Our Mission

Welcome to Empowering Women in Science! We are an organization of working professionals, including post-doctoral fellows and graduate scientists at the University of Minnesota. This group is for all scientists at the University of Minnesota - graduate student, postdoc, faculty, staff, resident, or some other scientist -- of any gender -- we welcome you!

The main objective of EWIS is to enable and empower all women-and gender minority identified scientists to fulfill their career goals and reach the highest level of leadership by advocating for gender equality in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

To this end, EWIS has the following goals:

  • Promote advocacy/awareness about sexism in the workplace through seminars and workshops aimed at University faculty, students, and staff.

  • Empower and enable women and gender minorities, and their allies, to combat sexism in daily life.

  • Promote gender equality in the workplace and at all levels of leadership.

  • Provide career development opportunities and peer/mentor support systems for female and gender minority scientists.

  • Facilitate professional and personal networking and community building support for future generations of scientists via community outreach projects such as science fair judging and high school career seminar visits.

  • Recognize that many peoples have been minoritized and historically excluded from STEM spaces. As such, we seek to uplift and support all individuals who are currently or historically excluded from STEM due to their sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, national origin, age, disability, or body size.

Our group is sponsored by the Center for Immunology within the University of Minnesota Medical School and has funding from a Gender Equity Grant from The Women's Center.