This award supports a series of Professional Skills Development workshops aimed at improving the communication and negotiation skills of female physicists. These workshops are modeled on ones initiated by the Committee on the Advancement of Women in Chemistry (COACh), and are a continuation of a previous series of workshops which have sought to address the under representation of women in physics at all levels from undergraduate students to full professors and on into prominent leadership roles in the field. These workshops are important to women scientists as they seek to achieve their full potential, advance in their careers, and reach the top ranks of their profession. The continuing workshops will contain two new aspects: 1) they will include female graduate students who are seeking permanent employment (rather than a postdoctoral fellowship) immediately following their PhD in the professional skills development workshops, and 2) there will be a workshop on advanced leadership for women who are in or advancing toward leadership positions. This award is funded through the Division of Physics and the Division of Materials Research within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
. These workshops were designed to provide women physicists with professional training in effective negotiation, communication and leadership skills, and special opportunities for networking. The workshops were made available to an additional 278 women over the past three years. Twenty-one of these participants were senior-level physicists who participated in a new leadership component to the workshop series, and another 40 women were part of a group that explored a new two-facilitator workshop model. The primary workshop goal is to produce more women leaders in physics and to help these women achieve their full potential in the top ranks of the profession. A major focus of the workshops is empowering individuals. Through professional development workshops at the APS meetings we provide postdoctoral associates, faculty, and research scientists with tools to thrive, and impress upon them the need to be visible. Through directed activities, we encourage these women to believe in themselves and their talents. Establishing a critical mass of women in prominent leadership roles is an important condition for meaningful institutional change; these workshops advance that goal. An additional focus of this workshop series was testing out new ideas for programs and new concepts for conducting the workshops. A special session for senior women physicists gave participants some basic concepts and tools to further develop their leadership skills. These participants learned about various concepts of leadership, explored what is known about gender and its role in leadership situations, and reflected on their own leadership challenges. This new leadership program involved a variety of instructional approaches, including presentation, small group discussion and experiential learning. The other test concept was a new two-facilitator model and experimenting with hosting workshops at divisional meetings, rather than the national APS meetings. The two-facilitator model combined one expert in negotiation with one expert in communications to create a two-person team that worked in conjunction the entire day. This new model was tested at two divisional meetings, both of which were at or over capacity, and successfully leveraged support from APS Divisions to help subsidize the workshops.
