WEPAN Newsletter November 2023

Take Our Community Survey! You Could Win a Free Registration to the ADVANCE EiSCC

As WEPAN continues to grow, we want to gain a deeper understanding of the WEPAN community. Whether you’re a WEPAN member, event attendee, program participant, partner, newsletter subscriber, social media follower, or more – we want to hear from you!

Take just five minutes to share more about yourself and your engagement with WEPAN in our community survey. In addition to providing insights about the WEPAN community, your responses will help also shape our future outreach goals and programming priorities.

Everyone who takes the survey will be entered to win a free registration to the 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening, taking place in Baltimore, Maryland.

Take the survey at: https://www.wepan.org/survey. Your responses will remain confidential and will be for internal use only.

Events

The Inventor’s Patent Academy Webinar Series: Promoting Equitable Innovation

Sponsored by Qualcomm, this WEPAN webinar series will explore topics covered in The Inventor’s Patent Academy (TIPA), a free three-part course that supports current and future inventors in understanding patenting and intellectual property.

TIPA, created in partnership by Qualcomm and Invent Together, promotes equitable innovation ecosystems by providing open access to patenting information often withheld from marginalized inventors.

The first webinar in this WEPAN series on Monday, December 11, 11am-12pm ET aligns with Module 1 of TIPA and features a panel discussion with four inventors who will share their patent successes and challenges as well as strategies, tools, and tips for navigating your own patent journey. Register here!

TIPA is a six-hour course you can complete at your own pace. Each of the three modules is broken down into lessons of approximately 10 minutes, allowing for completion on a timeline that works for you. To learn more about The Inventor's Patent Academy and to take Module 1, visit https://learn.inventtogether.org/

VVS Research Webinar: Academic Motherhood and the "Child Penalty" for Women of Color in STEM

The ARC Network is excited to continue hosting members of the 2022-2023 Virtual Visiting Scholars (VVS) cohort to present on their VVS projects and discuss the implications of their findings.

Join the ARC Network on  on Wednesday, December 13th at 3pm ET as we welcome Dr. Erin Winterrowd to present her work focusing on academic motherhood and the "child penalty" for women of color in STEM.

Winterrowd’s VVS project focused on academic motherhood and the child penalty. “For my own professional development, I wanted to attempt quantitative synthesis, and I looked for a topic that had enough studies available for a summary that wasalso something I had familiarity with. The topic ended up being quite ironic, since I spent my VVS year in academic motherhood myself. It was cathartic reading about other women’s experiences as I was having similar ones.”

There was so much material to explore, Winterrowd ended up reframing her VVS proposal as a two-year project, which she is currently working on. “Gender equity in work, both in STEM and broadly, has changed a lot in the last few decades in a greatway, with much needed attention given to the diversity of women’s experiencesin STEM. We need to pay attention to these differences,” she says.

“I’m finding a number of non-significant findings that used to be significant. That could mean positive changes, or that could also mean we’re not disaggregating data or asking the right questions. What used to seem like a pretty clear-cut situation may not actually be that clear.”

Register at bit.ly/VVSWinterrowd

News

Submit a Proposal for the 2024 ADVANCE EiSCC

Proposals are now open for the 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening (EiSCC).

Since 2019, the NSF-funded ADVANCE EiSCC has served as the convening for NSF ADVANCE grantees in a format that facilitates engagement with change agents within and beyond the NSF ADVANCE community. The ADVANCE EiSCC brings together a variety of change makers from higher education, professional societies, industry, government, and non-profits in an engaged exchange of knowledge, resources, and support to drive systemic change in STEM. The 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening will take place June 2-5 at the Hilton Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland.

Attendees have an opportunity to share new research findings and exchange resources; brainstorm strategies; collaborate in novel ways; learn about avenues for funding; and demonstrate effective programs and interventions for greater collective impact.

In lieu of traditional text-based abstracts, only visual abstracts will be accepted. Accessible content is encouraged. There are several types of sessions:

• Poster Showcase: Present an innovative poster design highlighting your efforts toward equitable STEM work environments
  
• High 5 Talks: Challenge yourself to outline the highlights of your work and explain its importance – in just 5 minutes
• Experience Reports: For those on the front lines of change, engage with the audience about your well-developed and/or later-stage initiatives or research
• Early-Stage Innovations: Inform and provide feedback to works-in-progress in a less formal setting
• Symposia: Join 3-5 presenters to discuss a novel, timely, and interesting topic
• Pre-Conference Workshops: Lead a deeper look into critical topics and challenges

Read more about the session types and the submission process here. Proposals close January 5, 2024.

Participants whose proposals are accepted are required to register for and attend the 2024 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening.

Partner with WEPAN to Advance Women in Engineering

WEPAN is the nation's foremost network dedicated to advancing cultures of inclusion and diversity in engineering higher education and workplaces. We have made great progress over the past 32 years, and with your commitment and passion for equity in STEM, we can ensure that we continue our work to cultivate systemic change to include, support, and advance diverse communities of women in engineering.

If you missed #GivingTuesday, you can still take another step towards WEPAN's vision by making a contribution to an organization that reflects your passion. We at WEPAN are hard at work reaffirming our commitment to women in engineering and would welcome your financial support.

You can donate online or mail a check and a completed donation form to: WEPAN, 2001 L St. NW, Suite 500-50176, Washington, DC 20036.

With your help, WEPAN can continue to be a catalyst for change to enhance the success of women in engineering in academia and the professions.

NFPA Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge Judges

NFPA is looking for industry members to judge the NFPA Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge Design and Specification Midway Reviews in December and January. The Vehicle Challenge program is a university-level design/build competition that challenges students to redesign a traditional bicycle using hydraulics as the mode of power transmission.

The reviews are 45-minute webinar presentations with 10 minutes of Q&A from the judges. During this review, students present their initial design and mechanical drawings that illustrate the fluid power control circuits to be created for the vehicle, as well as the results from their analysis of previous designs and ways to improve performance. Judges are welcome to participate in as many Midway Reviews as their schedules permit but are not required to evaluate all 22 teams.

Contact Mary Pluta at mpluta@nfpa.com to register as a judge.

The National Fluid Power Association (NFPA) is a trade association focused on strengthening the hydraulics and pneumatics industry. With over 300 fluid power manufacturers, distributors and suppliers in its membership, NFPA works to advance fluid power education, technology and the industry as a whole.”

ERVA Open Call for Potential Visioning Events

The National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) initiative identifies bold and transformative roadmaps for engineering research directions through discussions with subject matter experts in a visioning event workshop.

ERVA is looking for societal challenges for future workshops that are:

• Ripe for broad multidisciplinary engineering research intervention;
• Emerging, nascent, and currently under-resourced concerning engineering; and
• Capable of significant societal impact (if resourced)

The Open Call for Visioning Theme Submissions questionnaire will take about 30 minutes to describe the societal challenge with enough depth for ERVA to start the due diligence. Evaluation is on a rolling basis, but priority will be given to those proposed before December 31, 2023. Submissions will be blinded and reviewed by ERVA leadership.

Collecting Feedback for a Book Chapter about WEPAN and WiE Programs

Four past WEPAN leaders (Susan Metz, Jane Daniels, and Carol Muller, and Beth Holloway) have been asked to write a chapter about Women in Engineering Programs and WEPAN.  This chapter will be included in a book about women in academic computer science and engineering, which fellow WEPAN friend and Past President Jenna Carpenter is editing.

Would you help us out by answering a few questions in the below Google Form?

1. What first interested you in joining WEPAN?
2. What influence has WEPAN had on you and your work (programs, professional development, leadership development, etc.) ?
3. If you were to read a chapter about WEPAN and Women in Engineering Programs, what would you most like to see included?

https://forms.gle/SGoa6S4ZCZEUat5C8

WEPAN Listserv

Do you have something to tell the WEPAN community? Remember that subscription to the WEPAN-L listserv is a member benefit! Share announcements, post publication opportunities, and collaborate with colleagues from different institutions and organizations on special projects.

To subscribe to the WEPAN-L listserv, visit: lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/wepan-l

Resources

Publications, reports, or communications relevant to women in engineering and STEM equity. All resources listed below are available in the ARC Network online resource library. If you need help accessing the library, please contact ARC Librarian Bethany Farmer at bethany@wepan.org.  

• "What Late-Career and Retired Women Engineers Tell Us: Gender Challenges in Historical Context" by L. Ettinger, N. Conroy & W. Barr II

"Women engineers who graduated from college in the 1970s, a time in U.S. history when women's entry into engineering seemed most promising but failed to gain traction, offer important perspectives on the challenges facing women engineers in the past and today. To that end, we surveyed 251 women engineers from that generation to understand their perspectives and experiences. We found that the challenges faced by so many of the women engineers reflect gender issues that are deeply embedded in our interpersonal interactions and social structures - so much so that progress for women in engineering has been slow despite the anticipation that as more women went into the field, things would have gotten better."

ARC Network

Funded by the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program, Awards HRD-2121468 and HRD-1740860, the ADVANCE Resource and Coordination (ARC) Network seeks to achieve gender equity for faculty in higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. WEPAN serves as the backbone organization of the ARC Network.‍

Read and Give Feedback on the Latest ARC Emerging Research Workshop Reports

The two newest reports from the ARC Network's Emerging Research Workshops have been released. The reports, "Using Big Data and Algorithms to Foster Equity in STEM" and "Cultivating Equity In STEM Through Inclusive Language," cover research and promising practices on each of the topics and suggest new directions for future work. We invite the community to share their expertise on the topics. To read the reports and share your input visit https://www.equityinstem.org/about-emerging-research-workshops.

Institutional WEPAN Membership

Want to encourage your institution to deepen its commitment to equity and excellence?

Consider becoming a 30 for 30 Institutional Champion Member. At this membership level, institutions have unlimited member representatives who get to dive into critical diversity, equity, and inclusion issues through custom workshops. These members also get the opportunity to strengthen their inclusive leadership capacity as part of the Equity and Excellence Council. Additional 30 for 30 Institutional Champion member benefits include:

• Professional Development
• Decades of resources in the WEPAN Knowledge Center
• Professional development webinars, including one featuring an invited speaker from your institution
• Free and discounted workshops, including one customized for your institution
• Free and discounted access to WEPAN’s Program Days
• Three annual convening registrations
• Communication & Networking
• WEPAN-L listserv
• Slack
• WEPAN member directory
• Social media spotlights of your institution
• Workforce
• Free and discounted job postings for your institution in WEPAN’s Career Center

For more information on how to become a 30 for 30 Institutional Member, please email membership@wepan.org.

Get Involved

Committees

We are looking for visionary members to join our committees and influence programming and member experiences. If you are interested in being a member of a WEPAN committee, please complete this survey: https://forms.gle/ZQyijAGNtPYYtNTV9

Slack Channel

Please join us on Slack to drive that connectivity across our membership during a critical time for connection. Join our Slack community today!

‍