Blog – The CamAWiSE Mentoring Programme: An Interview with Mentor Becky Hall

At CamAWiSE we believe that mentoring brings many benefits to personal and professional development. Mentoring allows the development of new skills, learning about other roles or career paths and opportunities for expanding our networks.

In 2020, CamAWiSE launched a pilot Mentoring programme to support the professional development of women in STEMM and to facilitate connections among professionals in the local community. The programme included twelve pairs of mentor and mentees, who developed relationships and supported each other through a rather challenging year. 

We wanted to learn a bit more about the participants’ experience and so we asked one of our mentors, Becky Hall about her perspective participating in the programme. Becky is Internal Communications Manager at the semiconductor and software design company Arm, and was Chair of CIPR East Anglia from 2018 until the end of 2020.

Click here to read the full blog

Hidden STEM Figures in Cambridge

Date: 16th & 23rd November 2020

Time: 6.00 – 7.30 pm

Online

Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women face a number of challenges when pursuing studies or a career in STEMM, including biases related to race, underrepresentation and lack of role models. CamAWISE, with support from the University of Cambridge Diversity Fund, will be running two events in November to celebrate the contributions of BAME women in STEMM.

See the full details and register here.

CamAWISE’s September social goes online: This is how it went!

It is a tradition for CamAWISE to host a September social as an opportunity to get together and network after the summer break. Given the current COVID-19 circumstances, we could not meet at a pub this year but we did not want to miss an opportunity to catch up with many of you and so we hosted our September social over Zoom on September 17th.

We kicked off the session with a ‘Finding commonalities’ activity. In smaller groups of three or four and introduced ourselves with just our name and job, the goal was to find as many things in common to everyone in the group as possible…

We had lots of fun over the group activities, scavenger hunt and music quiz! Click here to read the full blog…

Blog – CamAWISE Mindfulness Sessions

CamAWISE offered 30-minute mindfulness sessions for 8 weeks between May and July this year. The sessions took place online on Wednesday evenings and were facilitated by Kalai vanii Jayaseelan, Mindfulness & Emotional Intelligence Coach and Director of Sukhaatma.

When your mind wanders, you simply bring it back to what you were supposed to be focussing on. The main idea is to stay with what’s here in the present, not the past or future, in a non-judgmental way. Practising like this in meditations means these skills will spill over into a person’s everyday life, and they will become more mindful and focussed generally, as well as responding in a calmer way to difficult situations.

Read the full blog here.

Motherhood and Career Progression in STEM

Gender differences in career progression after women or men have children are often anecdotally explained by differences in ‘biology’ or personal choice – and these motherhood myths conceal the real underlying causes driving women away from their career path.

The gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields widens as women climb the career ladder – and is magnified for ethnic-minority women. The bottleneck in the leaky STEM pipeline occurs after women complete their education and enter STEM employment, eventually resulting in an acute underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. There is wide evidence that gender discrimination and implicit bias are important barriers hindering career progression of women in STEM, but could motherhood be playing a critical role?

Read the full blog here.

Mothers in Science (www.mothersinscience.com) is a non-profit organisation that aims to advocate for workplace equality and inclusion in STEM and to raise awareness of the barriers preventing women with children from progressing in their STEM careers.

Mothers in Science are conducting a global survey in collaboration with other organisations to study the inequalities and career obstacles affecting parents in STEMM (STEM+ medicine).

Take the survey here: https://www.mothersinscience.com/survey

Please share the link, and forward to colleagues and friends.