Professional Skills Development Workshops

American Physical Society, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Women now occupy approximately half of all seats in high school physics classrooms, but fewer than one in four undergraduate physics degrees are awarded to women. Worse still, only eight percent of full professors in physics faculty positions are women. Women physicists often do not receive the same level of support and mentoring throughout the various stages of their careers that men do, even if they do not experience overt discrimination. Many small but subtle acts of omission together with the isolation that comes from small numbers frequently add up to create a playing field that is far from level in terms of career advancement for women. The American Physical Society (APS) has run, for nine years, a series of influential workshops designed to improve communication, negotiation and leadership skills of female physicists. This award seeks to evolve these workshops into a sustainable model that will reach many more women. This award will fund a continuation of the original workshops that also offers two new aspects: (1) training physicists as negotiation skills workshop facilitators who can conduct the Strategic Persuasion Seminars (SPS) at their institutions and at scientific conferences and (2) offering the traditional workshops on communication, negotiation and leadership skills at the larger APS divisional meetings. Information will be learned about what is of particular benefit to women in physics. Additionally the project will compare the impact of the workshops - delivered by the professional facilitators to the impact of the seminars - delivered by the physicists trained by the professional facilitators.