Increasing the Number of Women in Technical Careers: Online Professional Development of Leadership Teams at Community Colleges

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The Institute for Women in Trades, Technology & Science (IWITTS) provides online professional development about evidence-based practices in outreach, teaching skills and learning to increase enrollment and retention of women in community college STEM courses. This project focuses on professional development of leadership teams from community colleges with ATE projects and centers that support technician education in emerging technology fields of vital importance to the US. Webinars are being developed to help colleges assess their present efforts in recruiting and retaining female students in STEM disciplines and how to form and maintain a leadership team. In an online, twenty-five hour, professional development sequence, the teams learn about evidence-based practices and are mentored in developing and implementing Recruitment and Retention Plans. An electronically-scored Institutional Assessment Tool helps teams in pinpointing what practices they need to carry out to close the gap and broaden participation. The Women in STEM Toolkit includes easy-to-use checklists on recruitment and retention, resources for online recruiting, and a bibliography of off-the-shelf curriculum resources that educators can incorporate into their classes to better reach female students. Dissemination is to community college STEM educators via national conferences that disseminate literature on women in STEM, webinars, social media, and peer-reviewed papers or articles. A National Advisory Committee supports and offers input to the project and provides formative feedback on project implementation. An external evaluator provides information on the percent of teams that find the information useful, develop plans, implement them and increase enrollments of women. Surveys after the training and six months later are used to determine the components of the training that proved the most useful. A case study methodology is used to look in-depth at a sample of colleges that have successfully implemented their recruitment and retention plans. The National Women in STEM Broadening Impacts Project provides evidence-based mechanisms to increase the number of women in technical programs in community colleges. The mechanisms can be applied to other disciplines and educational institutions as well.