What we’ve learned from two years of celebrating senior women leaders in STEMM
In honor of the 50th post in this blog series, we take a moment to review what we’ve learned thus far and to ponder the evolving role of senior women leaders in STEMM.
By Janet G. Hering and Patricia A. Maurice
30 September 2025, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16935357
Especially in challenging times, it’s worth reflecting on our accomplishments and lessons learned. This post is the 50th in the Epistimi blog series, which started on 5 September 2023 with our post “A little less lonely at the top” [1]. Our intention was to create “a forum for senior women to provide advice, insight, and fellowship to one another”.
We are deeply indebted to Angeliki Artemis (Diane) Rigos, founder of Epistimi [2]. Diane graciously agreed to host our blog on her website, allowing us to focus mainly on content. Our second post profiled Diane’s experience and goals in founding Epistimi as a leadership training organization for women in STEMM [3].
We are also very appreciative of other contributors to our blog series and our readers, especially those who follow us on social media and circulate our posts in their networks.
Scope and uptake of the Epistimi blog series
In planning the Epistimi blog series, we expected to profile women in STEMM highlighting either their own leadership experiences or initiatives they had launched for women (or both). In addition to doing this, we were delighted to profile several male colleagues, who have supported women in STEMM academics as allies [4].
We also had ideas for various topics that one or both of us were interested in writing about, including reviews of some of our favorite books. Most of our posts have been on topics relevant for women leaders in STEMM, such as ethics and career development and tools. The importance of diversity has been a recurring theme throughout the blog series and a prominent aspect in most of our book reviews as well as the central focus in several posts. We emphasized the importance of going beyond zero-sum thinking in “It’s not pie…” [5] in order to engage the full range of talent in STEMM and to solve problems for all members of society [6].
Early in the blog series, we invited suggestions and contributions [7], either for profile subjects or guest posts. We are pleased to have published guest posts by Epistimi’s founder on leadership development [8] and by the co-authors of a recent book on transforming higher education for the benefit of all [9]. We feel it is important that our guest authors can also address topics that reflect their own experiences, even a challenging one like women bullying their female colleagues [10].
The uptake of our posts is not easy to assess. From the onset, our posts have been archived on Zenodo. Based on views and downloads from that platform, our most successful post by far is our review [11] of The Moment of Lift by Melinda French Gates. We also have some statistics from the Epistimi website and from LinkedIn, where we promote our posts. Although our statistics from these platforms are only for the last year, we are pleased to have highly viewed posts in all categories: profiles (particularly of Prof. Em. Ulrike Beisiegel [12]), reviews (of Invisible Women [13] and The Authority Gap [14]), guests posts (on the experience of being bullied [10] or writing a book [9]), as well as our own experiences (of being senior leaders [15] and Patricia’s post on motherhood [16]) and topical posts (on nominating women in STEMM for awards [17] and talking about ethics [18]).
Lessons learned about women in STEMM academic leadership
Both of us have our own experience in academic leadership, which we have found to be very rewarding as we wrote in our post on the joys of leadership [15]. Nonetheless, we still learned a great deal from reflecting more deeply on our experiences, including advice we received from mentors [19]. This reflection has strengthened our trust in our own capacities and experience, which we are, more than ever, motivated to share with other women.
We have also been inspired and educated by the leaders we have interviewed and by the books we have reviewed. We are especially proud of the posts that describe women stepping up to address unusual and even life-threatening challenges, often in brave and creative ways.
From administrative leadership positions, Ilene Sheffer was able to protect Rwandan students at her college in the US during the genocide in their home country [20] and Ulrike Beisiegel worked with colleagues in Nepal to evacuate students from her German university after the 2015 earthquake [12]. Administrative leaders also faced major challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, as described by Carla Koretsky [21] and Terri Camesano [22]. As a researcher, Tracy Kijewski-Correa described her decades-long work on global development projects, including the creative measures her group developed to assess building damage in Haiti when it was too unsafe for them to visit the site [23].
Although our own backgrounds – and most of the colleagues we have profiled – are in the natural sciences and engineering, we also have much to learn from women leaders in social sciences or with experience beyond academics. We appreciate the insights from social scientist Charmain Levy [24] and environmental consultant Liz Haack [25] as well as from women professors with experience as entrepreneurs in biotech, Betty Fini [26], and in national funding agencies, Sharon Hu [27].
We are convinced that women’s leadership STEMM academics is essential if higher education and research institutions (HERIs) are to contribute most effectively to addressing pressing societal challenges. As we wrote in our declaration on the rights of women in STEMM [28], there is still much work to be done to ensure that women and girls have equal access to education, professional opportunities, and resources in STEMM. This is reinforced in some of our book reviews (e.g., of Invisible Women [13], The Authority Gap [14], and The Guerilla Girls [29]) as well as by the career destruction experienced by a dual-career couple [30] and Patricia’s experience with dishonest colleagues [31].
In addition to the many women working to change STEMM academics for the better, there are, fortunately, many male allies. They have taken actions to promote their female colleagues, for example, by nominating women for awards and committee membership. One male ally urged everyone to “acknowledge that we have implicit biases and do everything we can to counterbalance [them]” [32].
We hope that – by making women’s leadership visible and providing a platform to discuss challenges, issues and solutions – the Epistimi blog will enable more women to move into leadership and be more effective in those positions.
Lessons learned on blogging
We have been delighted that so many senior women colleagues, despite being very busy, have been willing to take the time to be interviewed or write a guest post. We are grateful for their willingness to share their experiences and have been pleasantly surprised by their candor. We thank all our contributors for their patience with the editing and publication process.
We had decided in setting up the blog series not to support online discussion on the Epistimi website. We had hoped to engage with our readers through email (at: epistimiblog@gmail.com) or through LinkedIn. These channels have yet not been as successful as we had hoped so we would welcome suggestions on ways to strengthen our engagement with our readers. We especially encourage our readers to comment on and re-post our LinkedIn posts.
Challenges and plans for the future
Much has changed since this blog was launched two years ago. The STEMM enterprise itself, at least in the U.S., has been challenged by a catastrophic loss of funding and employment. STEMM leadership (and even participation) by women and members of under-represented groups has come under pressure with denial of the skills and accomplishments of individuals and a lack of recognition of the value that diverse perspectives bring to problem solving. At the same time, there is increasing visibility and activity by organizations, including the German Network against Power Abuse in Science [33] and the Academic Parity Movement [34], that are advocating for change in STEMM academics. Power abuse in STEMM academics is receiving increased media attention, especially in high profile scientific publications like Science and Nature.
This year is also the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a comprehensive and visionary agenda for gender equality and the human rights of all women
and girls. A progress review explicitly calls for “advancing women’s leadership in decision-making” [35]. Given the central importance of science and technology in today’s societies, women’s leadership in STEMM is essential for robust and evidence-informed decision making.
We are convinced that, as women leaders in STEMM academics, we can be most effective if we support each other in identifying and overcoming barriers to success. As we have discussed in several posts, there is an impetus for reform, and even transformation, of STEMM academic systems to make them more humane as well as more responsive to societal needs.
Another thing we have learned from our experiences editing this blog is that there are many amazing women, exciting new books, and a host of topics that are continuing to come to the forefront. We hope you will continue to follow our blog in the future and promote it in your networks. We welcome potential guest authors to contact us by email or through LinkedIn [36].
Questions for further thought
· What would you like to see us cover in future posts?
· Do you have any ideas for increasing readership and engagement?
· Are there other blogs on women in STEMM that we should be aware of?
Notes and references cited
[1] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/a-little-less
[6] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/engagement-and-the-ability-to-work-effectively-in-a-diverse-world
[7] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/would-you-like-to-contribute-a-blog-post
[10] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/gender-and-bullying-in-the-academic-workplace
[11] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-moment-of-lift-by-melinda-gates
[12] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/a-university-president-must-act-responsibly-and-consequentially
[14] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-authority-gap-by-mary-ann-sieghart
[15] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-joys-of-being-a-senior-woman-leader
[16] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/how-becoming-a-mother-made-me-a-better-professor
[17] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/nominating-women-in-stemm-for-awards
[18] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/why-stemm-leaders-need-to-talk-seriously-about-ethics
[19] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-best-advice-we-ever-got
[25] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-leadership-experience-in-environmental-consulting
[28] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/a-trip-to-paris-and-the-rights-of-women-in-stemm
[29] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/what-we-can-learn-from-the-guerrilla-girls-the-art-of-behaving-badly
[31] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/liar-liar-campus-on-fire-how-to-cope-with-dishonest-colleagues
[32] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/allies-for-women-leaders-in-stemm-thoughts-from-an-unabashed-optimist
[33] https://www.netzwerk-mawi.de/en/
[34] https://paritymovement.org/
[35] UN-Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women). 2025. Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing. New York: UN-Women. https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/womens-rights-in-review-30-years-after-beijing-en.pdf
[36] Email contacts: epistimiblog@gmail.com, pmaurice@nd.edu, LinkedIn contacts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janet-hering-53a6b847/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-maurice-88156355/