In This Issue:
- Call to Action
- MWM Shout Outs
- Women in STEM Events
- Women in STEM News
- Resources / Awards
- NEW: Mentoring Best Practices Tips
- Engage with MWM!
|
Welcoming one of our newest partners, Black Girls Code and honoring their work in "bridging the digital divide" through computer science classes, community outreach, and more. Learn more about Black Girls Code at http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ and click here to read their latest blog! |
 Our MWM team wants to give a huge shout out to the New York Academy of Sciences for their work in career development and STEM education! They are making great progress for women in STEM and have just signed on as a new partner! Learn more at www.nyas.org! |
Shout out to Academy Women for their amazing e-mentoring portal! Through this portal, they will offer mentorship to military personnel, and veterans, and their spouses. Not to mention, mentorship can be aimed growing personally or professionally with a 98% success rate. So delighted to have Academy Women as a Million Women Mentors partner! Check them out at www.academywomen.org!
|
Million Women Mentor Events & Calendar:
September 22
MWM Leadership Council Meeting
(Invite Only) September 22African First Ladies/STEM and MWM Global Announcements
October 2
Million Women Mentors
Town Hall 2
Mentoring Best Practices October 9 & 10National Diversity Women's Business Leadership Council Conference Click here for more information October 16
Partner Training Session October 21
Women in STEM Boston Conference Click here for more information December 4
Million Women Mentors Town Hall: State Partners Update to the Nation January 2015
National Mentoring Month January 8
MWM One Year Anniversary January 13
Leadership Council Meeting March 8 & 9
International MWM Announcements
|
Women in STEM
Resources/Awards:
Campaign for Science and Engineering
Improving Diversity in STEM
Pledge To Mentor
Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation Rolls Out Leadership AwardsSeries of leadership awards to recognize the leaders advancing opportunities for women in the building industry
Women in STEM:
Realizing the Potential
This white paper will give you credible insight and facts for your use. This key document was developed with our lead technology partner TCS.
Action Guide and Toolkit
Million Women Mentors
100 Women Leaders in STEM
In celebration of women role models in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), STEMconnector™ published in hard copy and online its inaugural
Teach Thought
40 Important STEM Resources For Women
Access HERE Office of Science and Technology Policy
Women in STEM: Fact sheets & Reports
Download HERE
How to find a Mentee?
STEM Mentoring
|
 |
Engage With The Million Women Mentors Movement!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Once you sign up and pledge to mentor girls and young women in STEM at
We are at the 170,000 mark in pledges to mentor, thank you! Already over 100 corporate and non-profit partners have signed on to actively engage in mentoring young women and girls in STEM skills. Look for resources and mentor opportunities on our interactive website.
|
Women in STEM
Across the entire country women and young girls are participating in programs that expose them to STEM careers. Through mentoring, our partners and top corporations are working to increase their interest and passion in STEM fields.
|
How GoldieBlox Went From A Scrappy Kickstarter To Making Important Toys For Girls (Fast Co.Exist)
It's not too often that a toy--not a video game, but a physical toy that small children play with--is greeted with rapturous excitement by adults. But when Debbie Sterling, a Stanford-educated engineer, decided to create a series of engineering-inspired toys for girls, the Internet exploded. When Sterling launched her GoldieBlox Kickstarter campaign in 2012, she was armed with little more than a prototype toy set and book that she made herself. Now, GoldieBlox is a full-fledged company, with a line of toys, a spot on the shelves of Toys "R" Us, and many thousands of customers. Here's how Sterling grew her company from scratch, overcoming countless obstacles along the way.
 | | GoldieBlox & Rube Goldberg "Princess Machine" |
Despite the enormous gains women have made in many professional fields, there is still a noticeable gender gap when it comes to science and energy. The lack of women in these science and math-based positions is detrimental to society at large. Gender and ethnic diversity is fundamental to American competitiveness -- and without it, the U.S. may never see the full-scale clean energy revolution we so desperately need.
There are a handful of examined reasons why the gender gap continues to persist. One is the pronounced lack of encouragement from an early age to explore natural sciences, engineering, programming etc. The instilled expectation that girls won't succeed in these areas leads to predictable, and disappointing results. According to US News, in 2013, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Montana saw not a single female student take the AP Computer Science test. Similar disparities hold true for AP Physics and Calculus tests -- and girls are left unprepared or uninspired for fast-paced college science courses.
Lockheed Martin donates $500,000 for girls STEM education (District Chronicles)
Girls Inc. National has received a one year, $500,000 grant from Lockheed Martin to strengthen its [STEM] programming for 500 girls ages 9-12. Lockheed Martin's new financial commitment comes on the heels of a successful 2013 pilot program, which paired program participants with Lockheed Martin mentors at five Girls Inc. locations. At the conclusion of that program, girls reported increased interest in studying STEM, positive experiences with female role models and a heightened awareness that a STEM career is a good choice for girls. "Our affiliate is thrilled to be partnering with Lockheed Martin on STEM initiatives for girls in our community," said Denese Lombardi, executive director of Girls Inc. of the Washington, D.C. Metro Area.
Hoping to boost the number of women who decide to major in STEM fields, the University of San Diego has hired eight new female professors in [STEM] with the help of a $600,000 federal grant. The hiring of the professors, who were among 17 faculty added for the fall semester, reflects an effort by USD to become a model for undergraduate institutions seeking to increase diversity and boost the number of women in STEM. The grant money was used to help with recruiting and will support them in their new jobs. "This is a very exciting development for the university," President Mary Lyons said in a statement. In report after report, companies like Apple, Google and Facebook all acknowledge that their workforces tilt heavily male. Silicon Valley companies are notoriously dominated by men, particularly in leadership roles and in jobs involving advanced technical skills. Men account for 7 in 10 workers at Twitter, for example. Many of these companies have pledged to do better - and what's heartening about this is that efforts to improve gender diversity could also wind up accelerating other positive workforce trends: namely, closing the gap between men and women when it comes to wages.
In 2010 while campaigning unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress from New York State, Reshma Saujani visited a lot of schools. That gave her a chance to observe the gender gap in technology education. At one school she saw dozens of boys in a robotics classroom, as well as a lone girl in a makeshift computer lab. "I really saw the technology divide, up close and personal," says Ms. Saujani, a former deputy public advocate for New York City. Galvanized by a newfound drive to increase opportunities for girls in computer science, she went to work to find a solution. Two years later Saujani founded Girls Who Code. The Lack of Women in STEM Is a National Security Issue (U.S. News & World Report)Attracting more women to study [STEM] isn't just an aspirational goal for education leaders and the business community - it's a "national security prerogative," according to the chief operating officer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Part of the key to overcoming that disparity, the NGA's Ellen McCarthy said, is continually showing young girls the options available to them in different fields, and engaging them in occupations that might be more meaningful. McCarthy, head of the NGA's daily business operations, said during a town hall discussion hosted by FedScoop on Tuesday that parents, teachers and the public and private business sectors all have a responsibility to push children to think outside the box when it comes to education and career pathways.
How engaging diversity made Xerox a company to copy (PBS Newshour)Xerox, a $22 billion company, is the first Fortune-500 corporation to have a female CEO. Its commitment to a diverse workforce began in the 1960s, when the founder pledged job opportunities for the African-American community. Economics correspondent Paul Solman explores how the effort to include and amplify multiple points of view has helped it survive and adapt to an ever-morphing market.
Janine Ingram (Vice President of Philanthropic Partnerships, MIND Research Institute): IX Reasons STEM Needs Title IX: Lessons From Center Court (HuffPost ImpactX) On the 40th anniversary of Title IX's passing, a White House press release stated that the number of female college athletes has increased from 30,000 to 190,000, and, not coincidentally, the proportion of female professors in science and mathematics has more than doubled. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Statistics found that women's increased participation in sports leads to increased participation in the workforce and, particularly, in high-skill, high-wage fields.. In the same way Title IX completely changed the landscape for girls in sports -- it's time for a full-court press on Girls in STEM. Rachel E. Scherr (Senior Research Scientist, Seattle Pacific University): What keeps girls from studying physics and STEM (Seattle Times) Every student returning to school this fall should have the opportunity to prepare for the rapidly growing job opportunities in [STEM]. But many students, especially women and underrepresented minorities, needlessly opt out - or are shut out - of discovering a passion or talent for one of these subjects. Physics is among the least diverse of the sciences, with only 20 percent of bachelor's degrees going to women and fewer than 10 percent to underrepresented minorities. The field needs to catch up to biology and chemistry, which have almost closed the gender gap at the undergraduate level. At the graduate-study level, all three sciences fail to attract enough women students. With nearly 16 million programmers in the world, at 10 to 15 percent women, there are more than two million female programmers -- but we never see them. Technical women remain largely invisible and behind the scenes despite important and often elite contributions. In tech, we are standing on the shoulders of giants -- men and women who have innovated and collaborated to bring us to where we are today. So many entrepreneurs, computer scientists, heroes, and creators have come before us -- and yet we are critically challenged by the lack of visibility innovators of those days.
Technovation, the longest running girls-in-tech program, launched a complete gallery of 362 mobile apps today. This gallery is a comprehensive look at the work developed by the participants in 26 countries around the world. The gallery showcases the diversity of issues girls face around the world and the technological solutions they come up with. Founded in 2009, Technovation focuses on addressing the gender diversity issues in computer programming, engineering, and entrepreneurship by mentoring girls ages 10-23 through the development of mobile apps. In 2014, Technovation was selected by UNESCO as their sole global partner for their Youth Mobile initiative.
2014 is shaping up to be the Year of Code -- everyone is talking about the importance of computer science education. We've recently seen lots of coverage about the lack of women in tech, from Google's Made with Code initiative that spurred industry giants to share their diversity data, to the recent spate of nonprofits addressing this lack of diversity. The problem is definitely very big and pressing and everyone is talking about it. But no one is really talking about what is working.
In my article on college majors, I point out that it's a mistake to treat STEM majors as a single category. Majoring in technology, engineering or math does generally lead to a well-paying job. But the sciences, especially life sciences, are a different story. The median salary for a recent graduate with a degree in biology, for example, is just $33,400, putting the major solidly in the bottom half of all fields. There's another difference between the "S" and "TEM" parts of STEM: gender. Women make up almost exactly half of all recent STEM graduates. But they make up less than a quarter of all graduates in the 20 highest-paying STEM fields, and more than two-thirds of graduates in the 20 lowest-paying majors. When I look around the offices of the Duke Biology building where I work, I see graduate students working fervently on data analysis, finishing papers, or writing grant proposals-and the majority of these students are female. Throughout my academic training, never have I felt out of place because of my gender, even though the majority of my courses were in math and statistics-classes, as new research confirms, that are dominated by men. And yet, I am often insecure about my abilities as a female scientist. I'm not alone. Female scientists across the country are leaving prestigious paths.
|
|
NEW! Mentoring Best Practices Tips
|
WALKING THE WALK: 5 Simple Actions to Recruit More Women into Manufacturing and Close the Gender Gap
The manufacturing industry is currently experiencing a shortage of women in the workforce, representing only 24 percent of the manufacturing labor force. Women are the missing element in closing the skills gap and increasing the industry's competitiveness. In order to attract more women into this industry there are several best practices that can be implemented.
TALK
One of the most significant changes manufacturers can make is to break the negative connotations associated with the industry. Sending executive and leading women to recruit next-generation workers can help break down these false perceptions. Targeting women graduates with strong STEM skills and supporting STEM education initiatives will increase the likelihood in recruiting women into the industry. Recruiters should stress to women the advantages of becoming role models as career-oriented women.
ALIGN
In an organization, senior leaders and executives must be united on the priority of promoting women in the manufacturing industry. Senior leaders should communicate their company's progress toward meeting this goal to diversify their organization. Transparency is key Read More.
|
|
