NSF Awards: 1216443
This video presents the ADVANCE Hispanic Women in STEM Network program which was funde by the NSF’s ADVANCE program to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers in Puerto Rico. The program hosted two dinamic workshops during 2012 to 2014. This NETWORKing workshops, as proposed by Universidad Metropolitana (UMET) and its collaborative partner institution University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), addressed faculty advancement and retention of women in STEM disciplines, aligned with NSF’s Career-Life Balance Initiative. The implemented workshops were the first of a series of conferences targeted to develop a Hispanic NETWORKing Project. The key goal of the workshops was to generate a network and open discussions among the academic institutions including key personnel in higher administrative positions and the STEM women to share perspectives, obtain ideas, discuss strategies and collect their recommendations aimed to develop and implement effective policies that help primarily early-career scientists and engineers to improve their career-life balance and advancement. As result of the program strong collaborations have been established.
NSF Awards: 1216443
This video presents the ADVANCE Hispanic Women in STEM Network program which was funde by the NSF’s ADVANCE program to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers in Puerto Rico. The program hosted two dinamic workshops during 2012 to 2014. This NETWORKing workshops, as proposed by Universidad Metropolitana (UMET) and its collaborative partner institution University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), addressed faculty advancement and retention of women in STEM disciplines, aligned with NSF’s Career-Life Balance Initiative. The implemented workshops were the first of a series of conferences targeted to develop a Hispanic NETWORKing Project. The key goal of the workshops was to generate a network and open discussions among the academic institutions including key personnel in higher administrative positions and the STEM women to share perspectives, obtain ideas, discuss strategies and collect their recommendations aimed to develop and implement effective policies that help primarily early-career scientists and engineers to improve their career-life balance and advancement. As result of the program strong collaborations have been established.
Continue the discussion of this presentation on the Multiplex. Go to Multiplex
Mayra Mendez-Pinero
Thank you for sharing with everyone part of your experience and for helping to increase the participation of women and latinas in STEM!
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Hello Mayra! Congratulations on your work and the grant for assistive technologies for people with disabilities! I started watching the video and recognized Cristina's voice! Cristina and Lourdes Medina (in your department) participated in the project. I think that there is a snippet of Cristina in the video. Please consider coming to the LACCEI conference this year in Peru! http://wp.eng.fau.edu/laccei2018/. Cristina and Lourdes were guests last year. Wishing you continued success!
Cristina Pomales-Garcia
Hi Renetta! It is great to see your video. In fact it was me, testing most of the products designed by students.
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Thank you Cristina! Congratulations on your video project with your colleague! I recognized your voice as soon as the video started!
Beatriz Zayas
Professor
Thank you Mayra for your interest. Your work is also a clear example of the power of women in science!!
Renetta Tull
Danielle Watt
Director of Education, Outreach, & Diversity
Hello Beatriz, thank you for sharing your work. Could you comment on the success of the program participants in achieving careers in academia since 2012? Were there challenges in having higher level administrators support this effort?
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Hi Danielle, I see that Beatriz has already addressed your question, and I wanted to add that we have seen several of the women participants advance to new ranks, e.g., tenure, associate department chair. The Chancellor of UMET was a co-PI on this project, so he was very supportive. He took on the task of connecting with VPs and chancellors within the three systems in Puerto Rico to make them aware of the project, and to share that these kinds of programs for women should be supported. We learned that higher-level administrators didn't have a problem with women participating in the program, but that actualizing some of the recommendations took a bit more effort. I think that one of the biggest things that we were able to do was to a) empower the faculty to move toward leadership, with an eye on career-life balance, and b) prepare the higher-level leaders to be ready receive and grant requests for travel to conferences to present research, modified teaching loads, etc.
Danielle Watt
Beatriz Zayas
Professor
Hi Danielle
Thank you for watching our video!
The program at PR had a great acceptance among those professors from multiple private and public universities. The two networking workshops provided them with the opportunity to network and after that many started to collaborate in research, have been invited as presenters in local conferences or have been Co-PI on new proposals.
In regard to administrators’ support, at UMET the host institution, we had full administrative support but your question was also on our mind in regard to the administration from other universities. To minimize this and as part of our workshops we invited administrators from private and public institutions for a private lunch and presentation.
Later once the project was completed we presented the findings from the survey used in the workshops, at a high education institution annual meeting in San Juan. The results summarized how the participants perceived their institution’s policy for women advancement in academia.
Danielle Watt
Renetta Tull
Danielle Watt
Director of Education, Outreach, & Diversity
Thank you Beatriz and Renetta for the response. I'm curious to learn if and how the participant's perception of their institution's policy changed post program or once they advanced to higher ranks in the institution, i.e. was it being better prepared and equipped to navigate the process of advancement or was it a change in culture or a combination?
Also, are their plans to expand the program to institutions beyond PR where women of color are underrepresented culturally and racially in addition to gender?
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Dear Danielle,
It was a combination of both. Many of the women in our project were very dedicated to their institutions, and did not plan to leave. Information and advocacy were key.
The grant ended a few years ago, so there aren't fully developed resources to scale, other than sharing what we have learned via dissemination. Our workshops included a lot of role-playing (negotiation), discussion (awareness among provosts), and attention to career-life balance (CLB). CLB was huge because there were simple things that could be changed such as not having faculty meetings in the evening, when many women faculty were take care of families. Recognition and awards also made a difference, as more faculty began to be nominated for recognitions within and beyond their institutions. There are some best practices that can be shared. This was an ADVANCE adaptation project, so there were some things that had already been implemented by UMBC that were modified for the schools in Puerto Rico. The culture was very different, so some of the best things that came out of those meetings were operating in a way that didn't "fit" traditional norms of the academy. Having a meeting for women faculty with music, sofas, recognition of their schools (flags), their achievements (posters), and having provosts in that space to share in it, along with presidents who reinforced the messaging was quite empowering.
Danielle Watt
Maria Ortiz
Congratulations for publishing this video on our past experience at ADVANCE Hispanic Women in STEM Network program. It is good to remember many great moments that we had there. I hope your video can reach your expectancy and won.
Renetta Tull
Beatriz Zayas
Professor
Thank you Dr. Ortíz.
I hope we can continue the initiated network as we stimulate further collaborations and the advancement of our women in STEM.
Renetta Tull
Cristina Pomales-Garcia
I have been able to benefit from this program and the opportunities for networking towards advancement. Thank you for the opportunity and congratulations on your effort to make an impact broadening participation of women in STEM.
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Thank you Cristina! Wishing you continued success! I will be at ASEE in Salt Lake, and LACCEI in Peru ... perhaps WEEF in New Mexico in November too!
Cristina Pomales-Garcia
Yay! We will see each other at Salt Lake City in June!
Whitney Erby
Doctoral Student
Thank you so much for presenting this video! Renetta mentioned how a simple change of meeting times can be helpful in promoting career-life balance. Given that the focus of this program is on early career scientists who may be trying to make tenure, what additional career-life balance strategies did participants find useful?
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Hello Whitney,
We had an unusual exercise where we asked participants to make a poster of their schedule for personal life and professional life - in columns, side by side, and then talk about the integration of the two. Most of the strategies included re-negotiating time and duties. For example, rising early to write for 2 hours in the morning was a best practice. Some people developed a mutual "Run and write" schedule where they would plan time to get in some physical exercise, and an hour of writing before 7 AM. Some faculty re-negotiated meeting times so that they didn't have so many "gaps" in the day, which allowed them to be more productive. They preferred schedules that gave longer breaks at the beginning or end of the day, so that their days on campus could be optimized. Moving meetings to earlier times in the day was a key factor. Another issue was sharing and acknowledging family time, including both child and elder care, and making these more connected with everyday conversation instead of pretending that they were separated and didn't exist.
Jay Labov
Thank you for producing this video to let viewers know about this very important initiative to support women faculty. One question I had from watching this video is whether the program focuses on women faculty in the STEM disciplines (as suggested by the title of the video) or if it also encompasses women from the arts, humanities, and behavioral and social sciences (while some people and organizations such as NSF consider social and behavioral science to be components of STEM), there is not universal agreement about this definition. Some segments suggest a specific focus on STEM while other segments appear to suggest that the focus of ADVANCE is broader.
Also, do you have data indicating that women in STEM are experiencing different problems than women in other disciplines, either qualitatively (i.e., some issues are fundamentally different in these various disciplines), quantitatively (i.e., women in STEM have more students who they teach or mentor, spend more time at research, etc.), or both? These kinds of data could prove very useful to more comprehensive policy- and decision making regarding the support and advancement of women in higher education.
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Dear Jay,
The program was focused on women in all STEM fields because it was an ADVANCE initiative. We had faculty in the social sciences, and the Chancellor of UMET (via outcomes from this program) sponsored (with other funds) some initiatives such as "publication/writing sessions" for faculty from all disciplines, including social sciences, nursing, communications, etc. Years ago, an NSF Director (Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr) mentioned in a meeting the the social sciences were part of the "S" in STEM. I believe that there are only a few programs at NSF that don't include social sciences --- it may depend on the representation within a demographic.
ADVANCE in general, has plenty of data related to different problems, these include time in the lab (bench scientists), being in male-dominated fields and being disrespected or not acknowledged by male colleagues, and much more. Some strong work has been disseminated by the University of Michigan: http://advance.umich.edu/climatestudies.php. Many programs, including ours, had climate studies.
Reports such as this one from MIT help with policies: http://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/.... Many universities these days seem to be using such reports as evidence for discussions that lead to new policies, or in some cases, strengthening policies that are already on the books, but had previously been ignored or underutilized.
Doris Baker
What a great surprise to see a video that also addresses women faculty conducting research. Do you have a newsletter or a network where we can sign up?
Renetta Tull
Renetta Tull
Dear Doris, Following on to Beatriz' comment, we used to have a blog, but we didn't continue it. At present, Beatriz keeps participants informed of updates via her email list, but you bring up a good point. We may consider developing a special issue with updates, that we can use to revive the blog and social media channel.
Best,
Renetta
Lorena Medina Luna
Beatriz Zayas
Professor
BakerThank you for your interest in our project currently we don’t have a newsletter but we keep each other inform of what is happening and disseminate throughout email our activities and achievements. That is However something we have considered doing.
Lorena Medina Luna
Lorena Medina Luna
This work you've been doing is so great! Thank you for sharing this video!
Beatriz Zayas
Professor
Thank you for your comments and for watching our video.
We hope in the near future we can host other workshops to include othe STEM faculties that could not participate. It generated a lot of enthusiasm and collaborations.
Further posting is closed as the showcase has ended.