WEPAN Newsletter October 2023

Register Now for the Virtual Women of Color Summit

As WEPAN continues to grow, we want to gain a deeper understanding of the WEPAN community. Whether you’re a WEPAN member, event attendee, program participant, partner, newsletter subscriber, social media follower, or more – we want to hear from you!

Take just five minutes to share more about yourself and your engagement with WEPAN in our community survey. In addition to providing insights about the WEPAN community, your responses will help also shape our future outreach goals and programming priorities.

Everyone who takes the survey will be entered to win a free registration to the 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening, taking place in Baltimore, Maryland.

Take the survey at: https://www.wepan.org/survey. Your responses will remain confidential and will be for internal use only.

Events

Join WEPAN for the Women of Color Summit (WOCS) Wednesday, November 15, 11am-4pm ET as we bring together women of color in STEM with individuals and organizations who authentically support WoC in thriving and advancing in their chosen fields.

The WOCS recognizes that, while critical to STEM fields, women of color are often underserved, under-resourced, and undervalued in their respective fields. The WOCS continues to raise awareness of both the common and the unique experiences of women of color as they navigate STEM careers while emphasizing the need to disaggregate WoC identities in order to develop effective practices.

Register at: https://registration.socio.events/e/wocs2023

The 3rd Annual WEPAN Women of Color Summit is sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Technology, Innovation and Partnerships and Translational Impacts (TIP/TI) Directorate.

VVS Research Webinar: Experiences of Foreign Born/Foreign Trained Faculty

The ARC Network is excited to begin hosting members of the 2022-2023 Virtual Visiting Scholars (VVS) cohort to present on their VVS projects and discuss the implications of their findings! Join us on Thursday, November 9 at 3pm ET as Dr. Sue Rosser discusses her VVS research on foreign born/foreign trained (FB/FT) faculty and the STEM equity issues they face.

Rosser’s VVS project was inspired by an NSF grant. Rosser was serving as an external advisor on an ADVANCE grant where the co-PIs were eight women engineers, all of whom were relatively junior in the California State University system, and six of the eight were FB/FT.  In interacting with them on the grant and discussing their careers and various issues they were having, Rosser realized the extent to which FB/FT faculty were an understudied group.

“When I looked into it, the existing literature mostly concentrated on men and had been conducted in R1 institutions. There was very little on women FB/FT STEM faculty and almost nothing on those at comprehensive universities or community colleges. I wanted to find out more, and the co-PIs were encouraging me to do so. I’ve served as a member of the ARC Network External Advisory Board since the organization’s inception, so I was well aware of the VVS program, and thought this would be a great project.”

Register at: bit.ly/VVSRosser

News

Submit a Proposal for the 2024 ADVANCE EiSCC

Proposals are now open for the 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening (EiSCC).

Since 2019, the NSF-funded ADVANCE EiSCC has served as the convening for NSF ADVANCE grantees in a format that facilitates engagement with change agents within and beyond the NSF ADVANCE community. The ADVANCE EiSCC brings together a variety of change makers from higher education, professional societies, industry, government, and non-profits in an engaged exchange of knowledge, resources, and support to drive systemic change in STEM. The 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening will take place June 2-5 at the Hilton Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland.

Attendees have an opportunity to share new research findings and exchange resources; brainstorm strategies; collaborate in novel ways; learn about avenues for funding; and demonstrate effective programs and interventions for greater collective impact.

In lieu of traditional text-based abstracts, only visual abstracts will be accepted. Accessible content is encouraged. There are several types of sessions:

• Poster Showcase: Present an innovative poster design highlighting your efforts toward equitable STEM work environments
  
• High 5 Talks: Challenge yourself to outline the highlights of your work and explain its importance – in just 5 minutes
• Experience Reports: For those on the front lines of change, engage with the audience about your well-developed and/or later-stage initiatives or research
• Early-Stage Innovations: Inform and provide feedback to works-in-progress in a less formal setting
• Symposia: Join 3-5 presenters to discuss a novel, timely, and interesting topic
• Pre-Conference Workshops: Lead a deeper look into critical topics and challenges

Read more about the session types and the submission process here. Proposals close January 5, 2024.

Participants whose proposals are accepted are required to register for and attend the 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening.

WEPAN Community Survey

As WEPAN continues to grow, we want to gain a deeper understanding of the WEPAN community. Whether you’re a WEPAN member, event attendee, program participant, partner, newsletter subscriber, social media follower, or more – we want to hear from you! Take just five minutes to share more about yourself and your engagement with WEPAN. In addition to providing insights about the WEPAN community, your responses will help also shape our future outreach goals and programming priorities.

Take the survey at: https://www.wepan.org/survey. Your responses will remain confidential and will be for internal use only.

Nominate Someone for a WEPAN Award

Nominations are now open for the WEPAN Awards!

Creating change can be difficult, and the efforts of those who work to increase participation, retention, and success of women and other underrepresented groups in engineering can often go unnoticed and unappreciated.

The WEPAN Awards are designed to recognize and thank honorees for their contributions to engineering and equity work in academia, industry, and the wider community. WEPAN Awards honor key individuals, programs, and organizations for accomplishments that underscore WEPAN’s mission.

Please consider submitting a nomination if you know an individual, program, or organization worthy of recognition (self-nominations are encouraged). Honorees demonstrate extraordinary service, significant achievement, model programs, and exemplary work environments that promote a culture of inclusion and the success of women in engineering.

Visit our WEPAN Awards page for a list of the available awards and selection criteria or to begin the nomination process. Nominations close November 3, 2023. The Awards will be presented at the CoNECD conference in February 2024 in Crystal City, Virginia.

ERVA Open Call for Potential Visioning Events

The National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) initiative identifies bold and transformative roadmaps for engineering research directions through discussions with subject matter experts in a visioning event workshop.

ERVA is looking for societal challenges for future workshops that are:

• Ripe for broad multidisciplinary engineering research intervention;
• Emerging, nascent, and currently under-resourced concerning engineering; and
• Capable of significant societal impact (if resourced)

The Open Call for Visioning Theme Submissions questionnaire will take about 30 minutes to describe the societal challenge with enough depth for ERVA to start the due diligence. Evaluation is on a rolling basis, but priority will be given to those proposed before December 31, 2023. Submissions will be blinded and reviewed by ERVA leadership.

Collecting Feedback for a Book Chapter about WEPAN and WiE Programs

Four past WEPAN leaders (Susan Metz, Jane Daniels, and Carol Muller, and Beth Holloway) have been asked to write a chapter about Women in Engineering Programs and WEPAN.  This chapter will be included in a book about women in academic computer science and engineering, which fellow WEPAN friend and Past President Jenna Carpenter is editing.

Would you help us out by answering a few questions in the below Google Form?

1. What first interested you in joining WEPAN?
2. What influence has WEPAN had on you and your work (programs, professional development, leadership development, etc.) ?
3. If you were to read a chapter about WEPAN and Women in Engineering Programs, what would you most like to see included?

https://forms.gle/SGoa6S4ZCZEUat5C8

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

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.  

• "Broadening Participation in Stem Through Alternative Preparation Programs: An Exploration of Race, Gender, And Admissions Policies in a Coding and Apprenticeship Program" by J. Jabbari, W. Huang & O. Johnson Jr.

"While previous research has explored the entrance and persistence of underrepresented groups in traditional STEM preparation programs, previous research has not explored these trends in alternative STEM preparation programs, such as coding bootcamps, nor the degree to which more equity-focused admissions policies can alter these trends within these types of programs. We fill this gap by examining entrance and persistence patterns across six cohorts of a large coding and apprenticeship program−LaunchCode (N = 4,868). We then leverage a natural experiment in which LaunchCode adopted more equity-focused admissions policies."

ARC Network

Funded by the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program, Awards HRD-2121468 and HRD-1740860, the ADVANCE Resource and Coordination (ARC) Network seeks to achieve gender equity for faculty in higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. WEPAN serves as the backbone organization of the ARC Network.‍

Save the Date! Cohort 5 Research Webinar

• Erin Winterrowd, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Regis University -  December 13th, 3pm ET

Institutional WEPAN Membership

Want to encourage your institution to deepen its commitment to equity and excellence?

Consider becoming a 30 for 30 Institutional Champion Member. At this membership level, institutions have unlimited member representatives who get to dive into critical diversity, equity, and inclusion issues through custom workshops. These members also get the opportunity to strengthen their inclusive leadership capacity as part of the Equity and Excellence Council. Additional 30 for 30 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
• Three annual convening registrations
• Communication & Networking
• WEPAN-L listserv
• Slack
• 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 30 for 30 Institutional Member, please email membership@wepan.org.

Get Involved

Committees

We are looking for visionary members to join our committees and influence programming and member experiences. If you are interested in being a member of a WEPAN committee, please complete this survey: https://forms.gle/ZQyijAGNtPYYtNTV9

Slack Channel

Please join us on Slack to drive that connectivity across our membership during a critical time for connection. Join our Slack community today!

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