This resource is Part 1 in a series of reports focused on solutions companies can employ to improve the recruitment, retention, and advancement of technical women.

SOURCE: https://anitab.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/AnitaBorgInstitute_SolutionsToRecruitTechnicalWomen_2012.pdf?_ga=2.45521069.887651685.1510163487-874367525.1510163487

This paper summarizes research findings and insights, presenting the key advantages organizations can expect to gain by improving the balance of women in the workforce.

SOURCE: https://anitab.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Women-314.pdf?_ga=2.12680254.887651685.1510163487-874367525.1510163487

Research

Report: Anatomy of Change: How Inclusive Cultures Evolve

Sep 04, 2013

Authored by: Sarah Dinolfo Jeanine Prime, PhD Heather Foust-Cummings, PhD

SOURCE: http://www.catalyst.org/system/files/anatomy_of_change_how_inclusive_cultures_evolve.pdf

 

Help Reduce the Quit Rate for Women in STEM

In many ways, this has been the decade of STEM and women’s leadership. There are hundreds of initiatives nationwide supporting increased participation by girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs, and just as many programs and organizations advocating for women leaders.

But there’s a gap between the investment in encouraging technical careers for girls and young women and the ROI in terms of the actual number of women who make it to management-level positions in STEM. The “Quit Rate” is high, as this chart shows:

A study from the National Center for Women & Information Technology starkly illustrates the problem. Female retention numbers in STEM fields are dismal, and companies are trying to understand why, and how to change this trend.

 

‘Engineering Exiles:’ Why Are Women Leaving STEM?

I joined CCL in 2016 after a long career in Silicon Valley, where I worked in technology marketing & product management with software and networking companies. I’ve reported to VPs and CEOs who were engineers, and have always worked closely with engineering teams to define new products. There’s always been significant representation of women in staff engineer roles, but as their careers progressed, I noticed that very few moved into engineering and technical leadership roles — many women with STEM expertise ended up in marketing and product management positions instead.

These ‘engineering exiles’ were always very successful, combining technical talent with the listening and communication skills required to translate customer needs into product plans, and to work with engineers to design them.

It always left me wondering:

• Why do so many women leave technical and engineering career paths?
• Why is the quit rate so much higher for women in STEM fields than men?
• And what would it take to keep them progressing into technical and engineering leadership roles?

This dilemma came back into focus during my first month at CCL when I met one of these ‘engineering exiles’ (we have many here!), Senior Faculty Kelly Simmons. My colleague Kelly was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard early on, but she left to build a career in leadership development. Like me, she was interested in seeing how we could tackle this challenge.

 

Reducing the Quit Rate for Women in STEM

Since Kelly and I are both devotees of design thinking and lean startup methodologies, we developed our own ‘startup,’ drawing on decades of CCL research about women’s leadership and issues. We tested it with 50 women technologists at the IEEE WIE International Leadership Conference, and then we piloted it in San Jose with support from PayPal. After several pilots of Advancing Technical Women in 2017, we launched the program in 2018.

Following the pilots, our Evaluation Team surveyed participants and we interviewed program sponsors and engineering managers who sent participants to the program. A few key takeaways:

• Research matters. Technologists are driven to ask questions and demand proof. The fact that ATW content is based on decades of women’s leadership research from CCL and others made it extremely credible to this audience. We watched women’s attitudes change from skeptical to enthusiastic once they understood the research behind program concepts.
• It’s a journey. The women in the pilots were able to apply the learnings and tools over the 6-month period and could see tangible benefits over time. Many of them received promotions or expanded their staffs, and one woman even secured a coveted speaking engagement at a technical conference — and they gave full credit to ATW.
• Focus on actions, no fluff. After all, these are engineers! There were specific challenging assignments they had to accomplish in their work environment, along with longer term action plans that really made the learning stick.
• Keep the relationships going. The group established a community and network of support that they want to continue. Since most are in male-dominated work environments, this group provides a safe place to brainstorm, test ideas, and practice.

Since launching, we’ve added more sophisticated features, including an online learning platform that tracks progress and assignments, builds community, and keeps the group engaged throughout the 6 months and beyond. We also added a virtual option for the final closing session to teach participants how to be as impactful online as in person.

The Future for Women in STEM

Our goal is to expand the scope of this program for women in STEM more globally. In addition to offering the program throughout the U.S., many of the companies that participated in the pilot have large engineering populations in China and India, where technical women are even more challenged.

We also want to work with women’s leadership organizations to offer the program to their memberships. And we want to bring the Advancing Technical Women program to other technical, “hard skills,” male-dominated professions. CCL has female faculty members who are “exiles” from aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and other industries where this program could be equally valuable.

In our data-intensive, technology driven world, the need for engineering, technical, and scientific professions is growing exponentially. Our research-based approach and heritage in women’s leadership is a perfect fit — and ATW is a natural extension of our service offerings.

We’re looking forward to providing leadership training for women in STEM to make a dent in that “Quit Rate” statistic and help these women become thriving leaders and contributors.

 

SOURCE: https://www.ccl.org/blog/leadership-development-training-women-stem-careers/

UNESCO, Measuring Gender Equality in Science and Engineering: the SAGA Toolkit, SAGA Working Paper 2, Paris, 2017.

SOURCE: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0025/002597/259766E.pdf

A Path to Empowerment: The role of corporations in supporting women’s economic progress. 

Summary report of a roundtable series on women’s economic empowerment.

Nelson, Jane, Marli Porth, Kara Valikai, and Honor McGee (2015). “A Path to Empowerment: The role of corporations in supporting women’s economic progress.” Cambridge, MA: The CSR Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Corporate Citizenship Center.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not imply endorsement by the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Corporate Citizenship Center.

SOURCE: https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/sites/default/files/Path%20to%20Empowerment%20Report%20Final.pdf

“Where’s The Dial Now?” is a benchmark report that examines the current state of women in the tech & innovation community in Canada.

By quantifying the gender disparity that exists in technology today, the report helps to generate awareness and inspire people like you to take action and help drive positive change.

SOURCE: https://movethedial.com/resources

A study by a team of researchers from Dartmouth, the University at Buffalo and Carnegie Mellon University has found that gender affects an individual’s perception of women’s anxiety in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. Men are more likely than women to attribute this anxiety and self-doubt to internal factors, while women usually attribute such emotions to external factors.

The study, titled “The Effect of Gender on Attributions for Women’s Anxiety and Doubt in a Science Narrative,” was published in Psychology of Women Quarterly in February by Dartmouth postdoctoral researcher Gili Freedman, University of Buffalo associate professor of communication Melanie Green, Dartmouth film and media studies professor Mary Flanagan, Buffalo graduate research assistant Kaitlin Fitzgerald and professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute Geoff Kaufman. Kaufman has also worked at Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor lab, which designs games to spur social change.

Freedman said the study used narratives about women’s experiences in STEM to research gender-based attribution biases, focusing on how men and women may differently attribute anxieties in a STEM class. Participants in the study read one story, among a selection, about an undergraduate woman taking a STEM class.

“The narratives were reflecting women’s real-life experiences in STEM,” she said. “This particular research comes out of a series of experiments we have done using narratives.”

Flanagan said that the narratives referenced the experiences of actual undergraduate women in STEM.

“In the stories, [the female main character] expressed having anxiety or self-doubt,” Freedman said.

She added that in the stories, which all focused on women’s experiences in STEM, it was ambiguous whether the instructor harbored any biases against women. For example, in one of the stories, a professor asks all of the women in the course to stay after class for extra help, but not any of the men. After reading these narratives, the study’s subjects were asked why they believed the main female character was experiencing anxiety.

“What we found across these three studies was that women were more likely than men to think that [the character] was experiencing anxiety or self-doubt because of factors like instructor bias or being aware of stereotypes about women in STEM,” Freedman said. “Men were more likely than women to think that her anxiety stemmed from just not being prepared enough for the class.”

She added that while this was the average trend in responses, some men and women still responded differently.

Flanagan said that the study’s results, which demonstrated gender differences in reactions to the stories, were compatible with current understandings of stereotypes and other types of biases.

“There is a disconnect in male students’ understanding of the difficulties that women students face,” she said. “Men were much less likely than women to attribute the student’s anxiety to any institutional bias, professor bias or stereotypes.”

According to Flanagan, who led the research team, the study is part of a larger project funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate the difficulties women in STEM face. The project is currently in its fourth year, she said.

Flanagan and Freedmen both emphasized the importance of studying women’s experiences in STEM.

According to Freedman, there is still an underrepresentation of women in STEM and negative stereotypes about women’s abilities can affect their willingness to enter those fields.

In order to increase female representation in STEM fields, it is important to understand how people think about the presence of women in STEM, Freedman said. She added that the study’s researchers were interested in discovering whether gender impacts attributions of emotions.

Fitzgerald said the study provided an opportunity to address bias in education in a new manner.

“Much of the research has centered on how women and other minority students are affected by bias and how we can educate those students about how they are affected,” Fitzgerald said. “This research is important because it goes beyond that to attempt to increase gender bias literacy for the population in general. The question should be, ‘What is everyone else’s role in the problem?’”

Flanagan said that the goal of the research is to change the mechanisms that create bias and make STEM fields more inclusive for women.

“Women identify the problem as something that is familiar and men identify the problem as something that is a particular student’s problem,” Flanagan said. “Men are not seeing the systemic biases as much as the women are. That is something that we need to address in deeper conversations about STEM classrooms.”

She added that a large problem is the culture created by STEM classrooms that is inhospitable to women.

Fitzgerald said that in order to change this culture, the next stage of research may look into crafting narratives with micro-affirmations instead of micro-aggressions.

“We’re shifting from ‘How do we raise awareness about these negative things?’ to ‘How do we use narratives to introduce these positive welcoming experiences for women?’” she said.

 

SOURCE: http://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2018/03/researchers-study-perceptions-of-anxiety-and-women-in-stem

The ‘baby penalty’ in academe could be eased with four key reforms

The good news: Many more women than ever before are completing Ph.D.’s in the sciences. Back in 2000, when I was appointed the first female dean of the graduate division at the University of California at Berkeley, I was delighted to learn that about half of the incoming doctoral students in the biological sciences—and more than 30 percent in heavily male fields like chemistry and engineering—were women. However, I also noticed that in most of the science departments where young women were eagerly enrolling, very few of the faculty members were female.

Today we know a lot more about what happens to women in the sciences after they receive their Ph.D.’s. My Berkeley research team has spent more than a decade studying why so many women begin the climb but do not make it to the top as tenured professors, deans, or presidents. We followed thousands of graduate students through their careers and extensively surveyed and interviewed faculty members, postdocs, and administrators, both at universities and at federal agencies.

Our most important finding is that family formation damages the academic careers of women but not of men. Having children is a career advantage for men; for women, it is a career killer. And women who do advance through the faculty ranks do so at a high personal price. They are far less likely to be married with children. We see more women than we used to in visible positions, like presidents of Ivy League colleges, but we also see many more women than men who are married with children working in the adjunct-faculty ranks, the “second tier,” and one of the fastest-growing sectors of academe.

Our study also identified interventions that could help change that disheartening pattern. Some of these policies are now in place at some universities and are being promoted by some federal agencies. We are at a critical point, where the story could change dramatically: The “baby penalty” could be wiped out, or at least greatly ameliorated, by these four reforms: better child care (in many forms), effective dual-career policies, childbirth accommodations, and compliance with Title IX’s prohibition on pregnancy discrimination.

1. Better (and more) child-care options. The No. 1 complaint of mothers at most colleges and universities is inadequate, overpriced child care. It is a major reason why mothers drop out of the academic pipeline. Any reform, including private fund raising for better day-care facilities, would be welcome.

But some immediate actions can be taken at relatively low cost. At Berkeley we offer emergency backup child care for all faculty members and recently became one of the first universities to extend a highly subsidized version to graduate students and undergraduates. This enormously popular, well-vetted service can be used when graduate students need to participate in conferences, meet a deadline, or attend to any other professional obligation that mothers often must forgo.

As one doctoral student said, “Half of [my monthly income] goes toward two days of child care per week for my baby so that I can attend lectures and teach sections. That’s difficult enough. Paying for extra care is out of the question. Because the university has started to subsidize backup care, I am able to have someone watch my baby when I have big deadlines looming. I can better meet my deadlines with a little extra care and don’t have to let the quality of my work slide.”

The National Science Foundation is also on board with dependent-care programs. It has announced that NSF awards may be used to pay the salaries of temporary employees hired to replace people who take a leave of absence to meet dependent-care responsibilities. In certain circumstances, the foundation will also allow grant money to be used to pay for regular dependent-care expenses.

2. Effective dual-career policies.Young scholars almost always have to relocate to find tenure-track employment, so a dual-career couple must either live apart or hope to find two jobs in one location. Structural inequities also affect the two-body problem. Female scientists are likely to be married to male scientists, while male scientists, and there are far more of them, are likelier to have a spouse who works only part time.

One of the two bodies must defer, and that body is likely to be hers (we assume this happens with all couples, even if both members are female or male, but the federal data set only deals with married couples). According to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, 65 percent of married female Ph.D.’s acknowledged that spousal-career concerns affected their search for a permanent job, compared with 38 percent of married male Ph.D.’s.

Department chairs often say that the two-body problem is one of the thorniest they face in recruiting. Women often say it is the reason they dropped out of the science pipeline. “My husband has a job he loves,” a Ph.D. told us in our research, “but it will require that we don’t move. This limits my postdoc and career options so significantly. I think the chances of staying in the same city throughout the career and finding a tenure-track position are almost nonexistent. However, I am not sure how much I care anymore.”

Provosts make many deals, often behind closed doors, and there is no standard playbook. Some offer split positions to a dual-
career couple, but more are likely to play the “thirds” game, in which the university and the hiring department each offer a third of the salary to a second department to hire a “trailing” spouse.

There are no easy answers to the two-body problem and the havoc it wreaks on women’s careers. At a minimum, a senior administrator should take charge of finding suitable employment for a trailing spouse and make sure the university’s policies are clearly and publicly stated.

3. Childbirth accommodations. In the past decade, most colleges and universities have moved toward flexible childbirth policies for faculty members (and many of those policies cover adoption as well). Stopping the tenure clock for mothers for a year is now fairly standard, although not always for fathers. Paid maternity leave is also the norm for mothers but not for fathers. In our study of member institutions in the Association of American Universities, 58 percent reported that they offered at least six weeks of paid childbirth leave for mothers, but only 16 percent provided at least one paid week for new fathers.

Many institutions offer some form of relief from teaching for childbirth, usually a semester. A very few, including the University of California, offer a part-time pre-tenure track for working parents. Workplace flexibility for both new mothers and fathers is critical. That could include paid parental leave, relief from teaching (in the UC system we offer a semester of teaching relief to new fathers and two semesters to mothers), stopping the tenure clock, and part-time work arrangements (with a right to return to full time).

4. Compliance with Title IX. The most vulnerable years of a female scientist’s career are the earliest: the graduate-student and postdoc years. The greatest
leak in the science pipeline occurs before women obtain their first tenure-track job, and the major reason is childbirth. Specifically, according to the NSF survey, married mothers are 35 percent less likely than married fathers to obtain a tenure-track job. Single women without children, on the other hand, are almost as likely as men to get that job.

Graduate students and postdocs are the most likely to drop out, yet they receive little support and few benefits. Only a few institutions offer them paid leave for childbirth, or any other benefits. And only those postdocs who are officially considered employees receive benefits at all.

Universities are required to comply with Title IX for all graduate students and postdocs who receive federal funds. But few students know that they are protected against pregnancy discrimination under Title IX, and many universities seem unaware as well. When I give talks to various groups throughout academe, and ask who in the audience knows that Title IX includes pregnancy discrimination, only a few hands go up.

Properly enforced, the Title IX provisions fill the shortfall in campus family-friendly policies. Colleges and universities are in violation of Title IX if they fail to allow pregnant mothers a reasonable period of leave for childbirth or fail to guarantee that graduate students can return to their former positions as teaching assistants or postdoctoral fellows after maternity leave. Recent federal efforts to enforce compliance suggest that this Title IX protection will soon be better known.

Family-friendly policies make a difference. At the University of California, we have seen tremendous shifts since we developed the UC Family Friendly Edge program a few years ago. More than twice as many of our female assistant professors have children now as in 2003. Faculty members are making use of accommodations for childbirth at an unprecedented rate, and graduate students are routinely stopping the clock and taking paid maternity leave. At Berkeley we now get good ratings for being family friendly. Our policies are used as recruitment tools.

Many other institutions, too, have important success stories to tell. Academe, long the epitome
of workplace inflexibility, is 
gradually becoming a benchmark for progress.

However, the federal agencies that support science and universities still have a great deal of work to do. In collaboration they could guarantee a baseline of family-friendly policies across the academic world that would encourage women to fulfill their dreams in science. We cannot afford to lose a major investment in our best and brightest minds.

 Mary Ann Mason is a professor in the Graduate Division and co-director of the Berkeley School of Law’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author, along with Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Marc Goulden, of the recently published Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower(Rutgers University Press). The book’s website is Dobabiesmatter.com. See also Toolsforchangeinstem.org for video presentations of their findings.

 

SOURCE: https://toolsforchangeinstem.org/how-to-level-the-playing-field-for-women-in-science/

Put an end to the costly workplace isolation experienced by many women by clustering them on teams and improving the promotion process.

Chances are, most people have experienced an “only” moment. Ours included being the only Jewish kid in the class as The Merchant of Venice was being discussed and plans for Christmas reviewed, and being the only woman and person of color in a room full of older men and about to tell the group that they needed to shift their strategy.

All of these experiences brought with them anxiety, pressure, and a sense of being on the spot: if we said or did the wrong thing, stereotypes would get reinforced or prejudices confirmed. Other people, we recognize, experience far worse.

For women, being an “only” in the workplace is endemic. Twenty percent of the women in our latest Women in the Workplace report said they were commonly the only person of their gender in the room or one of very few. The figure is far higher in some sectors such as technology and engineering. For women of color, that number rose to 45 percent. For men, it was just 7 percent.

These statistics, from a study of 64,000 employees and 279 companies in North America, are a sobering gauge of how frustratingly slow progress is toward gender equality in most companies. In the past five years, the proportion of white-collar women joining companies has risen steadily to reach near parity with men. But female representation still diminishes along the corporate pipeline, and in the C-suite it is stuck at one in five.

The more encouraging news is that those same statistics point to a potentially forceful way to break through: say no to “onliness.”

We know women are more likely to experience discrimination in the workplace than men. But the study shows the odds are higher still when women find themselves alone in a group of men (exhibit). They are far more likely than others to have their judgment questioned than women working in a more balanced environment (49 percent versus 32 percent), to be mistaken for someone more junior (35 percent versus 15 percent), and to be subjected to unprofessional and demeaning remarks (24 percent versus 14 percent). If they are treated like this, no wonder they get overlooked for promotion.

Exhibit

Banishing onliness does not replace the goal of gender parity in the C-suite nor the need for a more complex strategy to achieve it. But our research suggests it will diminish some of the barriers that hold women back. Importantly, it is also a relatively simple goal toward which visible progress can start today with a few practical measures, such as the following:

• Recognize that one is not enough. Forty-five percent of all men and 28 percent of women in the survey reported that if one in ten leaders is a woman, that means women are relatively well represented. These beliefs clash with the experiences of the onlys—suggesting how important it is to shift those perceptions. Two women is the bare minimum; better yet, many more.
• Build critical mass instead of spreading women leaders too thinly. Leadership teams, project teams, agile squads, and many other groupings of people are being formed all the time. Our research strongly suggests that it is preferable to assemble teams comprising several women rather than try to place one woman on every team. A higher concentration of women in some groups could, in the beginning, strip others of any women at all. This is far from ideal, but it does at least signal the aspiration and underscore the continued need to boost the number of women across the organization.
• Review processes for making promotions and filling vacancies. If the proportion of women at entry level has risen and if, as our research consistently indicates, women leave their companies at the same rate as men, then there must be a growing proportion of experienced women building up in the pipeline. Find them, help them advance, and enlist them in the effort to overcome onliness.
• Use the CEO transition period. In separate research, our McKinsey colleagues found that more than two-thirds of chief executives replace at least half of the members of their top teams within two years of taking office. These moments of change represent a great opportunity to address the “only” problem, but too often it becomes an opportunity forgone: the proportion of women in management in the senior teams that new CEOs reshuffled increased by only two percentage points to 14 percent.

A word of caution: We do not want to suggest women onlys never succeed. On the contrary, plenty do. And plenty feel supported in their work and ambition. That said, the research shows they are more likely to contemplate leaving their jobs (26 percent) than other women (17 percent) and employees overall (19 percent).

And our research reveals how to bring the “only” population into line with others in terms of job satisfaction and intent to leave. Sponsors who give them stretch assignments, highlight their good work to others, and advocate on their behalf for new opportunities move the needle most. Middle managers are naturally positioned to be the first line of change.

This speaks to the importance of making a compelling case for gender diversity that all managers hear and investing in more employee training to overcome the biased views—sometimes held by women as well as men—that keep women back. Both have emerged as constant themes in our research over the years.

We recognize that achieving gender parity in the workplace depends on a targeted set of actions that will differ by industry and company and that companies worldwide are making considerable efforts to change the status quo. But to inject some adrenaline into all those efforts, why not build strength in numbers?

This article originally appeared in the October 23, 2018, print edition of the Wall Street Journal as “Let’s Say No to ‘Onliness.’”

The article also appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s website, wsj.com, under the title, “How to overcome the isolation of women in the workplace.”

SOURCE: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/gender-equality/one-is-the-loneliest-number?cid=eml-app