Advance

Women ADVANCE at USM Initiative

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded USM a grant worth over $150,000 to fund the Southern Maine ADVANCE IT Catalyst project.

This grant funds a study to determine how USM can better recruit, retain and advance female faculty members in the sciences, technology, engineering and math fields, as well as in the social and behavioral sciences.  The study will identify best practices at similar institutions, and will fund an analysis of workload trends and the characteristics of a campus culture that tend to retain female faculty in those disciplines.

The goal is to help build a faculty that can serve as role models to women students, especially older women with families and women veterans, and improve the university's efforts to recruit and retain more women students in these disciplines.