Hi Rebecca: This is a great idea and I would love to see some of these strong women in our educational system, as teachers and administrators! My son is in the military and throughout his training, I have met some incredible young women making a difference everywhere they go. I look forward to reading more on your website!

 Thank you so much for visiting our video! While we are wrapping up our grant, we have learned so much from this work and are excited to share what we’ve done to date to help build pathways for women veterans into STEM careers as well as what we hope to do.

The women who serve our country deserve every opportunity to successfully transition from military to civilian life and the workforce. And they have much to bring to the STEM workforce. Congress, recognizing the importance of engaging veterans in the STEM workforce, enacted the Supporting Veterans in STEM Careers Act, which directs NSF to “encourage Veterans to study and pursue careers in STEM and computer science” (2020). The goal of the Act is to strengthen the STEM workforce by bringing Veterans’ many strengths—leadership, teamwork, problem-solving skills, resilience and persistence—to the civilian workforce.

Our project preceded the passage of the Act. It was funded through a Dear Colleague Letter released in early 2019. The goal of our work was to synthesize what is already known about how to successfully engage and support women veterans in STEM careers, and to make share this knowledge so that we can build robust pathways to better engage women veterans in STEM fields. To do so, we engaged a broad range of stakeholders in our work, and worked collectively to develop a set of recommendations for making a significant impact in this area.

Our work found that while many resources exist to support veterans, and local programs exist that support women veterans to enter certain fields, a cohesive national strategy and infrastructure is needed to make a significant difference. Specifically, we need:

1. A cohesive, national stakeholder community dedicated to broadening participation in STEM by women Veterans
2. To expand and enhance support services necessary for the successful transition and retention of women Veterans to STEM professions
3. To raise broad awareness among key stakeholders of the synergies between women Veterans’ skills/strengths and STEM employability
4. To engage and inform policy, education and training, and industry stakeholders to increase opportunities for women Veterans to pursue and stay in STEM careers

EDC and its partners are seeking to do just that with our project, and to build a collective impact initiative from our current project to launch some of the activities that we know are needed to help women veterans. Some of the research questions that we seek to answer are:

1. What resources are needed by organizations to help them design and implement programs to engage and support different subpopulations of women veterans?
2. What successes and challenges do programs report in engaging and supporting different subpopulations of women veterans?
3. What do women veterans say they need more or less of in the programs designed to serve them?
4. What are successful strategies that programs can implement to better support women veterans pursuing STEM careers?

We welcome your thoughts and questions.

Thank you for the opportunity to work on this project! Excited to see more feedback in the comments and future opportunities to collaborate for showcasing STEM careers. The transition plans have improved, but there is still work to be done. Today, let's celebrate the success of the project and plan for more in the future! Kudos, EDC.

This project aggregates information from many sources to develop a more coherent strategy to encourage women veterans to pursue STEM careers.  It will be interesting to see how it improves the diversity of the parts of the STEM workforce.  Often in trying to support one group, one learns something new to advance everyone.  What are you learning that could be used to support other groups as well?   

Absolutely correct--much of what we have learned is applicable to other groups. We've included many of these lessons in our recommendations, with recommendations and lessons intended to help different stakeholder groups. These recommendations run the gamut from having mentoring for new women veteran students to navigate the academic world to the importance of paid internships that specifically are marketed to women veterans to connecting with local and national nonprofit organizations that offer support and resources for recruiting and hiring veterans and integrating them into the workplace. In almost all cases, we could substitute any group that has been historically marginalized from STEM here, as women veterans are not a monolith and represent many populations that have been historically marginalized, and not just in STEM. The key takeaway, not surprisingly, is to tailor programs to meet the needs of the intended audience, rather than assuming that just by having the opportunity, the audience can and will engage!

What an honor to be a part of this initiative from the Idaho Veterans Chamber of Commerce.  The need to put a laser focus on our veterans in STEM and the women that are making history, and persevering through the stigmas associated with women in the military and what they can bring to our workforce to be a solution to solving some of our future challenges in the STEM space.  What an honor to be in this video with our friend Dr. Trill from Free to Feed.  We have had the opportunity to watch her grow in her invention and company.  She is changing the future for the women in the military by leading the way in her tireless efforts to follow her dreams, her passion, and her desire to give back to our community while she serves in the military.  The future is bright, and we look forward to being a part of the success ahead. 

This is such an important initiative that has multifaceted benefits to STEM, women, the economy, innovation, policy, etc. We often have diversity programs that affect benefit beyond the intended outcome. How are you measuring impact and are there any unintended benefits that you saw after you began evaluation of the program?

Great work! 

Rebecca, this is an exciting project. We are planning to develop tools and insights from our work in the National Institute for Adult Education and Online Learning that may be helpful to you.

Thanks for bringing this important initiative to our radar. Based on your team's interactions with women veterans, what are the major barriers that they have when it comes to accessing STEM education and career opportunities? 

My project focuses on the role of community colleges in promoting students' technical and basic skills. Our population includes first-year students and adult learners -- some who may also be veterans. What programs, policies, or pedagogies do you recommend we keep an eye on throughout our research that relates to supporting and advancing women veteran in STEM?

Maia, we are too early in our work to have answers to your questions, but we are definitely interested in this population of learners and hope to develop insights over time.

This is fabulous work, and hopefully enhanced by your participation in the NSF INCLUDES National Network! I noticed your overview of the sectors where your recommendations are being targeted. Are the armed forces themselves another area your project is focusing on? I am curious if opportunities have been explored to learn more about where within their service women can begin to learn more about the opportunities that exist after leaving their position within the armed forces. 

Thank you for the comments, Tim, and we definitely appreciated being and benefitted from part of the NSK INCLUDES National Network. The military is absolutely one of the stakeholder groups we are targeting with our recommendations. While transition services have improved in recent years, there still is variability in the experiences of service personnel, and the military needs to also consider its culture and how it approaches serving women service members. Some of our recommendations aimed at the military include:

• Ensure that transition planning starts long before departure for all service personnel and continues beyond service.
• Ensure that all service members, independent of their leadership, role, or post, receive the same level of transition support, including post-military career planning (pre-transition), support during the transition, and post-transition resources.
• Create a single transition services office that serves all branches in order to share existing resources and create a consistent transition plan for service members.
• Engaging companies and organizations that have committed to hiring and retaining veterans in programs for service members, including job fairs.
• Hire an independent external agency to conduct an assessment of the Transition Assistance Program, with a particular focus on the unique experiences, needs, and challenges of women veterans; how the program has worked and not worked for them; and what improvements they suggest. Translate the assessment findings into actions.

This last point is key--there needs to be action taken!

This is an amazing program that allows the team to capitalize on underrepresented groups who are already engaged in STEM and also to help soldiers/veterans transition to civilian jobs.  In reading all of the comments above, it seems as if there is definitely a positive response to this from those viewing the STEM Showcase.  A question I have is how challenging has it been to continue to involve veterans after more time "out of" the service?

Hi Christine, great question! Especially for female veterans, they tend to not identify themselves as veterans, so it is certainly a challenge to make sure that programs and benefits speak to and reach them. This tendency to not self-identify as veterans is part of the rationale behind our call for a national center to support women veterans in STEM--so many of the services aimed at veterans are programs begun for and marketed toward men (it's amazing to look at the websites and see few if any women in the images--and most of the women shown appear to be the spouse of a soldier or veteran). Some of our partner organizations specifically focus on women veterans, and they are able to engage many women because they are focused on their needs. As with any population, women veterans are a diverse group of people, and yet their needs are distinctive from those of their male colleagues.