RAISING AWARENESS ON DIVERSITY AND EQUALITY IN STEM DEGREES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Higher education environments are becoming more and more diverse, regarding both gender and cultural background, which could pose significant challenges for both students and teachers. In order to raise the topic amongst STEM students, a lecture on Diversity has been implemented in the course Research Methodologies for Engineering Mechanics, where different concepts regarding equality have been introduced and unconscious bias have been explained to the students. The lecture was placed in the middle of the course so that students could reflect back on their previous evaluations and enable them to correct their biases in the second half of the course. Feedback of the whole course has also been compared between the 2016 and 2015 editions, where this lecture was not present. The results show that a lecture in Diversity and Equality is especially useful for female students, strongly supporting its inclusion in the course.