Overview

Underrepresented Minorities (African-American, Hispanic, and Native American individuals). Women Engineering Faculty from all Disciplines, Ranks, Institutions, and Years of Experience in Academe.

Underrepresented Minority (URM; i.e., African-American, Hispanic, Native American) are significantly underrepresented on engineering faculties in the U.S. For example, in a 2002 study, in the field of chemical engineering at the top 50 departments, African American and Hispanic women together made up less than 0.75 % of the reported ChE faculties; Native American Women were non-existent on chemical engineering faculties. The ADVANCE program is specifically focused on the development of infrastructure, programming and resources to boost the participation and success of women in academia. Certainly, workshops and programs for women may have components addressing unique issues at the intersection of race and gender; but the time to cover this issue is often limited.

The Peer Mentoring Summits Program represents a focus primarily on underrepresented minority (URM) women within the PURPOSE Institute (Promoting Underrepresented Presence on Science and Engineering Faculties). This program synthesized by a group of successful, tenured, URM women faculty, will strengthen the recruitment, retention and upward mobility of these women in the academy. Specifically, this initiative will convene a series of "summits and mini-summits" for URM women faculty groups over a three year period. The goal is to extract from this set of faculty their perspectives on the best practices for the recruitment, retention and promotion for women of color in engineering academia. The summit will also tabulate information on the mentoring of this group of women by people of a different demographic background (e.g., cross-cultural mentoring) with the express goal of generating a document on best practices for use by those same groups.

While the majority of the URM Women Faculty in engineering academia are under the age of 50, in the past 10 years, there are a number of women that have assumed leadership positions in engineering colleges and at the university level. The existence of these women administrators presents an exciting opportunity for a peer leadership mentoring network and the development of a new community of support across the academy for women.