Big Ten Academic Alliance Summit on Advancing Undergraduate Women in STEM

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by promoting strategies and opportunities to improve the representation and success of women of color in STEM. Equal access to scientific inquiry and STEM careers is an important goal for the National Science Foundation and for the nation as a whole, yet minority students, particularly women of color, are not participating in the scientific enterprise in numbers representative of the general population. This workshop proposes to identify challenges and strategies to address this inequity within the context of the institutions of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Faculty and administrators from the Big Ten campuses will gather at Rutgers University on June 5-8, 2019 to engage in discussions with campus leaders and campus climate experts to identify challenges and develop strategies to promote achievement and advancement of undergraduate women of color in STEM.

Participants will examine survey data collected from Big Ten campuses to identify effective strategies and practices in use on individual campuses. Inter-university working groups will then develop plans for implementing these strategies across campuses. Working groups will establish program goals and develop plans for effective evaluation. Workshop results will be collected in a written report circulated to Big Ten provosts and distributed to national outlets. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.