Recruit, Retain!

Why should any woman get any degree in a STEM discipline? Especially if she has to wade through tons of bullshit courses to get there, and part of the learning, it appears, has to do with learning how to be someone you aren't? Some other gender, some other race - or some other social class? skeptifem challenges the female STEM universe thus: I am not working in some kind of grueling coursework, so I am not "most of us", I guess. What happened to me was that I never imagined I could be a college graduate or learn the sciences/maths (mostly because of being a woman in this culture), and I…
Over at A Blog Around the Clock there are a series of posts with great video interviews from ScienceOnline2010, but I'd like to especially point your attention to this one with David Kroll and Damond Nollan, both of North Carolina Central University. It was filmed shortly after their session on "Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media". I missed this session due to a combination of sleep deprivation and headache, and am really regretting it. Isis has a good post based on her attendance at the session, however - you should read it…
This evening Marketplace Report had a segment on " A push for Latinos to pursue education". It's a great segment, based on a report from the Southern Education Foundation. (Possibly this one; four page summary of the report, A New Diverse Majority: Students of Color in the South's Public Schools is here.) The Hispanic College Fund started out funding college scholarships, but found that wasn't sufficient; now they are reaching out to the high school level, as early as ninth grade, to encourage young Latino kids to pursue a college education. Many of these kids are from low-income…
Professor in Training is working on a faculty website design and asks the following: I'm in the process of designing my own page and also a separate set of pages for my lab. I know the type of stuff I want in both of these but I was looking for feedback from both current and prospective students and postdocs as well as other faculty as to what you look for if/when you go searching for faculty/lab pages. Take a visit over there and share your opinion on what makes a good website. Inquiring minds may also be interested in some work done on this issue a few years ago by Cynthia Burack (and me…
UPDATE: Pat Campbell has asked that if you did take the survey initially when it was returning 404 errors, and you subsequently re-took it, drop her an email and she will send you cookies! She has promised to send cookies to the first 10 of my readers who had to retake the survey, if you let her know by email. I've had her cookies. They are great! If you got the 404 error this is a nice incentive to retake - just do so and then drop Pat an email : campbell AT campbell-kibler DOT com UPDATE: If you took this survey right after I first posted this entry and got a 404 error when you tried…
Scads of stuff I don't have time to blog adequately... Johns Hopkins Provost Kristina Johnson was nominated by President Obama to be under secretary of the Department of Energy in mid-March. From the email press release: She is a distinguished researcher, best known for pioneering work -- with widespread scientific and commercial application -- in the field of "smart pixel arrays." Last year, she was awarded the John Fritz Medal, widely considered the highest award in engineering and previously given to Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Westinghouse and Orville Wright. She is an…
Text and title shamelessly stolen from Sciencewomen, I have no time to write, am at mom's again. Dr. Isis has decided to donate the funds from her blog traffic to fund a scholarship for undergraduate research, and has gotten the American Physiological Society to match her donation up to $500. And all you have to do is click on her site - no $$ donations required. So cool! Go visit her announcement, and her site through teh browser not the RSS feed reader for this month. :-)
NSF ADVANCE Workshop For Women Transitioning to Academic Careers The University of Washington's ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change received an award from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program to hold professional development workshops for Ph.D.-level women in industry, research labs, consulting, or national labs who are interested in transitioning to academic careers in STEM. The first workshop will be held October 18- 20, 2009. This workshop will be very helpful to women interested in making the transition to academia. The workshop speakers will primarily be successful…
You're a smart woman, and a fabulous scientist or engineer. You know you can be a great researcher or professional engineer. But have you given thought to doing more than your job - to becoming a leader? F. Mary Williams and Carolyn J. Emerson hope you will, and to encourage you, they've put together Becoming Leaders: A Practical Handbook for Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology. The book is a joint project of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers. As the authors note in the introduction,…
Good stuff from the AWIS Washington Wire: A new website on reducing stereotype threat. The engineering of ice cream, from Yale's first female dean of engineering. "More than half the women in the world live in countries that have made no progress in gender equity in recent years. " See the Gender Equity Index website for more information. "Women in Europe earn about 43% of doctoral degrees in science, but hold only 15% of senior academic positions." More info in this report.
Maybe you've been wondering just exactly how few women scientists and engineers there are in academia in the U.S. Or, to put it another way, maybe you've wondered just exactly how much men scientists and engineers are overrepresented in academia. There's a new website that gathers and presents comprehensive data you can use to answer those questions. The National Women's Law Center presents The Women's Prerogative. You can find out how many women are teaching in science and engineering at your school - there are data for 150 research universities. There are fact sheets that delineate…
Yes, February 17-23 is this year's National Engineering Week! I'm a little late to the party, I know...I've been a little preoccupied. But today is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day! There are events going on all over the U.S. even as we blog. But you know, you can do your own IAGTE activity at any time...it doesn't have to be today. And E-week has a list of 10 easy ways to get involved. Some of them are really easy, like #7: Donate copies of "Changing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers" to local libraries or a high school guidance office. "Changing Our World" is a product…
Some interesting things came across my listservs this week; one from WEPAN, another from the WMST-L listserv: a new book on recruiting women in IT, and a very interesting call for papers. Details after the jump. Reconfiguring the Firewall A comprehensive volume authored by three Virginia Tech professors, (published by AK Peters, Ltd.), "Reconfiguring the Firewall" addresses the global challenge of recruiting girls and women into majors and careers in information technology. Written and researched by Carol J. Burger, Elizabeth G. Creamer, and Peggy S. Meszaros, all faculty members in the…
I have no time for a real entry, but if you haven't yet had your daily quota of sexist nonsense, check out these two links. Melissa McEwan parses the gender segregation at the Discovery Channel Store. (Thanks to Bora for tipping me off to that post.) In case you were wondering where to get your scientific nail polish kit, you now know. And just in time for the holidays! And the Chronicle news blog reports on the continued sorry state of tenure for women at MIT. The comments will annoy the piss out of you. I swear someday my head will explode when I have to listen yet again to some…
By way of the Chronicle news blog: The National Institutes of Health has released new guidance about its policies on diversity and on child care. One set of guidelines, or "frequently asked questions," released Friday, concerns the NIH's efforts to expand the pool of candidates eligible for its training grants that were historically reserved for minority students...Another set of "frequently asked questions" describes the circumstances under which universities may use the agency's grants to finance child care and parental leave for scientists who receive NIH grants. Seems these guidelines…
Sooooo beautiful. You must read what Pat has to say about APS's CSWP compiling a list of female-friendly physics departments. And follow the links therein. Here's how my various alma maters responded to this survey question: Please describe why someone applying to graduate school who is interested in a female-friendly department should choose your department. Duke University The physics department at Duke University has quite a few females. Interaction among the women of this department is encouraged by having lunch together a few times a year among and other social events. I am told by…
By way of the LA Times, we learn that women are flocking in droves to Caltech this year: According to preliminary figures, 87 women are entering a freshman class of [235] students in September. That 37% share is Caltech's highest since it began admitting undergraduate women in 1970, when pioneering females comprised 14% of the entering class. Has Caltech gone soft and squishy? Though they protest that standards were not lowered, the LA Times does not seem convinced. Although Caltech insists that it did not lower its notoriously tough admission standards or practice affirmative action for…