Professional development support for women engineering faculty with Lean In Circles

One of the challenges in gender equality is the underrepresentation of women in engineering fields and in leadership positions according to the United Nations (UN). In academia, the percentage of women is still low, for example, in 2019 38% of the faculty and 26% of leadership positions were occupied by women in our Engineering and Science School in our university. There have been some efforts to cut this gap and this work takes a look at what motivates them to be part of the Lean In Circle groups, how valuable it is for women faculty to have this support group to their professional development, what themes are important for them to be covered in these sessions and what are their professional expectations. An online survey for women faculty at the School of Engineering and Sciences was conducted to identify these elements and some recommendations can be addressed for using these groups to impulse women faculty members into their careers. Some findings from the leaders group perspective are having a support network, skills development, learning, mentoring, contributing to a culture of equity and inclusion. From the participants perspective, it is important to have a space to share opinions and learn about how others have faced some obstacles and challenges but also, they consider that the principal topics that are needed to talk about in the sessions are: leadership, self-confidence, work and personal life time balance and unconscious bias.

I. Introduction

Gender equality is one of the 17 sustainable development goals declared by the United Nations (UN) and one of the challenges is the underrepresentation of women in engineering fields and in leadership positions [1]. Since 2014 our university has been implementing some strategies to cut the gap and there have been some gains, for example, in six years the percentage of women in leadership positions increased 12% [2]. But the challenge persists, in 2021 the percentage of women faculty in the university is 37%, just 1% more than in 2020 and for academic directors only 35% of them are women, the same result as last year. But if we look specifically to the Engineering School in 2019, women represented 38% of the faculty and only 26% of leadership positions.