Breaking Barriers: Strategies for Achieving Equity in Academic Careers in ICT/Informatics/STEM

Women are under-represented in academia, either because they do not consider an academic career as an option or because they drop out of the pipeline too soon. In this chapter, we examine the main challenges that women in ITC/Informatics/STEM face in advancing academic careers, and we propose concrete actions to address these challenges focusing on three main directions that have been shown to foster women’s advancement: build a supportive environment, build career development initiatives, and establish mentoring programs. We argue that the prevailing culture in many academic institutions is not supportive towards women and outline concrete actions to implement a culture change. We highlight the varied career paths that exist in academia and propose career development recommendations relevant to all career stages, and ones tailored towards key career junctures. We also provide step-by-step actions to set up successful mentoring programs and address different mentoring needs. This chapter is aimed at both managers and individual women. It can help managers start taking action towards supporting female students and faculty, and it can guide women who work in non-supportive environments or are just looking to understand the system.