TY - GEN
T1 - Increasing Collaboration among Geotechnical Engineering Faculty
T2 - 8th International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering: Data, Software, Education, and a Tribute to Ralph Peck, Geo-Congress 2019
AU - Gallagher, Patricia
AU - Bhatia, Shobha
AU - Alestalo, Sharon
AU - Soundarajan, Sucheta
AU - Athanasopoulos-Zekkos, Adda
N1 - Funding Information:
The underrepresentation of women faculty in geotechnical engineering has been a long-standing concern for women engineers and their allies, as charted progressively over the past decades (e.g. Bhatia 1989, Laefer et al. 2007, Laefer and McHale 2010, Alestalo et al. 2015, Gallagher et al. 2018, O’Neill and Laefer, 2018). In the past 30 years, there have been four distinct efforts to bring geotechnical engineering women faculty together to identify and address the barriers to participation at numbers equal to men. In 1989 and 2003, NSF sponsored structured meetings of women geotechnical engineers that focused on identifying and articulating the needs of geotechnical women faculty. These two projects brought women together to establish the barriers and challenges to equitable participation. This work contributed to the early identification of the issues addressed in the early years of the National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE initiative. In 2012, a project was designed to connect geotechnical women faculty using the online community GeoWorld. Using funding from an NSF ADVANCE grant, the project encouraged geotechnical women faculty to engage in online global networking. The project met with moderate success and most notably, identified important barriers to faculty participation in online networking. While women faculty provided positive feedback in terms of accessing a wider community of female geotechnical professionals through online networking with GeoWorld, barriers to participation persisted in these spaces. The investigators used this opportunity to combine knowledge gained from two bodies of work: 1) previous projects on women geotechnical faculty that identified challenges to, and proposed solutions for, creating more equitable opportunities to participation in professional collaborations, and 2) research collected from NSF ADVANCE initiatives that identified best practices for creating network collaborations within the global online community of GeoWorld. Using the practical and historical contexts of these previous efforts, the investigators proposed a model that increased opportunities for geotechnical faculty to attend workshops about online networking. This proposed model designed interventions that intentionally gave faculty information about creating, building, and maintaining professional networks in online communities while providing opportunities to network in person while learning about online networking as a way to create connections between faculty in order to facilitate long-term collaboration and mentoring relationships. The most recent effort to bring geotechnical women faculty together is an ongoing project funded by the NSF and led by the authors. This project, Connecting Geotechnical Engineering Women Faculty – Networked and Thriving (GTWF), began in 2016 with the goal to create an enduring network of geotechnical engineering faculty colleagues and collaborators, both women and men. Using lessons learned from the previous efforts to identify and support challenges facing women geotechnical faculty, this project focused on addressing a specific set of needs by offering skill-building opportunities to increase faculty understanding of online networking tools and platforms, and connection-building opportunities for faculty to facilitate connections beyond participation in this project. To that end, this project has two additional long-term goals of the project: 1) to make an impact that will be carried forward and 2) to identify strategies that work to build connectivity.
Funding Information:
The authors thank Chang Liu (M.S. student, Computer Science, Syracuse University), Samantha Steele (MS, Environmental Engineering, SUNY Environmental Sciences and Forestry) and Saeed Keshani (Ph.D. student, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Drexel University) for their assistance with the workshops. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award Number CMMI-1536542. The opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and are not necessarily consistent with the policies or opinions of the NSF.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - The number of women in the geotechnical engineering profession has increased exponentially in the past 30 years. Even so, women only comprise about 20% of the geotechnical faculty in the U.S. This case study describes a recent project to create an enduring network of geotechnical engineering faculty colleagues and collaborators, both women and men. The authors implemented a professional development intervention model to improve networks and collaboration and a social network survey to improve understanding of existing networks and practices. Within the intervention model, a successful strategy for establishing new collaborations and enhancing existing collaborations, was the award of small seed grants combined with the structured opportunities to meet and learn together. The seed grant program could be a model for academic institutions and other organizations to facilitate collaborative efforts that could lead to greater research funding and faculty inclusion on larger, interdisciplinary proposals solving the complex problems of today.
AB - The number of women in the geotechnical engineering profession has increased exponentially in the past 30 years. Even so, women only comprise about 20% of the geotechnical faculty in the U.S. This case study describes a recent project to create an enduring network of geotechnical engineering faculty colleagues and collaborators, both women and men. The authors implemented a professional development intervention model to improve networks and collaboration and a social network survey to improve understanding of existing networks and practices. Within the intervention model, a successful strategy for establishing new collaborations and enhancing existing collaborations, was the award of small seed grants combined with the structured opportunities to meet and learn together. The seed grant program could be a model for academic institutions and other organizations to facilitate collaborative efforts that could lead to greater research funding and faculty inclusion on larger, interdisciplinary proposals solving the complex problems of today.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85063507155&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85063507155&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1061/9780784482162.008
DO - 10.1061/9780784482162.008
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85063507155
T3 - Geotechnical Special Publication
SP - 86
EP - 98
BT - Geotechnical Special Publication
A2 - Meehan, Christopher L.
A2 - Kumar, Sanjeev
A2 - Pando, Miguel A.
A2 - Coe, Joseph T.
PB - American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
Y2 - 24 March 2019 through 27 March 2019
ER -