NSF RESET: A Conference to Support Returning Women’s Transition to Computing and Technology Discipline

Abstract

The disparity of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) discipline have been a persistent problem in the United States of America. Research suggests that women who join STEM discipline leave very frequently to care for their families, financial setbacks, personal obligations, and call to active-duty program. Returning women, very rarely choose to pursue STEM education or cannot enter the STEM workforce because -1) these fields are constantly evolving; 2) the technical preparations can be challenging or unknown; 3) technical skills development require a lot of time and effort; 4) there are not enough transitional programs which can leverage the existing background of returning women to develop new knowledge; and 5) industry and academia do not have enough knowledge to create diverse reentry pathways to prepare returning women for the 21st century workforce environment. Some niches within the STEM field, like Emerging Technology (EmTech) concentrations (e.g., cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing), are expected to grow job opportunities more quickly than others. The demands of these jobs can only be fulfilled by creating opportunities for one of the largest untapped talent pools, which is returning women. Therefore, to understand the barriers and challenges faced by returning women to enter computing and tech education and workforce, a three-day virtual conference, RESET (Re-enter STEM through Emerging Technology), was organized in March 2021. Through our experience in organizing a large-scale national conference, we surveyed 444 attendees (conference organizers and participants) to investigate their level of satisfaction and the overall effectiveness in helping returning women facilitating their transition to computing and technology discipline. In this paper, we present the qualitative and quantitative results on conference attendee's satisfaction level and its effectiveness in identifying appropriate resources to (re-)enter EmTech educational and professional pipeline.