Search for: All records

Mentoring interventions, particularly mentoring that incorporates networking, have been effective at meeting the professional needs of women and under-represented minority (URM) faculty. However, women, especially URM women, in STEM careers report feeling left out of networks and thus face decreased social and administrative support. The isolation of women, especially URM women, in engineering in the California State University (CSU) System is apparent in the fact that many CSU engineering departments have only a few women faculty and no more than a single URM woman faculty. Thus, despite current mentoring programs at each CSU campus, there is only a few (if any) other women within their engineering department with whom they may discuss shared experiences. As part of the NSF funded ADVANCE Partnership grant, “Kindling Inter-university Networks for Diverse (KIND) Engineering Faculty Advancement in the California State University System”, in order to address this isolation and to provide mentoring and networking opportunities for women engineering faculty in the CSU system, particularly woman who identify as URM, a series of virtual (to enable cross-campus mentoring), small group setting (to incorporate networking) mentoring events was organized. Another aspect of this initiative emphasizes foreign-born (FB) or foreign-trained (FT) women, a unique focus. Although the speed mentoring events are open to all engineering faculty in the CSU system, there is specific emphasis on those who are normally excluded from formal mentoring. In this paper, the post-event survey results which include the demographics of the participants are reported and the importance and impact of these events are discussed.