Planning: SOEST Wahine Awards

The University of Hawai‘i’s (UH) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) is the State of Hawai‘i’s largest producer of geoscience graduates. This planning grant will fund the initial conceptualization of the SOEST Wahine Awards, a new competitive small grants program, to support professional development activities of women (wahine) faculty, staff, post-doc and students in the at SOEST. The justification for focusing on women is to level the academic playing field, as systematic gender disparities tend to impact women’s ability to achieve and advance at the same rate as men. This project builds out from an existing NSF GEOPAths award in two important ways: (1) financially supporting the activities included in IDPs and (2) broadening the eligibility for professional development funding beyond students to include women post-docs, faculty and staff. University of Hawai‘i’s (UH) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) Wahine Awards will be a small, competitive grants program, which will support professional development activities for women in SOEST, particularly for the women mentees and mentors. The overarching goal of SOEST Wahine Awards is to support women’s career development by engaging in the following four objectives: (1) Fund activities that enhance women’s technical or professional skills; (2) Enhance women’s ability to secure future funding; (3) Expand and strengthen the Women-in-SOEST grassroots organization and the SOEST mentoring network; and (4) Broaden participation of women in geoscience, including Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and other underrepresented women of color. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.