” he said.

Mafunda said the perception or stereotype that girls perform better in arts while boys perform better in sciences is contributing to women’s low participation in STEM fields.

“The bottleneck starts at lower grades, so one can imagine the cumulative effect of this perception by the time female students reach university level,” he said.

“This is worsened by lack or non-availability of resources which turns out to be key to ensure that students, in general, unlearn some of these perceptions or stereotypes at appropriate ages,” he added.

Breaking the chain

But how did the few women who broke off from that chain manage to do that?

Tapiwanashe Miranda Chidemo (née Sanyanga), a big data and artificial intelligence analyst at the Zimbabwe Centre for High-Performance Computing who also works as a part-time lecturer at Chinhoyi University of Technology, said that, at advanced level in high school, there were only two girls and nine boys in her class and, when she started at university, there were 113 men and nine women.

She soldiered on and now, in addition to her two degrees, an MPhil in IT (research-based), majoring in data analytics, and a BSc honours degree in IT, she holds 10 professional certifications from Microsoft, Google Analytics Academy, and the Management and Strategy Institute.


Tapiwanashe Miranda Chidemo, Image provided

Chidemo said several things hold the girl child back.

“These include a lack of support from family, resulting in low self-esteem in the girl-child. STEM is believed to be a male field and the girl often shies away because she does not believe that she can attain what the male child can do.

“It takes the individual, the family, the community, the country, and the continent to continually nurture an environment comfortable enough for the girl child to flourish.

“Also, society expects too much from a woman and that can weigh her down sometimes. The roles women play as mothers, wives, daughters, daughters-in-law (and the list goes on and on) are demanding and exhausting, yet one is expected to perform exceptionally well in all of them, and still be able to do other non-domestic roles which one desires like their career and-or business,” she said.

Awareness and mentorship

Chidemo said awareness is also important. Girls need to be made aware of what they are capable of, the emerging technologies and that there is more than what they are currently exposed to.

“Some people are blinkered as a result of insufficient information, and this needs to be addressed,” she added.

Chidemo said mentorship was also crucial for her as a woman to make it into STEM.

When it comes to the power of mentorship for girls and women to make it, few understand it better than Henrica Makulu, a data analyst at Zimbabwe’s biggest telecommunications company, Econet Wireless.

Makulu said mentorship had a powerful and far-reaching impact on her career when she found herself working under Econet Wireless former chief operating officer, Fayaz King, who is now the assistant secretary-general serving as deputy executive director, field results and innovation, for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

She said, because of that mentorship phase, she now sees her life in two parts: life before and after she met King.


Henrica Makulu, Image provided

Makulu said a colleague who was teaching her the ropes mentioned that, since she was going to be working with data and analytics, she should attend one or a few of the daily call to action meetings held by King to observe how he used data to make decisions for the business.

“I had never seen anything like it. This man had a way with numbers almost as though he was a number whisperer or a numbers necromancer, I don’t know, but whatever it was I wanted to see more of it,” she said.

“The daily call to action meetings became a source of inspiration because, not only would Mr King crunch numbers and make a business call based on what the numbers were showing him, but he would end with a life story or quote to motivate us for the day.

“So, week in and week out, I would slip into these daily meetings, sit, or stand in the back, clap, laugh, fear, learn and be inspired along with everyone in the room and continue with my workday. Until the day I landed up in Mr King’s office,” she said.

“The next months were filled with possible and ‘impossible’ data and non-data business challenges that Mr King would ask me to solve and I ended up being moved to his office where I got to work for a year.

“He literally took me on as a mentee, even though I hadn’t asked for it and I learned more in that year than I did in the five years before that.”

Makulu said this motivated her to start a mentorship programme, as the biggest hindrance along her STEM journey was a lack of confidence, opportunities, and career guidance.

Young women need affirmation

“I founded HM Digital – a programme where I mentor people who want to get into the same career as me, with a particular interest in young girls, because I feel there was no guidance for me when I was getting into the data analytics field.

“So, I believe I can guide someone else who wants to join my field of specialisation. As one of only two females to graduate in my applied mathematics programme, and being young, I know first-hand the need for voices of affirmation to young women who want to venture into this field and those who do not even know that this field exists or what it entails,” Makulu said.

She said, to date, HM Digital has reached hundreds of aspiring data professionals in Zimbabwe and the aim is to reach thousands more and provide guidance for aspirants into data or tech fields.

Makulu said some of the challenges girls and women in Zimbabwe and in Africa face when getting into STEM include a lack of career guidance, a lack of female technical mentors and role models to look up to, domestic responsibilities limiting the amount of time they can dedicate to career development, lack of confidence and few opportunities to gain practical experience in industry.

Tatenda Emma Matika is a data scientist who studied BSc honours in computer science at Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and Technology before going to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa for a masters in mathematical science.

She said that, in a bid to address the low uptake of STEM by girls, various interventions have been suggested such as offering different cut-off grades for acceptance into programmes, and funding girls to study STEM-related subjects.

But, despite these interventions, the numbers are still low.

Believing in yourself

Matika, who works as a research scholar at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) West and Central Africa, said that, when a woman makes it into the field, she occasionally meets people who think that she is not good at what she does simply because she is a woman.

“I think the main challenge is believing in yourself. In Zimbabwe, we still have men who think that women cannot do certain tasks just because they are women.

“And this is hard because, if those men are in positions of power, they will not give women good roles. During my internship, we once had someone in our department who used to say: ‘Don’t send a woman to do a man’s job’,” she said.

“Another challenge could be lack of information. People don’t really know some of the opportunities out there, so we stick to what we know. And this can lead to selecting programmes that are not STEM-related because one doesn’t want to be a doctor or an engineer. But there are many different STEM programmes that one can study,” Matika said.

Like Makulu, Matika said STEM-mentorship opportunities are useful in increasing awareness of women in STEM. That is why she is part of Tea in 60 Mentorship.

Tea in 60 is a social enterprise comprising a community of thriving Zimbabwean women seeking to create a diverse, culture-rich STEM environment by inspiring Zimbabwean girls and women to realise the endless possibilities in the field.

Its main activities are scheduled one-to-one 60-minute virtual mentorship sessions with Zimbabwean women, opportunities for networking and peer support and STEM-related basic and advanced online courses for those wishing to upskill.

“There is a pipeline that narrows as we move from high school to university and to industry or academia when it comes to women in STEM. I think it is important to focus on the first point where the pipeline begins to narrow down – in high schools,” said Matika.