Women Achieving Tenure-Track Success: Strategies to Enable Community-based Retention

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of Washington, North Carolina State University, and California Polytechnic State Institute, San Luis Obispo submitted an ADVANCE PLAN D project whose overall goal is to increase the retention and advancement of women in academic careers to create greater diversity in engineering leadership. This project will build and facilitate a community-centric mentoring, networking, and career development program and will target early career women in electrical engineering and underrepresented minority women in engineering and computer science. The early career women (postdoctoral and early-career faculty stage) will be supported through cross-career stage networking, community building, career development symposia, and peer Mentoring Circles. The project adapts two previously successful efforts at the University of Washington: 1) Women Evolving the Biological Sciences (WEBS): professional development symposia for early-career women in ecology and evolution and 2) Broadening the Representation of Academic Investigators in NeuroScience (BRAINS): symposia followed by Mentoring Circles for early career underrepresented minority neuroscientists. This project will examine how best to adapt these successful programs to two new disciplines and develop a model framework to allow others to develop such programs for a wide variety of fields and populations. To maximize program impact, the team will use ethnographic research methods to study the process and unique features of program development such as the collaboration between engineers and social scientists to develop new knowledge on the principles and processes critical to planning, implementing, and adapting successful intervention programs. The evaluation of the project will identify best practices to support women's success in academic careers and to diversify the engineering professoriate. The guiding principles and values that enable these programs to have impact on participants will be identified and codified in a framework that will be shared through the University of Washington's ADVANCE online "LEAD-it-Yourself!" toolkit. The NSF ADVANCE Partnerships for Learning and Adaptation Networks (PLAN) program track supports projects that promote the adaptation and implementation of previously effective ADVANCE programs in new contexts and the testing of innovative strategies to promote the participation, success, and advancement of women in STEM academic careers. PLAN projects also contribute to the knowledge base on gender equity in STEM academic careers. The PLAN-D funding track is designed to expand the application of proven-successful gender-equity initiatives for STEM faculty in a specific disciplinary area through networked adaptation of a specific program or initiative. Careful evaluation is expected to expand understanding of such initiatives in a disciplinary context.