Women Leaders Must Support Each Other - Transforming Your STEM Career Through Leadership and Innovation - page 156

of leadership! The strength of this chain depends on how you use your position
to create opportunities for other women - not just in other spheres, but within
your own organization. There is a tendency to look on other leaders of the same
cause as competition. This is true to some extent.
However, in the case of women leaders, there is another far more important
side to this picture. The greater the number of women leaders, the greater the
number of women who will be their support systems. The greater the number
of women leaders, the less the issue that you are a “woman” leader becomes,
allowing you to focus more on your leadership.
Identify your areas of influence/control and see if you can create an
opportunity for at least one woman within the next six months. This could be
a leadership opportunity on a project, a nomination for an award, or participa-
tion on your project team. You might recommend someone for a promotion
or project.
Dr Mary Juhas, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Engineering at
Ohio State University, is a person who wakes up thinking about how she can
help other women. As a PhD in Engineering there haven't been many women
in her field of study, but she supports junior faculty members, female faculty
throughout the nation, and students in any way she can. She is so passionate
about this that she accepted a prestigious rotation as a Program Director in the
Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. That leadership
position allowed her to create a concept for the programs that will make a differ-
ence for women, such as the project she conceived known as the Women's Inter-
national Research and Engineering Summit (WIRES). WIRES is about helping
women in engineering academic positions go to “next levels” and become a
part of the global community. WIRES has resulted in an international impact on
women in STEM careers. The tangible outcomes include increased confidence
in women to pursue these now necessary international collaborations for career
success, multiple research projects funded by the U.S. and other countries,
scores of scientific publications, and enduring research collaborations among
engineering women worldwide. This is a simple but powerful example of one
woman using her passion to create opportunities for other women. She did this
with a plan, strategy, and team focus and in doing so positioned herself as a team
member who not only benefited other women but built a powerful “international
bridge” for other women to cross.
Although we can't all give hundreds of thousands of dollars to support wom-
en's research, we can find a project for a junior female to lead, or we can take a
page from Dr Juhas' “philosophical book” and do something such as nominat-
ing a woman for an award, recommending a female colleague for a leadership
position, or supporting each other for promotions or projects. In essence, we
must establish a mindset where we are automatically thinking of ways to cre-
ate opportunities for one another and thinking about how we can enhance one
another's reputations and value each other. We can start doing this within our