In a year’s time, we had increased female enrollment in our IT & CS Department from 149 to 226 female students and male enrollment had also increased from 751 to 1009 male students.

The WomenTech Educators Training got us thinking intentionally about who we were going to target for outreach, how we were going to target them, and how we would follow up to make sure we had actual results linked to the different programs and events that we were holding. Since then, it has grown organically and blossomed into something that our college just does naturally.

I think getting together as a team with intention—because we're all so busy—and developing a written plan that we could stick to was what made all the difference. I don’t think we would have ever done that if it wasn't for the WomenTech Educators Training.

I’m happy to say it worked! Our Engineering Technology program went from 2 female students to 12 in only one semester and retention went from 50% to 100%.

I've been an educator for a very long time: 40 years in education and 30 years at a community college. I thought I knew everything related to education. Well, I quickly found out with the WomenTech Educator’s program that you were guiding us through there were a lot of strategies that I had never realized we should try, things I never would have thought about doing myself to interest females in STEM fields. I also found out that there were many people at the college that were interested in the project. Getting people to buy in as early adopters in several areas in the college was very important.”

The knowledgebase that IWITTS provided us on how to build an outreach strategy that targeted women helped us to tap existing resources within the college and led to our great results—from zero to 7 women in the Automotive Pre-Apprenticeship program in 2.5 months.

“There was a big difference in how we recruited for our 1st cohort of Pre-Apprentices—which had no women—and our 2nd cohort that had 7. The WomenTech Training gave us a robust Version 2.0 Outreach Strategy. We had an entire platform and the messaging including: a Women and Automotive website, flyers featuring female role models, and a fact sheet with talking points about why automotive and apprenticeship is a good field for women. Plus, we had 3 Women in Automotive Meet & Greets with female automotive technicians.

Before the WomenTech Educators Training, I felt like I was just spinning my wheels trying to get more women into our Automotive Manufacturing Technology program. After the training, Lawson State went from only 2 female students in Automotive Manufacturing Technology to 11 in just over a year.

If you’re tired of spinning your wheels attempting to get more women in your program, then the WomenTech Educators Training is the way to do it.

I think the team was the biggest difference. We were able to get all kinds of perspectives. I think it worked much better because we had buy-in from the instructors and the staff—if you're working on it and you're part of it, you own it. Our team owned the Recruitment and Retention Plans. We were able to hear what strategies had been tried in the past that didn’t work, so we could leave those out of our plan.