The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $499,858 to Wayne State University to establish, ESCALATE, a three year interdisciplinary program to improve career advancement opportunities for women engineers and scientists in academia. With a start date of Sept. 1, the project focuses on broad institutional climate change in science and engineering, specific change in two engineering departments, and career development activities for women faculty in sciences and engineering, and is only one of seven grants awarded nationally.

ESCALATE: Engineering and Science Careers in Academia: Learning from ADVANCE and Translating Effectively. ESCALATE builds on and applies lessons learned from a prior NSF-funded project at the University of Michigan. ESCALATE will collaborate with UM to help women in engineering and science academic careers at Wayne State, a diverse urban university, as well as other Detroit area schools.

ESCALATE addresses two concerns: Women often are isolated from networks needed to advance their science and engineering careers. Additionally, academic science and engineering culture in universities and colleges fails to recognize its impact on women, and the need to acknowledge women’s unique experiences, needs, interests and desires during hiring, advancement, tenure and promotion, and salary decisions.

The Wayne State ESCALATE program uses several strategies:

1. Resource Team. Team members will learn about women’s circumstances and institutional culture change strategies and will work to   help WSU to improve.
2. UM Theatre Group Presentations. This experienced theatre company will present interactive workshops teaching campus leaders about equity in faculty hiring, tenure, and mentoring process.
3. Joint Urban Presence. This will allow WSU faculty to help UM faculty develop known effective strategies in working with urban students.
4. Departmental Transformation. Two WSU engineering departments, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, will work to increase the numbers of women faculty and help women faculty to advance.
5. Annual Women’s Career Symposium. Women faculty, upper level graduate students, and post-doctoral students in the sciences and engineering meet and learn practical solutions to everyday career dilemmas, network opportunities, and guidance from the researchers and Resource Team.
6. Monthly Career Network Meetings. These events, focused on specific issues or disciplines, provide opportunities for UM and WSU women to network.
7. Web Resource for Career Developments. This Web site will facilitate sharing research interests, accomplishments, career challenges, and opportunities.
8. Career Development Grants. These small grants to WSU women faculty assist women in overcoming critical career barriers by funding travel to meetings with granting agencies; by covering expenses such as child care incurred at conferences; or by bringing relevant speakers to WSU.
9. Wider Horizons. ESCALATE invites women faculty and staff from other neighboring colleges and universities in the region to attend the monthly Career Network Meetings and the Annual Women’s Career Symposium, thus widening the strengthening broad-based networks of women in science and engineering.

By explicitly teaching women about the range of experiences other women report, developing strategies for emerging career dilemmas, and connecting women to networks supporting them as women scientists and engineers, the project improves women’s status and social capital. Also, institutional change in hiring, evaluation, and tenure processes enhances women’s chances for hiring, retention, and security so that they can make real and lasting contributions in their fields.

This unique and innovative project integrates science and education research. The Joint Urban Presence incorporates the National Science Foundation – and many science and engineering professional organizations’ – goals of diversifying the academic science and engineering workforce.

Principal Investigator project is Allen Batteau, director of the Institute for Information Technology and Culture and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Co-investigators are Ece Yaprak, associate professor of Engineering Technology; Karen Tonso, associate professor of Education; research associate Diane Pawlowski and Michele Grimm, associate dean of Engineering, who will oversee climate change activities in the two engineering departments and serves as liaison with administration.

For further information, please contact:
Allen Batteau 313-577-2935 or 874-7010 ad4408@wayne.edu
Ece Yaprak 313-577-8075 yaprak@eng.wayne.edu
Karen Tonso 313-577-1764 ag7246@wayne.edu
Diane Pawlowski 313-576-4448 ac8359@wayne.edu
Michele J. Grimm 313-577-8395 grimm@rrb.eng.wayne.edu

NSF#0620013
Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences, PAID: Partnerships for Adaptation, Implementation, & Dissemination.

Wayne State University is a premier institution of higher education offering more than 350 academic programs through 11 schools and colleges to more than 33,000 students.