The slow advancement of women in scientific fields remains a persistent problem, especially in academia. Highly trained doctoral women in the sciences drop out of the academic pipeline for a variety of reasons that are poorly documented. This paper reports on a qualitative exploratory study based on structured interviews with 15 women who have taken career breaks after receiving their science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) PhD, but wish to re-enter the academic career track. The study aims to understand the pressures that contribute to taking such breaks, how women remain connected (or not) to their field during breaks and how re-entering the field after a career break could be facilitated. Suggestions based on the interviews include career development workshops and networking opportunities for women in breaks, as well as systemic changes such as reduced fees for society membership and conferences, changes in the way resumés are reviewed by faculty search committees, and in the design and implementation of maternity and child care leave policies.

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Women are underrepresented in STEM and in entrepreneurship but are rare in STEM entrepreneurship. A gender-sensitive entrepreneurship education and peer mentoring program for women engineering and computer science students was developed to provide classroom instruction, experiential learning, and support to a small group of students. This paper reports on the experiences of student peer mentors in the program, in terms of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) and entrepreneurial intent (EI). Qualitative methods were adopted for this study. Student mentors were interviewed about their experiences and reported increased perceptions of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, a greater awareness of diversity and gender issues, and a changed perspective on problem solving and life in general. Student mentors reported a distinct interest in becoming an entrepreneur at "some time" in their lives, although not necessarily immediately upon graduation.

Receptivity of the two-dimensional boundary layer on a flat plate with elliptic leading edge is studied by numerical simulation. Vortical perturbations in the oncoming free stream are considered, impinging on two leading edges with different aspect ratio to identify the effect of bluntness. The relevance of the three vorticity components of natural free-stream turbulence is illuminated by considering axial, vertical and spanwise vorticity separately at different angular frequencies. The boundary layer is most receptive to zero-frequency axial vorticity, triggering a streaky pattern of alternating positive and negative streamwise disturbance velocity. This is in line with earlier numerical studies on non-modal growth of elongated structures in the Blasius boundary layer. We find that the effect of leading-edge bluntness is insignificant for axial free-stream vortices alone. On the other hand, vertical free-stream vorticity is also able to excite non-modal instability in particular at zero and low frequencies. This mechanism relies on the generation of streamwise vorticity through stretching and tilting of the vertical vortex columns at the leading edge and is significantly stronger when the leading edge is blunt. It can thus be concluded that the non-modal boundary-layer response to a free-stream turbulence field with three-dimensional vorticity is enhanced in the presence of a blunt leading edge. At high frequencies of the disturbances the boundary layer becomes receptive to spanwise free-stream vorticity, triggering Tollmien–Schlichting (T-S) modes and receptivity increases with leading-edge bluntness. The receptivity coefficients to free-stream vortices are found to be about 15% of those to sound waves reported in the literature. For the boundary layers and free-stream perturbations considered, the amplitude of the T-S waves remains small compared with the low-frequency streak amplitudes.