Successful Leadership Development for Women STEM Faculty

Abstract

The Leadership Institute, funded by the National Science Foundation to encourage women faculty in engineering and science to prepare for academic leadership roles, was designed to increase the accessibility of such training for faculty in the Midwest by providing short-term workshops within their geographic area at low cost. The leadership training was limited to women who had already received tenure and focused on the portable business and leadership skills women need to make a successful entry into department chair and dean positions. The participants learned about budgeting conventions at their home campuses, but most of the training was designed to generally equip them for academic leadership roles. This article describes the training and reports the results of longitudinal data collection to document the movement of women faculty into named leadership positions and assess the effectiveness of the leadership training