Intellectual Merit: The Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN) proposes to create an online professional networking environment called "gseSpace" to serve the needs of people working to increase the participation of women in science and engineering. The gseSpace will leverage WEPAN?s Knowledge Center (WKC) with focused outreach, facilitation and dissemination activities targeted to those supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) program, Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE). This project will provide public access to enduring grant-related documents from the GSE community in the WKC database. The GSE community incorporates social science researchers, education program evaluators, educators, practitioners, policy analysts, and professional associations focused on the issue of underrepresentation. With such wide interests and perspectives, the exchange of information, mutual inspiration, and the transfer of knowledge between members of the GSE community is challenging. Abstracts, articles, and other conference-related documents are difficult to navigate and do not facilitate ongoing interaction. An online environment for supporting shared work-in-progress, results, and professional networking will create more cohesion, leverage knowledge gained, broaden experience with promising practices, and generally increase visibility of GSE-related issues. The gseSpace will also facilitate the transfer and translation of research into practice.
Broader Impacts: Researchers and other interested parties studying underrepresentation can be better sustained, strengthened, and helped to greater success through a community such as that proposed by gseSpace. Ultimately, the interest lies in greater science and engineering literacy in our society, leading to more students choosing science and engineering careers, and a more diverse workforce and faculty. This project will offer the grantee and potential-grantee community more support, interaction, engagement and communication than currently available.
Businesses across the U.S. recognize the benefits of hiring talented scientists and engineers who come from diverse backgrounds to increase creativity and innovation. Even with high demand from employers, women engineering graduates are just 20% of the graduates each year. Today, about 57% of college students are women. Why is there such a big gap in engineering and some other STEM fields? What is being done about it? There are dedicated people across the country who study this issue. They look at how gender matters in educational and career success in science and engineering. If people have been studying this issue for decades why is there still a problem? Good question. Although technology changes quickly, cultural change and institutional change take longer. A lot has been published on the topic of gender in STEM as we discover more of what does and doesn’t work. But too much information can sometimes feel like too little information if you can’t find what you are looking for. The feeling is universal but when our nation’s researchers and those whose aim it is to implement the best research can’t find what they are looking for, we all lose out. WEPAN, a 25+ year old professional organization, works to advance women in engineering. WEPAN initiated a project called gseSpace to help people across the nation find what they are looking for in the world of gender equity in Science and Engineering. They launched the "Women in STEM Knowledge Center" (WSKC) in 2013 to make sure research on gender equity in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is "findable". What is the WSKC? It’s a publicly accessible website that culls published information on gender and STEM, and organizes it along different themes so that you can find information about many large and small issues related to gender inclusiveness in science and engineering. The website is open to anyone with an internet connection in order to have the widest possible extension of this important knowledge. "Connected Advocates" are showcases on the WSKC website for current projects that want their messages to be broadly shared. You are invited to join a WSKC live webinar or watch a recorded one with leading researchers. Explore the WSKC to strengthen your own knowledge and help build the STEM workforce of the future.
