Building the Sisterhood of Science

Residential Programs: Successful Intervention Strategies to Encourage Girls to STEM

I am the direct beneficiary of outreach programs to encourage girls to pursue opportunities in the STEM arena.  My participation in two specific programs, NASA's Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program (NASA SHARP) and UC Berkeley's Womyn in Science and Engineering (WISE) residential living program, prepared me to complete a bachelor's degree in environmental science from UC Berkeley.  Gender specific programming is necessary to open the pipeline for more women in the STEM professions.  The earlier you build a girl's confidence in math and science, the further and faster she can go in building her career.  In particular, gender specific residential based STEM programs provide girls with the personal and professional support to build lifelong networks.

In 2001, I was selected to participate in NASA's Summer High School Apprenticeship Research program for women and ethnic minorities.  The program was completely free; room, board, and transportation were provided in addition to a stipend.  For approximately ten weeks, incoming high school seniors were placed in research groups at the University of Michigan.  I worked with Dr. Keolian at the Center for Sustainable Systems to conduct a life cycle assessment of a re-manufactured engine.  It was such an exciting research endeavor!  In addition to lab work, students had a daily morning seminar about STEM careers, site visits on the weekends, and social programming.  The students lived together in college dorms which allowed for intense bonding.  I made lifelong friends and colleagues that continue to support me today.  Early in my career, thanks to NASA SHARP, I developed the skills and confidence in science which ultimately earned me one of the few spots as an out-of-state student at UC Berkeley.

Since I had such a positive experience with NASA SHARP, my father encouraged me to apply to live in Berkeley's WISE dormitory for female students pursuing STEM majors.  Students attended weekly seminars connecting them to STEM faculty and research opportunities.  Many of the students were taking the same difficult math, science, and engineering classes, so we studied together and supported each other through these challenging courses.  I started at Berkeley as a geology major, but the demands of the very hard science courses proved very tough for me.  I considered switching to an easier social science degree, but my girlfriends encouraged me to stick it out in science.  Today, the women I met at WISE continue to be my best friends and support me tremendously in my professional life.

The power of the female bond cannot be underestimated.  As women seek to break the glass ceiling in male dominated fields of science and engineering, they break through more easily when supported by other women, especially their peers.  Residential programs literally provide women the safe space to share their challenges and support each other to overcome hardship.  The informal space of a collegial environment allows the opportunity for conversations that may not arise in more formal programs.  Living together allows women to connect in unique ways.

As advocates of women in STEM explore options to close the gender parity gap, they should consider the power of gender specific residential programs.  Many college campuses have women in science and engineering residential programs.  Advocates can explore how these programs can be enhanced. Where such dorm programs do not exist, companies and philanthropists can consider making long-term capital investments to endow buildings designated for women in STEM.  In addition to college dorms, advocates can create residential programs for high school girls such as summer programs. Building communities of the Sisterhood of Science will provide young women the necessary support systems to excel in their careers.

Silicon Valley: Take on Your Next Challenge of Innovating Diversity in the Workplace

Silicon Valley is the place of endless possibility. The birthplace of new technologies that are directly impacting the way people live around the world. Change moves very fast here, unlike the public policy processes of other powerhouse places like Washington, D.C. In fact, in many regards, the innovation happening here is far ahead of American laws and policies, and actually sets the tone for their creation. Many of the creative geniuses here like to attack a problem quickly, but with an innovative mindset that results in a lasting impact. The most recent obstacle pervasive throughout the Valley is its lack of diversity. However, this challenge is also the Valley's greatest opportunity to continue to reform the way America does business.


In recent months, most of the leading technology companies in Silicon Valley have collectively acknowledged a major challenge their industry is experiencing overall. The tech leaders have publicly acknowledged the lack of diversity in their companies' employees. Moreover and fortunately, these public acknowledgements come with the recognition that this is a serious problem, and that the company is ultimately suffering from its dearth of diversity. Silicon Valley does not run from problems. It attacks them head on and finds the most effective solution. I am eager to see how Silicon Valley innovates diversity in the upcoming months and years. 

Fixing the diversity dilemma has no single solution, and can't be cured with the development of a new app or upgrading a tech product. The solution must be multifaceted and include short-term and long-term strategies. On the whole, tech companies must not only focus on recruitment and retention, but also on how the company overall values its commitment to diversity.

Continue to collect data to get a deep understanding of how the diversity challenge exists in your specific company. Offer employees the opportunity to share candid feedback about their work experience in regards to diversity through regular anonymous surveys or focus groups. Seriously evaluate this feedback and enact what changes are feasible.

Additionally, short term tactics can include enhanced recruitment efforts to find new candidate pools. This may mean partnerships with minority organizations or schools from underrepresented communities. Make special efforts to recruit diverse candidates for upcoming internship programs. This may also look like a revised internal reference system that removes traditional barriers for talented candidates that don't necessarily come from the top schools or other privileged traditional recruitment pools and social networks. Scholarship funds or partnerships with established nonprofits are a great investment.

Short-term Strategies

Immediately, a company can actually improve its numbers in the short run through a number of tactics. Number one, focus on the retention of current employees who come from diverse backgrounds. Support them with employee resource groups, mentoring, and professional development opportunities. Companies can make sure they have the best maternity and paternity policies to entice employees to stay. Similarly, companies can provide resources and programs to on-ramp women who may have left the workforce due to child rearing. What diversity best practices has your company not yet utilized or could be doing better? Hire new staff soon to help you explore these questions.

Keep an ongoing conversation about diversity within your organization. Host events to celebrate diversity and encourage education and awareness among all levels of staff. These can be round-table discussions, films, receptions honoring historical months and events, or conferences.

Companies can consider industry-wide partnerships, coalitions, or working groups to work together to improve the tech industry overall. Sharing data and resources collectively can yield a greater impact. Commission a multilateral research study to explore system wide best practices that companies can undertake. 

As annual strategic planning, board meetings, marketing, and budgeting processes begin, make sure diversity is on the agenda and significant time is dedicated to its discussion. All top company leaders need to be included in this conversation. Companies need to determine long-term plans to address diversity in a comprehensive way. What exactly are the short-term and long-term diversity goals for your organization? What financial and human resources will you dedicate to achieving such goals within certain deadlines? How does your company value diversity in a comprehensive way, beyond just statistics about diverse employees, but across all aspects of your organization, from supply chains to potential customers? As I mentioned in a previous post, the United Nations has recently created a system-wide plan of attack to improve gender parity among its employees. Tech companies can adapt this model to achieve their own diversity goals.

If there is an industry ready, willing, and able to take on the challenge of diversity in the workplace, it is high tech. Already, it has revolutionized the workplace, and perhaps diversity will be its greatest new innovation.

Tech Companies: Look to the UN to Improve Diversity

I'm grateful to the many tech companies that are publicly sharing their diversity data. Collecting dis-aggregated data is definitely a major starting point to addressing the problem of the lack of diversity. Moreover publicly acknowledging your numbers, especially when they're less than ideal, is definitely a laudable effort. Tech companies can follow the lead of the United Nations (UN) in implementing new strategies to improve diversity. 

Increasing diversity among an organization's workforce requires a multifaceted approach of recruitment and retention. The United Nations (UN) has also had a poor track record of retaining women in top leadership positions. However, in 2012 the UN took a bold step in committing to a new policy, the UN system-wide Action Plan (UN SWAP), to set goals and measure progress towards the goals of gender equality and the empowerment of women. Tech companies can implement their own SWAP policy to set specific diversity goals and define actionable strategies to achieve such goals.

The UN-SWAP provides a comprehensive framework to hold UN institutions accountable for mainstreaming gender perspectives into all aspects of their work, laying out guidance of how they might go about it and ensuring that women are represented in equal numbers at all levels and in all the work of the UN whether it is peace-building, conflict resolution and mediation or procurement of gender-specific bulletproof vests for police and military contingents to ensuring adequate financial resources for programs dedicated to gender equality. Its 15 Performance Indicators, which provide a common understanding, method and progressive sliding scale for all UN entities to monitor progress towards the goal of gender equality, are organized around six main elements: strengthening accountability; enhancing results-based management; establishing oversight through monitoring, evaluation and reporting; allocating sufficient human and financial resources; developing and/or strengthening staff capacity and competency in gender mainstreaming; and ensuring coherence/coordination and knowledge information management at the global, regional and national levels. Moreover, and similar to the needs of a large multinational company, the UN-SWAP allows an organization to specifically track progress in individual departments and divisions.

Adapting the 15 SWAP indicators, companies can set their own goals, time lines, and strategies to achieve their diversity goals. While the UN-SWAP focuses on measuring gender, companies can modify it to address their broader definitions of diversity, which include race, disability, sexual orientation, age, etc. The UN-SWAP model provides tools to increase the recruitment and retention of employees from underrepresented communities. However, since it is a comprehensive approach to diversity, it also can serve as a way for companies to look at how they value diversity across their entire organization, from suppliers to untapped customer demographics.

The private sector has finally accepted the concept that increased diversity often yields increased profits and a more talented workforce. I commend the many tech companies for taking the first step by publicly acknowledging their current challenge. I encourage them to take the next step and consider the UN-SWAP as a new solution to achieving their diversity goals.

More Info:

A United Nations Accountability Plan to Empower Women and Further Gender Equality

Original post from https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140811210031-23081378-tech-companies-look-to-the-un-to-improve-diversity?trk=prof-post

Ten Years Ago Today I Realized My Vocation

 *The following may contain triggering language to survivors of violence*

As I get dressed up to go out and celebrate Halloween tonight, I sadly remember how after a night of similar festivities ten years ago changed my life forevermore....

Ten years ago, I awoke to my passion in life.  I realized my vocation was feminism.  For the past ten years, I have dedicated my career and personal mission to advancing the status of women in the world.  For the next decades of my life, I vow to continue to strive for those goals.

I was a sophomore and the fall of 2003 was my first semester being a resident assistant (RA).  On Saturday night, the all male dorm had a Halloween party. I was not officially on RA duty that night, but I went to celebrate.  I saw two of my female residents at the party and talked to them.  When I saw them again on Sunday morning, all of our lives changed.

I don't remember exactly how I was notified, but on Sunday morning, I was informed that two of my female residents were raped that following night.  I was close with these two women.  I knocked on their door, and walked into a dark room of heavy sadness.  The two rape survivors and a few of their close friends were sitting on the floor in silence.  The lights were off.  It felt as if someone had died and we had just come from a funeral. I sat down on the floor with them.  All I could do was just sit there and be with them.  Eventually, they shared their tragic details with me.

The women had been to the hospital, but one of them was still in pain.  Official RA policy restricted me from personally driving her in my car to the hospital.  But, I called up the RA chain and was given permission to go back to the hospital with them.  I waited for her in the emergency room.

I was in shock.  I was overwhelmed.  This was the first time in my life I was exposed to the violence women and girls disproportionately experience due to their sex.  How did this happen?  I knew one of the perpetrators.  He was in one of my classes, and I frequently had to see him after this case.  I don't think he knew I was involved with his situation.  He seemed like a good guy before this happened. I was shocked he was the rapist.

There was only so much I could do to help these two survivors.  The police were not helpful, and the women did not feel supported as they were interrogated.  How did I live in a world where such violence was a common reality?

Sadly, I soon found out that many of my other girlfriends and sorority sisters were also survivors of rape and sexual assault.  I felt deeply compelled to do something about this issue.  After this experience,  all of my volunteer and extracurricular activities were related to feminism.  I should have been a gender studies major, but ended up pursuing an M.A. in Applied Women's Studies at Claremont Graduate University.  The past seven years of my career have been working in the field of gender equality.

Earlier this week, I met up with a girlfriend in her early twenties who is trying to figure out her passion in life.  I shared this story with her.  For better or worst, through this experience, I clearly found my passion in life.  I am deeply grateful to these rape survivors and all the others who have shared their story with me.  I am so inspired by the incredible power survivors have to reclaim their lives and not give up. 

For those still searching for your passion in life, that's OK.  Be patient.  You never know where or when you will learn what it is.  I suggest volunteering or getting involved with different organizations and causes.  You need to learn what you hate to help figure out what you love.  Take new classes, and try to learn new skills.   Check out this previous blog post to find more resources for discovering your passion.

I can't help but end on an uplifting, perhaps cheesy note.  This video by Beyonce on World Humanitarian Day at the United Nations is one of the most inspiring videos I have ever seen.  I wish you all the best in finding and living your passion!

Resources for Rape and Sexual Assault

 Rape and Incest National Network

Bay Area Women Against Rape (the organization that provided resources to these survivors, and that I eventually volunteered with)

Break the Cycle

HollaBack 

V-Day 

National Network to End Domestic Violence

Young Women Gave Us the Right to Vote

Women's Suffrage Monument in the Rotunda 

Ninety-three years ago today, women in American finally won the right to vote.  On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution became law and declared "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."  To date, the Equal Rights Amendment has not passed, so the Nineteenth Amendment is the only Constitutional protection explicitly including the term "sex."

The fight for women's right to vote began in 1848 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls Convention.  However, it took 72 years of activism to successfully achieve suffrage.  Young women such as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns carried the torch that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony first lit.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were American students who met in London while protesting with the Pankhursts, Britain's suffrage movement.  They were inspired by the militant tactics of the Pankhursts which included mass public protesting.  Upon returning to the United States, they joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).  NAWSA was using traditional lobbying methods to advocate for suffrage.  Alice and Lucy thought these strategies were ineffective, so split and formed the National Woman's Party (NWP).

If you pass by the White House today, seeing protestors in front of it is a common sight.  However, the first political organization in the United States to picket the White House was the NWP, founded by young Alice Paul.  The NWP still exists today and you can become a member!

The women picketing the White House used nonviolence, and stood for hours in the cold, well dressed, holding banners with political messages.  At first President Wilson tolerated them, but not once the nation moved into World War I. Alice, Lucy, and the young women leaders of the NWP decided to still picket even through the country was at war.  Not much later, the suffragists were arrested on the bogus grounds of obstructing traffic.

The women were sent to the Occoquan Workhouse where they were treated poorly as common criminals.  The prisoners, including Alice and Lucy, went on extended hunger strikes.  They were violently force fed, with tubes painfully shoved down their throats.  Once the public learned of this brutality, Wilson had no choice but to support suffrage.  While not entirely historically accurate, a recommended film to learn more about this is Iron Jawed Angels featuring Hillary Swank.  You can also visit the Sewall-Belmont House & Museum in DC or the Alice Paul Institute in New Jersey to learn more about Alice Paul.

Thanks to the sacrifice of young women activists such as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, YOU can vote! Women in America have only been able to vote for less than 100 years, so use your right and vote in all elections, from municipal to presidential.  Women voters make or break candidates.  In every presidential election since 1980, a gender gap has been apparent.  In 2012, women voters favored the successful candidate Barack Obama ten percentage points over Mitt Romney.  Women in the United States are 51% of the population, 53% of voters, but hold less than 20% of elected offices in America.  Let's change those statistics.

Alice Paul was 35 years old when the Nineteenth Amendment passed.  Alice and Lucy are role models to show us you do not need to wait until you finish school or have decades of experience to start changing your country and the world.  The fight for women's equality is not complete.  What torch will our generation carry?  The movement begins today!

So You Want to Be an Adjunct Professor?

Last year, I had the great honor to become an adjunct professor at American University and Trinity Washington University.  This semester, I am excited to teach "Gender, Power, and Politics" at American University and "Women and Leadership" at Trinity Washington University.  So what exactly is an adjunct professor and how do you become one? 

From an undergraduate student's perspective, they generally don't know the difference between full time or adjunct faculty members.  Basically, an adjunct professor is a part-time professor who is not on the tenure track.  You don't necessarily have to have a PhD. You are hired to teach a certain class for one semester, and are not necessarily guaranteed future employment. You generally do not receive benefits and most adjuncts are paid less than $5,000 per class.  For all the hours you spend teaching, grading, planning, and doing office hours, this is a job you do for the love of it rather than for money.  However, the adjuncts at American University recently unionized, so I am excited to learn more about the potential professional development opportunities and pay increases I can receive.  As universities and colleges nationwide are experiencing budget cuts, more and more school are hiring adjuncts, so more teaching opportunities exist for your taking.

Know What You Want

As with anything in life, I strongly believe in the power of knowing what you want far in advance of it actually happening.  For many of life's great accomplishments, you must dream your dream for many years, and take baby steps along the way to build your path. For example, in graduate school, I always knew I eventually wanted to teach, and participated in my school's Preparing Future Faculty program.

Know the Right People

I knew that many Washington, DC schools had adjunct opportunities, but I just didn't know how to connect to them, and thought I had to wait until I was older with more experience. However, one day I randomly received an email from a friend who used to teach saying her school needed someone last minute.  I asked if you needed a PhD, or just a master's.  She said all you needed was a master's degree.  She recommended me, I quickly interviewed, my experience spoke for itself, and I was hired.

My other teaching opportunity randomly came through LinkedIn.  A professor I did not know invited me to speak to her class.  The students ranked me as their favorite guest speaker that semester.  The professor and I began a professional relationship, and she gave me free executive coaching.  When she was thinking about creating a new class, she invited me to apply to teach it.

All of my friends who are adjuncts all knew someone where they applied, and did not apply cold.  The chair of a department generally does the hiring, so they are the right people to know.  If you are not yet connected to an academic community, create those relationships now.  Go to events on campus.  Offer to be a guest speaker.  Meet with professors for informational interviews.  Introduce yourself to department chairs months before the semester starts and suggest classes you can teach.

Also know that many adjunct opportunities arise right before a semester starts.  Look through the schedule of classes.  If a class does not have a professor's name attached to it, they are probably still looking for someone to teach it.

Know Your Stuff

So in addition to knowing what you want and knowing the right people, to be an adjunct, you have to know your stuff!  You really need to be an expert in your field.  You generally have a have a relevant graduate degree.  I have an M.A. in Applied Women's Studies.  Prior teaching experience or working with students is valued.  Publications definitely help.  As academia begins to value scholar practitioners more and more, having significant professional experience and demonstrated leadership in your field is important.

Own your expertise! I became an adjunct professor when I was 28.  You don't have to wait until you have decades of work experience to become an adjunct professor.  While it is a demanding job, teaching is one of the most rewarding professions.  Higher education needs more committed people wanting to teach!

More information about adjunct professors

Follow the adventures of my friend Michael Rodriguez as he follows his passion to teach architecture in Guatemala- Arch Abroad

Adjunct Project 

Adjunct Nation

Adjunct Professor Online