At this event, we wanted to get an external perspective of Diversity in STEM fields in academia. We wanted to look at the faculty situation and had a great speaker from UDel who is currently a dean of engineering. Professor Pamela Cook is a applied mathematician and she shared her thoughts about the field overall in addition to the trajectory of women in STEM and how to facilitate gender equality.
She went over many of the statistics and the different studies that we have for this field. Professor Cook stressed the importance of the administration in the academic gender equality movement – a point I found to be extremely salient (see the second article in today’s issue of GQM for more thoughts on this idea). She also fielded a few questions and had some tips including trying an online quiz to determine your own implicit biases. Furthermore, a reception after allowed us to discuss this topic as a group, and those who came were able to interact with Professor Cook one on one. We would like to thank Professor Cook for being so interested and excited to share her experiences with us and to hear about ours, at the GWIS event and during meetings throughout the course of her visit.
