I've been away for awhile for some quality time with the migraines...but I'm hoping to be back in stride this week. In the meantime, I'll just share a few tidbits with you that came in over email.
From the SWE Newsletter:
A special Women in Engineering edition of Prism magazine, published by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), examines issues surrounding the under-representation of women in engineering. Additional Prism stories include "Making It Through the Maze," a report on how women find themselves going around a lot of blind corners when it comes to tenure, and "Opening Doors," a profile of Sheri Sheppard, who has overcome many of the same hurdles faced by other women engineering professors as she has made her mark at Stanford. To read these stories, visit the ASEE website.
I love this quote from the end of an article in Prism issue, "Competing Forces".
Engineering educators need to bear in mind, [Daphne] Atkinson [VP of industry relations at the Graduate Management Admission Council] says, that “only if you first talk to women about the things that they care about will you then be able to talk to them about what you care about. Remember, it is not about you. It is about them.”
Are you listening, engineering educators?
It's a great article, except that it doesn't even mention climate issues as a reason women are turned off from engineering. But the analysis comparing engineering and business to medicine and law is quite nicely done.
How to deal with those nasty climate issues? Well, if you are a woman in engineering or science, having a mentor might help you until the revolution comes. But it's often difficult for women in these fields to find good mentors. AWIS Member Services recently sent out the following announcement about a resource designed to fill in the gap:
New from the Association for Women in Science: A Hand Up: Women Mentoring Women in Science (the entirely revised Second Edition of AWIS’s 1993 paper mentor)
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Author: The Association for Women in Science
Editor: Deborah C. Fort, PhD
Contributors: Some 60 distinguished scientists
Published: November 15, 2005
Price: Nonmember - $34.95; Member - $29.95. Order through the national office or the secure website.
This new edition of AWIS’s classic paper mentor has been thoroughly revised to reflect the realities women in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering face in the new millennium. Through interviews and essays, both veteran women in science and others new to the field offer specific and practical insights, advice, and assistance to females who would enter scientific fields and to those already there. Virtually every contributor offers to serve as a mentor and/or to try to provide any advice sought to any woman scientist in search of help. Contact information accompanies all 37 interviews with women scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and students.
A Hand Up concludes with a section guiding aspiring women scientists to organizations, electronic resources, and how-to practical recommendations in their searches for successful professional outcomes. Some barriers have been breached; others remain for women scientists in general and for Hispanic ones in particular. To investigate and mitigate such hurdles, AWIS describes the struggles and triumphs of the latter group in particular
detail.
AWIS sees the audience for its second edition as comprising not only individual scientists young and old, male and female, in search of mentors or protégé/es but also libraries, general and science-specific, and university courses in both the sciences and women’s studies.
As you may know, AWIS is the largest multi-disciplinary organization for women in science in the United States, with more than 3,000 members and 50 chapters nationwide, as well as international members and affiliates. The AWIS membership is very diverse, ranging from students (23% of members) to Ph.D.–level scientists (over 65%), and including professionals at all levels of industry, academe, and government. For the past 35 years, AWIS has supported women in science at the national and local levels by providing a network, a resource, and a voice. Originally established to identify and help eliminate inequities in the scientific community, AWIS continues to build awareness of issues affecting women in the sciences.
Disclaimer: The views of individual contributors are their own, not necessarily those of the nonpartisan Association for Women in Science.
I haven't looked at the new "paper mentor" yet but it sounds like it will be quite useful. Check it out. And let me know what you think about it.
2:08:39 PM 
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