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.

Journalist Elizabeth Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with the seemingly unsolvable questions in our lives. What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek answers from “experts”, influencers, gurus, and more, but they can’t easily provide an answer to questions such as: What should my next career move be? Am I happy doing what I’m currently doing? Who do I want to become? No one can answer these questions but you. Are they even the right questions? Inspired by 150-year-old advice from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Weingarten takes readers along her journey of developing a questions practice. She shares scientific studies that demonstrate and explain our discomfort with uncertainty. She interviews and introduces us to many people struggling with their own challenges and questions, and offers a fresh approach for dealing with these seemingly unsolvable questions. She suggests that readers go beyond embracing uncertainty and learn to live with and love the questions in their lives. What if our questions - the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose - are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions challenges us to unlock our minds and embark on our own journey of self-discovery and transformation.

NCWIT CEO Terry Hogan joined more than 250 CEOs from companies such as Airbnb, IBM, and Microsoft in urging state leaders to make computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI) education accessible to every student. Their open letter, published in the New York Times on May 4, 2025, launched Unlock8, a national campaign by Code.org and CSforALL to promote policies ensuring that all U.S. students have access to the foundational skills needed to succeed in a world increasingly enabled by AI. The campaign is based on new research from the University of Maryland showing that taking just one CS course in high school can boost early career earnings by 8%, regardless of a student’s college or career plans. Though all 50 states have taken steps to expand CS access over the past 10 years, only 12 require it for graduation, and as a result just 6.4% of students were enrolled in CS courses last year. The Unlock8 campaign seeks to close this gap and prepare students for a rapidly evolving economy. Beyond just an educational issue, the campaign is about closing skills and income gaps that have persisted for generations. It’s also about keeping America competitive. Countries such as Brazil, China, S. Korea, and Singapore have already made computer science or AI mandatory for every student, and the United States is falling behind. Making CS and AI a required part of every K-12 school’s curriculum can unlock $660B in opportunity for everyday Americans, close wage gaps, and ensure that our children are prepared for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

NCWIT CEO Terry Hogan joined more than 250 CEOs from companies such as Airbnb, IBM, and Microsoft in urging state leaders to make computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI) education accessible to every student. Their open letter, published in the New York Times on May 4, 2025, launched Unlock8, a national campaign by Code.org and CSforALL to promote policies ensuring that all U.S. students have access to the foundational skills needed to succeed in a world increasingly enabled by AI. The campaign is based on new research from the University of Maryland showing that taking just one CS course in high school can boost early career earnings by 8%, regardless of a student’s college or career plans. Though all 50 states have taken steps to expand CS access over the past 10 years, only 12 require it for graduation, and as a result just 6.4% of students were enrolled in CS courses last year. The Unlock8 campaign seeks to close this gap and prepare students for a rapidly evolving economy.