By shira karp | Donor Relations
The Technion established the Technion Women in Science Initiative dedicated to promoting career options for women in Israel’s high-tech industries and STEM academia. The fund will support women’s opportunities up through the highest levels of academic training; it will offer female students increased financial assistance and alleviate some of the structural impediments to women’participation in advanced academic studies. This initiative adds a new layer to the tapestry of Technion programs that empower women to set about a career path in STEM– including community outreach, academic conferences, workshops and mentorship programs conducted at the high school, undergraduate, graduate and faculty levels of engagement. The Technion Women in Science Initiative aims at encouraging women to undertake career paths in Israeli STEM academia and related industries. The initiative seeks to encourage women to undertake graduate studies in the engineering and hard science disciplines; it similarly focuses on removing practical and economic roadblocks to a postdoctoral commitment and to improving the conditions of entry-level academic faculty. The initiative welcomes women of all cultures and backgrounds encouraging diversity and equal opportunity.
As a matter of culture and policy, Israel is committed to gender egalitarianism in all facets of human endeavor. This commitment is keystone to the Israeli democratic ethos and a bedrock of Israeli constitutional law. Equal conscription of women and men into the Israel Defense Forces is no less than a holy grail of Israeli society. Women and men have equivalent access to academic studies. Indeed, significantly more women than men receive undergraduate and master’s degrees in Israel; men and women earn doctorates at virtually equivalent rates. Yet, in Israel – like in the E.U. and the U.S. – glaring disparities between men and women still exist in many of the STEM disciplines. As of 2015, women account for 38% of all students enrolled in the physical sciences in Israel’s institutions of higher learning; they make up 29% of the students in mathematics, statistics and computer science. While women constitute an encouraging 45% of Technion’s overall doctoral student body, they continue to be vastly underrepresented – among students and faculty – in most non-life-science STEM faculties. Israeli women undertaking postdoctoral Women constitute 20% of Technion’s MSc students in aerospace engineering, 15% of its MSc students in systems engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, and a mere 8% in autonomic systems and robotics. This is in part due to a noticeable drop in the proportion of women advancing from undergraduate degree to graduate level studies.
The ultimate goal is for more women to assume key positions throughout Israel’s academia and leading industries.
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