AWIS is launching a new career center experience! The updated platform features a STEM-fluent algorithm so you can easily highlight technical skills and quickly find opportunities that match.

This virtual, cohort-style experience is built for women in STEM preparing to return to the workforce after a career break of one year or more. This program provides personalized support to help you relaunch with purpose - covering resume and interview prep, negotiation strategies, your “transition pitch,” and more. You’ll also join a supportive peer network and receive a virtual headshot and digital badge to mark your return.
Applications open in August.

Event reporting just got easier. SWE Group Event Tracker (SWE-GET) is a one place to log all SWE-related events - from networking nights to SWENext outreach with centralized reporting, visibility with SWE HQ, data that supports future funding. You can track events like: Professional development, Outreach & SWENext and Fundraising, networking, and more.

SWE Learning empowers women to succeed at every stage of their personal development and professional careers. We support the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in engineering through career resources, professional development, and one-to-one networking opportunities through live and online learning, including SWE’s Advance Learning Center, CEU/PDH offerings, and leadership programs. SWE’s Advance Learning Center (ALC) provides online access to a valuable collection of professional development content available when your schedule allows. New courses are constantly being developed based on identified learning needs.

Merit and meritocracy are having quite the moment. Many are rushing to defend them, but few are able to define them. Despite bold claims, our existing workplace and educational systems often function more like a hall of mirrors - reflecting the same profiles over and over while overlooking highly qualified talent that doesn’t fit the mold. Backed by research and real-world examples, this session will challenge the false binary between inclusion and merit and ask: if the mirror’s distorted, what would it take to see talent clearly? Attendees will leave with new language for better ways of talking about merit and practical strategies for building workplace and educational systems that better reflect it.

Grant spending in the United States has fallen by 53% since January 2025. AWIS member Patricia Soochan reports on how other countries are capitalizing on these funding reductions and welcoming US scientists forced out by budget cuts. In March 2025, Nature polled its readers on the question, “Are you a US researcher who is considering leaving the country following the disruptions to science prompted by the Trump administration?” Among 1600 respondents (over 1000 of whom were early career scientists or grad students), 1200 (or 75%) said yes. Reflecting the overrepresentation of early career scientists among the respondents, one young scientist said, “The PIs [principal investigators] I’ve spoken to feel they’ll be able to weather this storm. As early career investigators, we don’t have that luxury – this is a critical moment in our careers, and it’s been thrown into turmoil in a matter of weeks.” Data on the actual impact on several aspects of science over the first 100 days of the new administration ensued in Science in May 2025. It included the revelation of a 53% decline in new grant spending for the major federal funders of science from 2024 to 2025.

Applications are NOW OPEN for two of SWE’s premier leadership development programs. Academic Leadership for Women in Engineering (ALWE): Designed for women faculty in engineering, ALWE equips participants with practical tools, negotiation strategies, and leadership insights to step into - and thrive in - academic leadership roles. Collegiate Leadership Institute (CLI): For undergraduate SWE members, CLI offers virtual, year-round programming to help build confidence, communicate your value, and successfully transition into the engineering or tech workforce.
Learn more and apply by the July 7 deadline.

Inherent data biases in career assessment tools, or CATs, used for advising students every year on college majors and careers can systematically exclude girls from certain career pathways, according to a November 2024 report published in the Sociological Inquiry. The research, published in the paper “Steering Women out of Engineering: Career Assessment Tools as a Technology of Self-Expressive Segregation,” highlights the importance of addressing data and algorithmic biases in such tests to promote equitable career guidance toward engineering. The report examines how CATs, which are trusted by millions and considered an objective mechanism, are less likely to recommend engineering occupations to women, even after controlling for GPA, satisfaction with the major, and planned persistence. The CATs use small differences in students’ preferences when responding to test questions to drive them toward different occupation recommendations, exacerbating gender segregation in certain occupations and reinforcing men’s dominance in engineering, the report finds. “Engineering and other STEM fields are interesting because people are committed to objective, evidence-based evaluation and a meritocracy that is fair and rewards the best and brightest. Researchers have shown in a number of specific ways within engineering that those expectations of objectivity and meritocracy are violated,” says report author Mary Blair-Loy, Ph.D., professor at University of California San Diego’s department of sociology.The research considers two CATs that are widely used in educational institutions — O*NET Interest Profiler and Traitify Career Discovery. O*NET is freely available and based on the work of John Holland, Ph.D., who developed the original CAT in the 1950s. Dr. Holland’s RIASEC Interest Structure sorts people into six personality types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, entrepreneurial, and conventional. Test takers rate how much they like or dislike various occupational tasks and these ratings are combined to assign the individual a primary and secondary personality type. Previous research has found that CATs based on Holland’s RIASEC system tend to disproportionately place women into working-with-people categories and men into working-with-things categories. And often, engineering is seen only as a working-with-things profession.

The crowd gathered in an auditorium in the Swiss village of Villars on Tuesday applauded as, one by one, three scientists - two women and a man - stepped onto the stage to accept a plaque and their prize of 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million) for research into solutions for the ongoing climate crisis. It marked the first time in the Frontiers Planet Prize’s (FPP’s) 3-year history that a woman, let alone two, has won. Gerard Rocher-Ros, a 2024 finalist and ecologist at Umeå University, was an outspoken critic of the lack of women winners in previous years. This year’s lineup - Arunima Malik, a University of Sydney sustainability researcher; Zahra Kalantari, an environmental and geosciences engineer at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology; and Zia Mehrabi, a climate and agriculture data scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder - “was very comforting to see,” he says. The women winners also view the award as an important step for highlighting women’s contributions to science. “I see this award as a recognition that we are also among the men, that we are [also] working hard to come up with solutions … to address the social challenges that we are facing,” says Kalantari, whose work focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of cities. And Malik’s winning paper, about the sustainability of supply chains and global trade routes, was written with multiple women as co-authors, she points out.

The NCWIT Higher Ed Alliance is hosting a webinar entitled Building Faculty-Student Relationships as the next installment in the Building the Pipeline with Community College Insights on Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) series. The session will be presented by Professor Nancy Binowski of the County College of Morris, an NCWIT Higher Ed Alliance institution. Join in as Nancy shares strategies for enhancing students’ academic success by building positive and meaningful faculty-student relationships, without overwhelming faculty.