This award provides funding to the Center for Workforce Development (CWD) at the University of Washington (UW) to conduct a path-breaking NSF Workshop to address the underrepresentation of women faculty in nanotech/nanoscience (NT/NS). The workshop will be held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) headquarters in Washington, D.C. in September 2010 and will be under the direction of Dr. Suzanne G. Brainard.
Women faculty of all ethnicities continue to be exceedingly underrepresented in STEM fields, with many U.S. university STEM departments having no minority women on their faculty at all. As an emerging, well-funded area of research that cuts across STEM disciplines, NT/NS provides an opportunity to (1) assess the representation of women in this emerging field and (2) investigate the various factors that influenced the educational and career pathways of different groups of women from a variety of STEM fields into the cutting-edge and cross-disciplinary area of NT/NS. The CWD proposes to organize and conduct a workshop to bring together social scientists, scientists and engineers to discuss the obstacles these women scientists and engineers face, to develop recommendations for effective strategies to recruit and advance women into STEM faculty in nanotechnology, and to develop a network of women faculty in nanotechology to encourage cross-institutional collaboration.
Women and Minority Faculty in Nanotechnology Workshop Summary Nanotechnology is often heralded as the Next Big Thing that will propel the nation into a bright and promising future. Yet, the promise of nanotechnology is shadowed by the grave and persistent underrepresentation of women and other minorities in the STEM workforce. It remains to be seen whether nanotechnology will suffer the same fate of traditional STEM disciplines such as physics and engineering, or if it possesses characteristics that will set it at the forefront of not only scientific progress, but progress in workforce diversity as well. By gathering female and minority nanotechnologists themselves, we gained a first-hand understanding of the particular challenges and opportunities academic work in nanotechnology presents to these groups. The workshop set out to address the lack of data by convening twenty-five women scientists with two major goals: (1) To determine if there are barriers faced by female nanoscientists/nanoengineers that are different from other female STEM faculty (2) To ascertain interest in establishing a network or professional association During the workshop the participants were asked to discuss four research questions during breakout group sessions: (1) What are the career pathways for women faculty in nanotechnology? Do women of color follow different career pathways? (2) What are the specific challenges or barriers women face in NT? And, were these different from other STEM women scientists? Are the specific challenges women of color face different than other women? (3) Did the scientists have mentors in undergraduate, graduate or post-docs? How has mentoring impacted their career? (4) Do the scientists believe that there are effective interventions that would facilitate the careers of women faculty in nanotechnology? If so, what are they? Findings The biggest challenges associated with working in nanotechnology were its interdisciplinary nature and the necessity of collaborative work. These characteristics are not typically valued or recognized by traditional academic departments. While not a gender difference per se, the isolation created by the nature of the work is further compounded by the isolation of being a woman or a racial minority in the department. Further, the emerging technology has created less-hierarchical and more collaborative structure where women seem to thrive, but where their contributions are less recognized. Overall, the challenges faced by the women nanotechnologist echoed themes from the STEM literature: compensation inequity, being at a disadvantage in dual-career relationships and child-rearing, lack of appropriate mentors, and having their research be viewed through a different lens on the basis of race or gender. Recommendations emerging from this workshop include more sex-disaggregated data collection and the establishment of an informal network for female professionals in nanotechnology. There was a particular interest in understanding gender differences in patenting and technology transfer out of research institutions as well as gender differences in funding (both amounts and sources).
