The National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women's Health, with the American Society for Cell Biology, will convene a meeting focused around the scientific societies and their committees concerned with promoting women's careers. There will be 200-300 participants consisting of a core of about 50 people nominated by scientific societies representing all life science and related disciplines, and the remainder to be filled through open registration on a first-come basis. Participants will share strategies, successes, and failures in promoting the careers of women in the sciences. The meeting will have a minimum of formal presentations; the majority of the sessions will be interactive. The expected outcome will be new ideas to be taken back to and implemented by the participating societies to promote the scientific careers of women. In addition, the assembled resources for women's careers, described below, would be posted on an appropriate web site. The societies to be involved would be those whose members are Ph.D. level scientists who might reasonably apply to NIH for support. These include not only the traditional biomedical and behavioral areas but the non-traditional areas such as mathematics, physics, and engineering - where NIH is reaching out to include such disciplines in the research it supports. The meeting would not attempt to address issues unique to the careers of scientists who are M.D.'s. These could be addressed by a possible future meeting. The career stages to be considered would span undergraduates through full professor or equivalent, including how such senior individuals achieve national recognition. Careers in academic, industry, government and elsewhere would be considered.
