The Elsevier Foundation

The European Commission's recent public consultation on strengthening the role of women in science yielded professional development feedback: the need for career models and pathways; balancing career aspirations and family responsibilities; childcare issues and costs, mobility, dual career couples, and returning after career breaks. The Scenario Toolkit for Advancing Careers in Science targets this call to action to help European women scientists navigate the complex relationships between events and decisions that shape a scientist's professional development through the doctoral and postdoc stages. Portia , a UK-based non-profit, will pilot the scenario method through workshops delivered with two partners; the Technical University Berlin and Tel Aviv University. Portia's scenario toolkit moves beyond traditional mentorship to provide an innovative new strategy for improving the career success of female scientists and engineers.

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the University of Nebraska aims to retain women scientists by improving research productivity and promoting critical networks through a model STEM writing retreat. A week-long, multi-disciplinary, multi-rank writing retreat at the University of Nebraska (UNL) will be offered to STEM faculty across the "Big 10" universities. With a concerted focus on writing success and social connections, this program has the potential to serve as a model that can be easily replicated across institutions and disciplines to help retain STEM women in academia.

Over the last years, optics research has become an indispensable part of daily life. Fiber optics for telecoms, medical imaging and cancer research, optical parts in cars, computer and 3D screens are at the core of the world's technical infrastructure. This interdisciplinary proposal from Tunisia aims to orient young women scientists in the dynamic and rapidly evolving field of optics and photonics while providing them with professional development skills and a deeper understanding of what is needed to succeed as a woman scientist. The ten day summer school in optics is a partnership between the University of Carthage's Engineering School of Communications , Tunisia and Philipps University from Marburg, Germany and offers recent Tunisian and German graduate students with scientific orientation, career coaching and international exchange to lay the groundwork for a successful scientific career.

While women comprise roughly half the US work force, they hold just 24% of STEM jobs according the Department of Commerce. Whether the root causes lie in a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, or a lack of family friendly flexibility, the resulting attrition in the academic pipeline means that the US is halving its potential for innovation. The Elsevier Foundation New Scholars program has focused on the holistic, work-life dimension of the STEM workplace including dependent care, dual career relationships, mentoring and travel to professional meetings. The Association of Women in Science (AWIS) will collaborate with the New Scholars program to leverage best practice testimony to impel systemic change in the global STEM workplace. Through an international work-life satisfaction survey and a New Scholars Roundtable, AWIS aims distill recommendations into a report that will serve as an action plan to help employers, working women, and policymakers identify, create and sustain systemic changes.

An Elsevier Foundation New Scholars 2010 grant has enabled the continued support of twelve regional and discipline-specific prizes for the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD). The OWSD Young Women Scientists in Developing Countries awards will be awarded to a young woman scientist in each of the four regions of the developing world (Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East) to a total of three $5,000 prizes per region in biological sciences, chemical sciences, and the physical and mathematical sciences. The expanded prizes will ensure that talented young women scientists in developing countries are recognized for excellence within their own disciplines and help to promote the overall participation and recognition of women scientists in the developing world.

A 2010 Elsevier Foundation Grant has made it feasible for the OWSD to undertake a five country assessment of emerging and developing countries offering new and valuable data on the participation of women in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) for countries with highly accelerated growth in the research arena. In addition to South Korea, India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, existing qualitative and quantitative research from the US and EU will be compared. The results should offer significant value to build program to improve status, shift policy and develop new programs based on real data and statistics.

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the expansion of TWOWS' recently launched prize awards from one young woman scientist in each of the four regions of the developing world (Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East) to a total of three $5,000 prizes per region in biological sciences, chemical sciences, and the physical and mathematical sciences. The expanded prizes will ensure that talented young women scientists in developing countries are recognized for excellence within their own disciplines and help to promote the overall participation and recognition of women scientists in the developing world.

The Five College system which includes the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire and Amherst colleges, has proportionately more women scientists and engineers with children than other US universities (72% at the Five Colleges vs. 42% nationally). This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the Five College system to educate early-career STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Medicine) women about the critical importance of travel for professional advancement through biannual educational seminars, post-doc/faculty travel mentoring networks, dependent care travel funding and childcare support advocacy to professional societies and conference organizers. This project aims to make the need for professional travel childcare support "visible" and advocate for future conference organizers to take responsibility for on-site childcare.

The University of Groningen's Special Childcare Program targets ad hoc situations (a sick child, travel to conferences, and parental participation in international projects) as well as childcare for conference participants and temporary guest lecturers tackling a clear and present 'care gap', which prevents women scholars from maximizing their professional participation, travel, career development and competitiveness. At 14%, the percentage of women professors at the University of Groningen is only slightly higher than the Dutch average. The Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the University of Groningen to take a concrete steps to help recruit, develop and retain more female talent.

Supported by an Elsevier Foundation grant, UCLA Los Angeles (the largest campus of the largest public university system within the US) has created an advocacy and travel grant action plan to confront family-related barriers to women's academic career progress in science, health and technology. UCLA will establish a five-member senior female and male faculty Work Group for a Family-Friendly Academy to maximize the use of existing policies to increase the retention of women STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, Medicine) faculty and alleviate some of the stress associated with professional travel while caring for young children. In addition, 25-30 Travel Childcare Awards will enable women STEM faculty to attend professional conferences, meetings, workshops and symposia critical for the exposure and recognition of research, networking and solidifying career objectives.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used by the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) to develop an educational/support program, including a toolkit with supplementary resources and extended coaching to enable AWIS' 51 chapters around the county to help early-to-mid career women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learn to effectively manage their personal and professional lives. Building on an established network, this three year project will address the critical career point when women's attrition from STEM fields is highest. Watch the Story

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the American Physical Society to provide childcare grants to young physicist parents at the APS' large annual spring meetings. The program addresses the critical role that professional societies can play in long term diversification within the physics discipline by creating a more family-friendly environment. It also aims to ease the financial disadvantage parents responsible for childcare may face in attending meetings which are essential to collaboration, visibility, networking, and a successful career.

This Elsevier Foundation grant provides an integrated approach to childcare and mentoring needs at the annual Evolution conference. The Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists will partner with Elsevier to establish on-site, subsidized child-care service; a professional mentoring program for 50-100 pairs administered through MentorNet; and a themed key note lunch symposium. Ensuring that young women researchers can attend this critical conference will help reduce their well-documented attrition in the field of biology.
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The Elsevier Foundation grant will enable "The EMBO Meeting", the first annual life sciences meeting organized by the European Molecular Biology Organization, to offer subsidized multilingual onsite childcare services at the 2009 conference venue in Amsterdam. This program will enable young European life scientists to take full professional advantages of the EMBO conference and serve as a family-friendly model among scientific societies in Europe.

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, this project will create a framework of national issues, capacities, mentoring and support for women scientists in Georgia. While the Soviet era officially offered women equal access to education, employment and remuneration, no real or lasting opportunities were created for women to develop as leaders in science. To address these challenges, this grant will conduct a survey of 100 Georgian postdoctoral women candidates, a week-long training curriculum for 150 scientists, and build a new virtual network and website resource. Georgian women scientists from different regions and institutions will learn the tools, skills, and networks needed to advance their careers including developing grant proposals, managing research projects, publishing results, successfully balancing work and family – and assuming leadership positions.

The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to develop an innovative program to address the unique challenges faced by scholars with family responsibilities in travelling to professional conferences and research meetings in national venues that are necessary to advance their careers and contribute to scientific discovery and innovation. The new program will provide dependent care assistance to faculty in science, technology, engineering and math who are at least 50% responsible for childcare and will be administered through an established competition with formal guidelines and backed up by a survey to evaluate its impact as part of the University's overall program for promoting work-family balance. The formal framework and evaluation report that will result from this program will enable them to establish other sources of funds to sustain the program after the Elsevier grant.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to create and disseminate a series of programs to help new scholars in science, technology, engineering and math to meet their academic and parental obligations while on the job. The centerpiece of the initiative is the development of a lactation model program, which will establish a prototype onsite lactation room and advisory resources for lactating faculty mothers. It is envisaged that this prototype facility will be sustained permanently following the grant period with university funds and will be replicated elsewhere at the university and in the region based on a formal assessment of its effectiveness. The program builds directly on initiatives developed under a grant from the National Science Foundation to increase the percentage of women faculty hired, identify barriers to recruitment and retention in these fields, establish parental leave programs, and create greater understanding in the academic departments of the need for family-friendly practices. This lactation program is an innovation in the academic arena in the scientific and technical disciplines and has good potential for creating a model program that will be adopted by other institutions.
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An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to address barriers to relocation that affect the recruitment and retention of new women scholars. The program will address a wide set of new scholars – notably women with working spouses and partners, whose own careers often present a significant obstacle to relocation – by establishing resources to help new faculty settle in a new location, relocation counseling, a regional career network for faculty spouses, and career coaching for both the scholar and the spouse. The program is particularly innovative in taking a regional approach that extends not only to other universities, but also to all PhD-hiring institutions. It would become self-sustainable through membership fees and will create incentives for institutions to participate in the network by offering credits to institutions that actively participate, e.g. by interviewing and hiring a spouse. RPI is playing a nationally recognized role in the advancement of women faculty in technology and the Settlenet initiative therefore has high potential to serve as a model program. Watch the Story

An Elsevier Foundation grant will support the Computability in Europe Conference Series to increase the participation of women scholars in a field where they are currently underrepresented. CiE (Computability in Europe) is a European network of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability. Its conference series CiE-CS plays an important role in giving female researchers the opportunity to present results and serve as plenary speakers and role models. CiE-CS will use the grant to establish a mentoring program at the conference to establish formal and informal contacts among senior scientists and graduates students. It will further fund the provision of childcare at the conference to encourage and allow women scholars to attend, a significant innovation for a Europe-based conference.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will allow the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) to provide stipends to cover childcare expenses for selected traveling scholars who attend the ASCB Annual Meeting. While women scholars make up nearly half of post-doctoral researchers in biology, there is a sharp fall off of women in the ranks of assistant professors, associate professors and full professors. Society conferences offer attendees opportunities to highlight their research, hear from leaders in the field, and network with peers. Consistent with studies and feedback from academic institutions, the Society has identified family care issues as one obstacle to the participation of new women scholars in the ASCB annual meeting. This participation is an important venue for career development in the field. Watch the Story

The grant will extend for one year an existing program of workshops and curriculum development on the use of online resources, including Hinari, Agora and Oare, aimed at researchers, clinicians, government officials, and librarians in developing countries in Asia and Africa. It will also provide for the further development and deployment of an email training course that provides a less expensive channel for delivering training and that is scaleable to participants in other countries where distance and resource constraints prevent users and trainers from attending workshops. The grant will facilitate the development of a 'users survey' that will assist in establishing future training priorities. The Medical Library Association/ Librarians without BordersSM program conducted eight 4-day workshops on the use of HINARI in Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria and Tanzania, resulting in significant increases in usage.

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the UIUC College of Engineering will develop and test new approaches to enhance to its existing programs to address the under-representation of women faculty in technical fields. The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to establish a monthly forum for faculty and post-doctoral students and their families to provide social reinforcement, advice and peer-counseling. It will also establish small groups of scientists and engineers, not including families, which will consist of both new and senior faculty to discuss work and work-life issues. The program also includes diversity workshops for faculty, department heads and search committee members, to enhance awareness among the engineering faculty of how gender issues can unfairly limit the opportunities available to women. The new programs will support an established university-wide program, which has received past grants from the National Science Foundation, to increase the advancement of women faculty in technical fields, through recruitment and retention programs, spousal hire programs, and awareness-building.

This grant supports the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Initiative at Boston University. As part of an active program of mentoring and leadership development for women scholars, WISE will sponsor an outstanding female graduate student.

This project is focused on preserving and disseminating content in agriculture, fishery and forestry by enhancing professional knowledge and information literacy for librarians in agriculture, fishery and forestry universities in Vietnam. It will also establish a network of information literacy librarians who will contribute to the goal of producing high-level agricultural thinkers.

The UC Berkeley "Big Ideas @ Berkeley" program supports young scholars in implementing community programs. As a part of this program, this grant will enable Dr. Madelaine Plauché, a post-doctoral field researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, to deploy the Open Sesame Project Toolkit in four village centers in Tamil Nadu, India. The Open Sesame Project sponsors access to online information for all literacy levels in developing regions of India by creating open-source and easy to use spoken dialog systems for training and education purposes.

As part of the "Big Ideas @ Berkeley" program, the Science Technology and Engineering Policy Group (STEP) seeks to create better technology policy through collaborations between scientists, technologists and policy-makers. This grant will enable Kate Hammond, a joint Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley and UCSF, to develop training programs that provide scientists with the skills to communicate effectively and understand the decision-making process of political institutions.

Princeton University aims to establish a dependent care program to address the worrisome trend of female Ph.D. candidates unable to pursue their careers as science and engineering professors while raising a family. This grant will allow Princeton to begin funding a program to help graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with the necessary childcare associated with travel to academic conferences.

As part of an initiative to promote leadership in the field, this grant will establish and fund an annual award over three years. The Society of Toxicology is a global leader in advancing science to enhance human, animal, and environmental health.

In an effort to support women scholars with family responsibilities, this grant will help contribute to the establishment of a day care program at Keio University, the oldest private university in Japan.