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Multiple factors contribute to the attrition of women from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). A lack of recognition for scholarly contributions is one piece of the puzzle. Awards are crucial not only for recognizing achievement but also for making individuals feel that their contributions are valued. Additionally, awards for research are important for promotion to various levels within the academic hierarchy, including tenure and promotion. With a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) has been examining the ways in which women are recognized for their achievements by professional disciplinary societies.

Working with the leadership of scientific societies, we developed best practices to increase gender parity and the transparency of awards processes. These recommendations included using gender-neutral language for solicitations and letters of recommendation, increasing the nomination and selection pools, clearly defining and discussing the types of achievements being sought and evaluated, including women on nomination and selection committees (particularly as committee chairs), and educating the committees about implicit bias.

AWIS partnered with 18 different societies and has seen an increase in the transparency of awards processes leading to more equitable recognition since the project’s inception in 2010.

Professional societies play critical roles in scientists’ professional development, and their awards programs make powerful statements about values. When awards show a gender gap, the implication is that men and women are valued differently by the society. Thus, leaders of disciplinary societies should work to ensure that their recognition processes do not disadvantage women.

Purpose – This chapter outlines and describes a number of case studies detailing the experiences and activities of individual women scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs who have made substantial contributions to particular fields of science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) activities.

Methodology/approach – The chapter employs a qualitative case approach to offer detailed insight into the experiences of successful women entrepreneurs.

Findings: These case study reports describe the tactics, strategies and achievements of successful female innovators within the STEM sector.

Research limitations/implications – Although offering rich descriptions of the achievements of women innovators, these cases cannot be generalised. However, they do illustrate that woman have a notable and meaningful presence within the field of entrepreneurial STEM innovation.

Practical implications – These cases can act as role model illustrations to encourage other women to act as STEM innovators and entrepreneurs.

Social implications – Indicative that despite gendered ascriptions which limit women's engagement with STEM subjects they can, and do, offer a critical contribution to innovation and entrepreneurial activity within the field.

Originality/value of chapter – A relatively rare celebration of women's achievement within the STEM sector.

This chapter outlines the successful development of a women’s initiative from a grass roots organization to a firmly established institution within our medical school. Championed by a group of dedicated women leaders, the mission of the Alliance for Women in Medicine and Science (AWIMS) is to provide a supportive forum to promote honest discussion and positive change in the realms of gender equity, career advancement, work-life balance, and community service, and to champion professional development and promotion of women in medicine and science. What started as an informal gathering within Southern Illinois University (SIU) School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine in 2015, led by Dr Vidhya Prakash, first morphed into a robust, vital organization called Women in Medicine that contributed meaningfully to SIU Medicine and to the community before it broadened its focus to women in medicine and science and expanded its reach to the entire SIU system. In January of 2018, the initiative was firmly institutionalized as AWIMS, an organization open to ALL members of the SIU community. AWIMS seeks to advance women’s rights through various initiatives. This chapter is co-authored by AWIMS director Dr Vidhya Prakash, and Dr Anne Scheer, a qualitative sociologist in the medical school’s Department of Population Science and Policy, who hopes to help tell the story of AWIMS and translate the Alliance’s successful development process into a narrative accessible to other professionals interested in creating innovations to promote women’s interests in traditionally male-dominated professional settings.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

Finding reference sources on women in mathematics can be challenging. With the increasing interest in encouraging women to go into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-related careers, there is a need for a list of recommended resources in the literature.

An exhaustive literature review was performed on books addressing women in math that were published in the last 15 years.

An exhaustive literature review was performed on books and online reference material addressing women in math that were published in the last 15 years.

These resources are mainly useful as places to begin research on women and mathematics. This list is not designed to be comprehensive.

This annotated bibliography will be helpful to librarians interested in helping others understand the challenges women face in STEM careers, specifically mathematics.

This study explores faculty members' outputs and citations by gender and academic rank in Israeli academia. The study focuses on the connection between research productivity and underrepresentation of women in academia. To this end, four fields were chosen, each representing a different discipline: Psychology (social sciences), Public Health (health sciences), Linguistics (humanities), and Chemistry (Exact sciences).

The name, the rank and the gender of the researchers were collected from the researchers' websites and those of their departments. The number of publications and citations were retrieved from Scopus.

Findings revealed that there is a significant difference between the median number of men and women in Chemistry concerning publications and citations and in Psychology concerning citations. Moreover, in all four disciplines, females' average number of publications was lower than that of males', and that in three out of the four disciplines (Psychology, Public Health and Chemistry), men published more in top journals (the top 5%) than females, while the reverse was true of Linguistics. Furthermore, in three disciplines (Public Health, Linguistics and Chemistry), there is an increase in the average citations per female researchers between 2015 and 2019. Further, in all disciplines, women collaborated more than men.

As only a few studies in Israel have explored faculty members' outputs and citations, this study contributes and enlarges the Israeli research concerning this topic.

This paper aims to investigate the “gender management gap” in the scientific labour market in the North East of England. The paper seeks to compare and contrast employment, ownership, management structure and capacity between men and women in the Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) sector.

The empirical investigation is based on a survey of 60 SET‐based small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), operating in the North East of England.

The results show that women are particularly under‐represented in managerial and senior positions of scientific nature in the private sector in the North East of England. The “glass ceiling” effect appears to be widespread.

There are very limited empirical data and research on the nature and level of participation of women in the scientific managerial labour market at firm level in the UK. There is a need for more rigorous research at firm and regional levels to examine the cumulative effects of underlying factors that prevent women from progression, beyond the “glass ceiling”, in the scientific labour market.

This paper builds upon a research project funded by the ESRC Science in Society Programme. The key findings have resulted in a subsequent award from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Grants to establish the “North East Role Model Platform for Innovative Women” in the light of the Science City Initiative.

The “gender management gap” in the scientific labour market in the North East of England has not, empirically, been investigated before and appears to be a highly neglected area of public policy and research.

The paper seeks to provide a structured review of the literature on gender and scholarly career outcomes in the social sciences and discuss its relevance to research on IS scholarship, in order to guide researchers who seek to conduct studies on the role of gender in academic IS careers.

The authors review the literature to identify all published studies that compare (or theorize about) various academic career outcomes for men and women in the social sciences.

In comparing the literature from the IS field with other social science disciplines, the authors conclude that gender has been entirely overlooked in studies of IS scholars' publication patterns and other career outcomes. Propositions are developed for researchers in order to guide future studies that examine the relationship between gender and academic career outcomes.

The paper focuses on studies that compare research productivity and other career outcomes for men and women in social science disciplines. Studies in other disciplines such as engineering, physical sciences, arts and humanities, are omitted. Studies that focus on women only or studies that examine the general antecedents to scholarly outcomes but which ignore gender are also excluded.

This paper seeks to open up a discussion of gender as a valid issue for investigation regarding career outcomes for IS scholars. The authors seek to motivate other researchers to examine whether women are achieving parity in the IS academic field.

This paper provides a comprehensive, structured literature review to systematically study whether gender plays a role in research productivity and other career outcomes for IS scholars.

The purpose of this study is to investigate women and men’s differences in perceived importance of various job attributes. Analyzing the job attributes that derive value might help to form intervention ideas for promoting greater participation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) industries. Current research has primarily focused on this issue from educational, sociological and gender-based approaches, suggesting interventions such as enriching women’s science literacy and skills, increasing their science self-confidence and changing stereotypical views of the STEM field as masculine (perceived as lacking altruistic or communal values). Other have suggested policy interventions that include workplace family supportive programs.

Choice-based conjoint and choice model analyses were conducted to examine the importance of different job attributes for women and men.

Salary and the ability to combine work and family obligations were the most important determinants of women’s career choices.

This study is a first step to inform future intervention designs based on social marketing strategy. Focusing on the attributes related to women’s career choices is suggested to facilitate women’s entry into the STEM industry.

Increasing the value of STEM careers might lead to more equal representation of women in the STEM field.

For the first time, initial principals of a social marketing intervention is suggested after an examination of the core attributes related to women’s career choices.

The purpose of this research is to show that upward mobility of female academics in regular selection procedures is evolving extremely slowly, especially in The Netherlands. This paper aims at a more profound understanding of professorial recruitment and selection procedures in relation to gender differences at Dutch universities.

This paper explores the recruitment of university professors as a gendered process and is mainly based on the analysis of selection committee reports between 1999‐2003 from six large Dutch universities (n=682).

The research findings give a clear indication of gender differences in selection and recruitment procedures. Although not in all disciplines, the paper observes a disparity in the percentages of male and female applicants who were successful in the selection procedure. There is no confirmation of the predicted relationship with the nature of the procedure (open/closed), but there is a correlation with the number of women on the committee.

As it was not possible to make any pronouncements about the quality of the applicants, a strict measurement of gender bias is not possible.

The results show that academic disciplines are gendered in a different way, requiring different measures at the institutional and individual levels.

This is the first paper on recruitment and selection procedures that takes into account disciplinary differences and factors such as the number of applicants for each professorship and the recruitment potential by gender.