About Us

Our Mission and Values

Cybermentor’s mission is to address barriers that young people face in accessing science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) education and careers.

We address these barriers in the following ways:

1) Facilitate online mentoring relationships for girls, non-binary, and Indigenous youth age 10-18+ (typically grades 5-12) with women, non-binary, and Indigenous STEAM professionals and scholars to increase the visibility of minority folks in the STEAM community (and encourage our participants to imagine themselves in these careers!)

2) Offer STEAM workshops through a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens for schools and extracurricular groups

3) Raise awareness of the barriers girls, non-binary, LGBTQIA2S+, people with disabilities, Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC), People of Colour (POC), and other populations who are marginalized face in accessing and retaining education and careers in STEAM fields.

Between 2001-2020, Cybermentor focused on addressing the gender gap by matching girls with incredible women in STEAM careers and through outreach programs for girls programs. Thanks to funding from NSERC PromoScience, Cybermentor is expanding to address the barriers Indigenous youth face to accessing culturally relevant STEAM education.

Cybermentor employs an intersectional approach to our work. We examine and address the barriers that women face to accessing STEAM, and also the ways that race, class, ability, sexuality, and other aspects of identity impact individual and communities’ experiences in the STEAM community.

We value curiosity, relationship, community, critical thinking, advocacy, diversity, and inclusion.

Herstory

In 2001, Dr. Elizabeth Cannon was appointed the Chair for Women in Science and Engineering - Prairie Region for NSERC/Petro-Canada. One of the projects she created was “SCIberMENTOR”, now known as Cybermentor.

The program was the first of its kind - an online, long term mentoring program for girls interested in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) to address the gender gap and lack of representation of women in STEAM. According to NSERC’s Women in Science and Engineering in Canada’s 2017 report, 20.9% of women held natural science and engineering (NSE) related occupations in 2000 and saw a 2.3% increase by 2015 with women occupying 23.2% of all NSE-related positions (NSERC, 2017).

Mentoring has been proven to be an effective way of increasing young people’s self-confidence, attitudes towards education, educational outcomes, social skills, and more. By connecting girls with women in STEAM and facilitating a mentoring relationship, girls are able to see people like them succeeding in male-dominated fields.