Knowledge Center

The WKC, an organized and annotated digital venue for selected information resources for women in the STEM community, officially launched in June 2009 with just over 600 resources. Carpenter and project PI and WEPAN Executive Director Diane Matt had worked with WEPAN’s librarian Jane Langman to populate the WKC with references to articles, papers, websites, books, presentations, and other materials found in bibliographies created by various organizations and authors prominent in the STEM field, as well as to create an organizational system for the resources, as there was no set taxonomy for women in stem literature. Some resources were available free of charge and resided inside the WKC, while others could be accessed from the annotations and profiles via links to non-WKC repositories containing the resource.

Knowing that root causes of women's underrepresentation spans STEM fields, and the multidisciplinary impact of gender in STEM issues, WEPAN leaders decided to make sure the WKC was not just a WEPAN member benefit, but a center of information shared freely with the larger STEM community. In just the first three years of its existence, there were over 34,000 visits from 96 countries around the world.

The WKC was marketed through electronic newsletters, papers, and posters and presentations at conferences, including NSF ADVANCE PI meetings, NSF joint annual meetings, the Society of Women Engineers, the American Society of Engineering Education, and WEPAN.

There was also a companion webinar series to the WKC, which Carpenter ran for two years, featuring prominent scholars talking about common issues and research impacting women in STEM. Speakers included Claude Steele, who discussed the Steele and Aronson theory of stereotype threat, and Virginia Valian, author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, a book using data to explain the disparities in the professional advancement of men and women.

The WKC not only showcased the availability of previously hard-to-find resources, together with views from thought leaders on key issues affecting involvement of women in STEM, it also launched an online professional community to encourage and support knowledge exchange and collaborations among researchers and practitioners working to increase participation of women in STEM.

Today, the WSKC contains over 2300 resources for those working in academia, K-12 education, industry, and professional societies. The body of knowledge, tools, and promising practices for gender equity in STEM initiatives is no longer a standalone website, but all of its content has been added to the ARC Network Resource Library.

In 2021, WEPAN announced it would serve as the backbone organization for the ADVANCE Resource and Coordination (ARC) Network, which seeks to achieve gender equity for faculty in higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The ARC Network‘s Resource Library was the perfect place  to house the newly renamed WSKC. WEPAN librarian Bethany Farmer worked to add and update the WSKC resources.