Empowering Female Postdocs Through Mentorship: The Origins of the UC-Irvine Women In Research Community

How do you find a peer support group when you are still learning? Dr. Alie Male arrived at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2019, eager to start her postdoctoral training in neuroscience. Upon her arrival, she unsuccessfully scoured the university website for opportunities to connect with other postdoctoral fellows and faculty to form a community outside of her research group. She realized that the university lacked robust infrastructure supporting postdoctoral mentorship especially for female peer support.

Unfortunately, her experience is not unique. Postdoctoral appointments are an expected step in the academic career path, yet universities are lagging in integrating postdoctoral fellows into their campus communities. A gap in institutional support at this critical career juncture may be one explanation for the underrepresentation of female faculty in senior academic positions.

Despite women earning the majority of doctoral degrees in the life and health sciences and forty-seven percent of doctoral degrees overall [National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2023], women hold only thirty-three percent of tenured academic faculty positions in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields as of 2019 [National Science Board, 2021]. This disparity is even more pronounced in specific subfields such as engineering and computer science, and in higher levels of academia such as full professor appointments and departmental or institutional leadership positions [McCullough, 2019]. The greater attrition of women from academia compared to their male peers has been referred to as the "leaky pipeline" [Pell, 1996]. These statistics suggest that, at the critical juncture between postdoctoral fellowship to tenure-track faculty positions, this leak is a torrent.

WIR fosters supportive spaces for postdoctoral women

Women scientists face a myriad of challenges in academia that particularly emerge during the postdoctoral stage, which may contribute to attrition during this time. While the postdoc is an essential career phase to demonstrate research caliber and productivity, women face many challenges such as gender biases in hiring [Roper, 2019], disparity in securing grant funding [Hechtman et al., 2018], and inequity in publishing and citations [Bransch & Kvasnicka, 2022; Ross et al., 2022; Teich et al., 2022; Lerchenmueller & Sorenson et al., 2018], which leads to less perceived research achievements. In addition to research related challenges, service work is more often performed by women and is undervalued in career progression [Wu et al., 2023; Guarino & Bordin, 2017]. Further, the postdoctoral phase has a complicated overlap with a time in women’s personal lives when some may choose to begin families or to have young children, which can be an additional source of stress or bias (Lee et al., 2017; Morgan et al., 2021]. Successfully navigating these challenges relies on strategies and advice that is not typically included in standard academic training, but can be gleaned from direct mentorship with female faculty who have experienced and overcome these barriers firsthand.

These challenges have motivated a number of support activities especially those catalyzed by funding from the ADVANCE program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF program supports systemic change projects to enhance gender equity and inclusion in STEM. In the early 2000s, UCI had an ADVANCE award that led to the creation of the Biomedical Trainee Network (BMTN) whose mission was to promote career development for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in the biomedical fields on campus. The BMTN leadership were all female postdocs who had organized seminars on topics such as "Balancing Career and Family" as well as "Women and Conflict: Using Negotiation Techniques to Reach Agreements and Get Your Interests Met" [Hammond et al., 2006]. After the NSF funding ended, some intervention elements were institutionalized; but, the BMTN initiative disappeared as the leaders moved on in their careers.

Dr. Male realized that she would need to create the infrastructure for postdoctoral support that she wanted herself, and thus launched the UCI Women in Research (WIR) mentorship program. WIR forges transdisciplinary connections between postdoctoral women and faculty, and fosters supportive spaces for postdoctoral women to speak candidly and receive support about the challenges to succeed in academia. In building this unique community, WIR is designed to empower postdoctoral women with the strategies to successfully traverse the cracks in the academic pipeline.

The core of the program centers on regular meetings across a one-year period between small cohorts of postdoctoral women and a female senior faculty. The theme of each mentoring session is derived from the group’s specific interests, and have covered topics such as how to recruit students and build a research group, navigating gender bias in academia, establishing professional collaborations, succeeding on the academic job market, to the ever-elusive work-life balance. By fostering these new spaces for mentorship, WIR helps to instill a sense of belonging in postdoctoral women at UCI, which is a crucial intangible element that is known to influence women’s decision-making regarding career choices in STEM. In addition to the small group mentorship, WIR also holds targeted career development events open to all postdoctoral women, such as networking socials with female faculty and trainings on how to succeed as women in STEM.

Since its inaugural group in 2021, UCI WIR has engaged 75 mentees across 16 mentorship groups spanning across all academic STEM fields and individual backgrounds [Male 2024]. Based on an internal survey, over half of past participants say that they gained a support network from WIR, while over two-thirds report that participating in the program improved their postdoctoral experience. As the postdoc alumni of the program mature in their careers, some are even beginning to credit WIR as one factor in their success. For example, one former participant stated, "I found this program to be very helpful and believe it contributed to my career path and success in obtaining a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor." Another participant acknowledged the benefits of connections with other postdoctoral women, commenting, "It is not only a safe space for hard questions, but creates a community of scientists with the same questions [and] concerns looking for advice and support."

Dr. Male and the UCI WIR leadership team, which includes many alumni mentees of WIR who wanted to give back to the program, as well as other allies who joined the team to support women in science, now aim to expand this program to help women postdoctoral fellows at other institutions launch programs modeled after UCI WIR's success. We have found other postdoc-related initiatives in the U.S. such as reviewed by the NPA [Flint Ehm & Johnson Phillips 2013; Huang 2015]. There are also race/ethnic-specific postdoc groups as catalogues on the MinorityPostdoc Stakeholders page. However, WIR may be the first grassroots postdoc community focusing on women and females that is attempting to replicate itself beyond one campus. Stopping the flood of women leaving academia by placing a WIR-shaped bandage over the postdoc-to-faculty leak will help create gender equity in STEM and provide tangible benefits to the next generation of women scientific leaders.