TASSA-WISE
We are excited to announce that TASSA's 1st Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) symposium will take place in Robert H. Smith School of Business, Van Munching Hall, University of Maryland, College Park in Fall, 2013. Within a short period, we are delighted to follow the progress achieved by program and organizing committees.
In our previous Bridge issue, we emphasized TASSA`s desire to act as a facilitator to raise awareness to overcome the persisting gender inequalities in diverse science, technology and engineering fields. Recognizing the fact that we need to have more women not only scientists and educators but also as leaders in every aspect of life, we started working out revolve around how we get there. TASSA-WISE symposium will provide a platform for Women Scientists, Scholars, Engineers and Administrators to come together, listen success stories, learn from each other`s experience and form network where they can expand. This symposium will enable an ignition step to inspire ideas and harness the potential of diverse groups to fully realize the operational domain for TASSA-WISE teams. With the symposium outcome, TASSA will continue to support WISE teams activities exploring women leader`s strategies, introducing role models, assisting career advancement strategies to provide mentoring young members.
Women still comprise a minority of scientists and technologists across diverse science and engineering areas. To our knowledge, there is no global figure reporting the representation of women in science and technology areas. Certain fields of science, education and technology areas attract women more than others. This may also change from country to country, for example, women participation is high overall in biological sciences compared to some of the engineering fields. Both in the USA and Turkey, women received doctoral degree in certain field of engineering, e.g. mechanical, electrical and materials science is less than 30%. There is also a major difference in the representation of women researchers by sector of employment. In Turkey, higher education is the most populated area for women compared to business enterprises. However, even then these figures tend to decline as moving towards the upper management positions. In general, there is an underrepresentation of women in the Science and Technology leadership positions. A major gap is observed between women and men in senior professor positions or in higher management positions. We still lack the representation of women in editorial boards as well as running large research projects. Another area to address this gap is entrepreneurship, which is closely linked to innovation in S & T areas. Women scientists and scholars have relatively low representation as patent holders. In the TASSA-WISE symposium, we plan to touch upon all of these areas. We will cover different scientific fields ranging from social science & humanities to life sciences and engineering. We will ask the questions “How do we get there” and strategize our actions to make the impact!
Come and join us, let’s make the difference together!