Encouraging Equilibrium: Career-Life Balance Outreach and the Advancement of Women in Engineering

Abstract

Issues related to career-life balance (CLB) disproportionally affect women in STEM. These issues disrupt women's career pathways, and in many cases, push them out of academia. In order to halt the exodus of women from academic careers in STEM, universities must develop interventions around CLB that recognize and address the everyday gendered CLB challenges that women graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty face. This paper showcases narratives from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's (UMBC) international CLB initiative with underrepresented STEM faculty and graduate students that set the stage for the development of three additional CLB projects. The results of the former international project inform the partial implementation of the expansion projects at UMBC, which include: 1) Accelerating Post-Leave Associate Professor, Advancement through Intensive Support at Critical Junctions, 2) a campus-wide CLB awareness campaign and, 3) campus-wide CLB educational workshops. Through this outreachcentered paper, anchored in existing best practices and first person narratives of CLB struggles at UMBC, we aim to spur conversations and provide a model for other institutions to weave CLB into the fabric of university culture as a normalized and cherished community value.