WEPAN Newsletter May 2025

Renew Your WEPAN Membership or Join WEPAN Today

WEPAN members enjoy a wide range of benefits designed to support professional growth and enhance engineering inclusion and excellence:

• Community of Practice (CoP): WEPAN offers access to an engaged community where we deliver education and training on relevant topics in smaller groups to facilitate expertise sharing, psychosocial support, and peer-to-peer mentoring. The CoP also supports navigation of resources housed within the WEPAN Knowledge Center.
• Conferences and Workshops: WEPAN events offer opportunities to network, share resources, and discuss best practices to advance cultures of inclusion in engineering. As a WEPAN member, you will receive discounted conference and workshop registration rates.
• Webinars: WEPAN offers professional development, strategies for ensuring the success of women in engineering education and professions, and online community for members through its workshops and webinars, which feature women engineers, DEIA researchers and practitioners, and experts across different disciplines and sectors.
• Career Center: The WEPAN Career Center is a premiere resource to connect career opportunities with qualified engineering professionals in both industry and academia. Whether you are searching for jobs or finding candidates, the WEPAN Career Center offers a wealth of resources to help members achieve their career goals.
• WEPAN Academy: A wealth of critical knowledge was created within WEPAN’s initiatives and grant-funding projects. Through asynchronous, hybrid, and live education and training, WEPAN Academy will support members broadening their professional development as change agents.

Members should have received a renewal email. If you haven't received a renewal email, or if you're interested in joining WEPAN, please reach out to membership@wepan.org.

News

Free Program to Help Move Your Small Business Forward

WEPAN is partnering with Verizon as part of their Small Business Digital Ready program, a free program designed to give small businesses more tools to succeed. It’s personalized and easy to use, with all the information online in one place.

Sign up for the platform and engage with a combination of two free videos or events to become eligible for $10K grant opportunities offered at least four times per year.

The videos and events cover topics like branding, cybersecurity, managing money, legal essentials for small businesses, and more. The events also include opportunities to connect 1:1 with business coaches and experts for feedback on areas where you could use some extra guidance. Plus, the platform has a growing database of external funding and financing opportunities. Sign up through our link, and you also help WEPAN!

Coming Soon - the WEPAN Academy

Despite our country’s continued need to ensure a robust engineering workforce, for decades we have asked why so many women leave engineering. It has been well demonstrated that we can and should do more to retain women in our engineering workforce.

Over the past 35 years, the dedication of WEPAN’s leadership and community has resulted in amassed knowledge critical to advancing cultures of diversity and inclusion in engineering spaces. How do we make this knowledge more accessible and adaptable?

Coming soon - WEPAN Academy! Providing workforce development and retention education and training to ensure women can thrive in a robust engineering workforce.

WEPAN Listserv

Do you have something to tell the WEPAN community? Remember that subscription to the WEPAN-L listserv is a member benefit! Share announcements, post publication opportunities, and collaborate with colleagues from different institutions and organizations on special projects.

To subscribe to the WEPAN-L listserv, visit: lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/wepan-l

Career Center

Post Jobs with the WEPAN Career Center

Find and hire top engineering professionals with the WEPAN Career Center!

Explore the benefits of our new career center by logging in today.

‍Post your job, or your institution's job, where the industry's most qualified engineering professionals go to advance their careers. You can also email your job directly to WEPAN job seekers via our exclusive Job Flash™ email.

WEPAN members receive free and discounted job postings.

Free Resume Critique

Take advantage of the WEPAN Career Center's FREE resume critique service, which offers a resume review by a resume-writing expert.  Within a few days of submitting a resume, an evaluation is sent outlining strengths, weaknesses, and suggestions to ensure best chances of landing an interview.

Please share this opportunity with your students, colleagues, and anyone else interested in career advancement.

The process is simple:

1. Click "Manage Resumes" under the Career Center Job Seekers tab
2. Click "Upload Resume File"
3. Choose the file to be uploaded
4. Click "YES" next to "submit my resume for a free evaluation from a trusted resume expert at TopResume”
5. On the pop-up window, click "Evaluate My Resume"
6. Proceed with the upload by clicking "Upload Resume"

Stand out to employers with a polished resume and increase your chances of landing your dream job! There are currently over 500 employers on the WEPAN Career Center, and over 1300 job openings.

Resources

Publications, reports, or communications relevant to women in engineering and STEM equity. All resources listed below are available in the ARC Network online resource library. If you need help accessing the library, please contact ARC Librarian Bethany Farmer at bethany@wepan.org.  

• "The loss of women from science, mathematics, and engineering undergraduate majors: An explanatory account" by E. Seymour

"The reasons for the loss of high ability women from science, mathematics, and engineering undergraduate majors are not well understood. However, investigators have, consistently, found an early loss of confidence in their ability to “do science” among such women. In seeking to explain why the vulnerability of women to leaving science majors greatly exceeds that of men, the author draws upon the findings of a 3‐year, ethnographic study of factors contributing to high undergraduate attrition rates among men and women of different ethnicities on seven campuses of different type."

• "What do Women do with Engineering Degrees?" by L. Frehill

"These data, collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for the National Science Foundation, provide insights into the current and previous work experiences and career outcomes for people who work in science and engineering fields or who possess science or engineering masters or bachelors degrees. These are ideal data to examine the extent to which women with engineering degrees stay in the field, go to graduate school, or leave from the field and to what extent their experiences differ from those of their male peers."

Institutional WEPAN Membership

Encourage your Institution to Deepen its Commitment to Excellence

Consider becoming an Institutional Champion Member. At this membership level, institutions have unlimited member representatives who get to dive into critical equity and excellence issues through custom workshops. Additional Institutional Champion member benefits include:

• Professional Development
  • Decades of resources in the WEPAN Knowledge Center
  • Professional development webinars, including one featuring an invited speaker from your institution
  • Free and discounted workshops, including one customized for your institution
  • Free and discounted access to WEPAN’s Program Days
• Communication & Networking
  • WEPAN-L listserv
  • WEPAN member directory
  • Social media spotlights of your institution
• Workforce
  • Free and discounted job postings for your institution in WEPAN’s Career Center

For more information on how to become a WEPAN Institutional Member, please email membership@wepan.org.