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LEARN MORE To read the results of the report Stemming the Tide,? go to www.studyofwork.com/?p=320 For more information on engineering and career issues, check out the following resources: Diversity in engineering: Managing the workforce of the future . The National Academy of Engineering, 2002, the National Academies Press. Career Management by J.H. Greenhaus, G.A. Callanan, V.M. Godshalk, V.M. Sage Publications, 2010. October 2011 www.sname.org/sname/mt COMARK Organizations need to create support networks at work and create opportunities for formal and informal mentoring. Women engineers reported an array of positive attitudes and behaviors when they worked with supportive supervisors and colleagues. Further, many women engineers in our research?including those who left and those still working in engineering?did not have a men- tor. For the women who were still working in engineering and did have a mentor, we found higher levels of job and career satisfaction and lower intentions to leave the engineering eld or the company. Lack of mentors and role models take a toll not only on women engi- neers but also on the institutions that employ them. Organizations need to consider implementing not only formal mentoring pro- grams, but also provide workplace forums for informal mentoring and coaching relationships to develop. Mentoring is especially criti- cal in the rst few years of the employees tenure and should be seen as an extension of the engineers on-boarding process. A network of supportive colleagues, senior managers (both within and outside the chain of authority), coaches, and mentors could not only help women engineers achieve a better t with their work groups and organizations but also help them build organizational knowledge that is vital for advancement. Organizations need to offer work-life initiatives that are embedded in family-supportive cultures. In the POWER study, the organizations with family-supportive cultures that did not impose excessive time commitments at work and were character- ized by empathetic managers who understood their employees work-family concerns beneted from having satised and com- mitted employees who were less likely to want to leave. Further, women engineers who worked for organizations that provided work-life initiatives (such as job-sharing or exible work time) reported lower levels of work interference with family and greater intention to stay with their current organization and in the profes- sion than those who did not work in such organizations. e use of work-life initiatives was associated with high family-to-work con- ict, suggesting a possible mismatch between the benets used and the specic personal/family needs of the person. Companies need to do two things to promote the satisfaction and retention of women engineers. First, they should understand the work- life (as opposed to mere work-family) needs of their employees and accordingly, oer specic, tailored initiatives to meet those needs. Organizations should be proactive and periodically revisit these initiatives and determine whether the initiatives need to be changed to better address their employees concerns. Second, work-life benets are not likely to be used eectively unless they are embedded in organizational cultures that truly recognize and support employees need for work-life balance. Organizations can begin to change their work-life cultures by conveying that it is the job performance that truly matters and not mere face time, by training their supervisors to appropriately address their subordi- nates work-life concerns, by providing work-life support groups, and by redesigning work processes that may be more compatible with employees non-work lives. In sum, the study revealed that while an organizations systems, policies, and actions mattered a great deal, the micro climates? at work, characterized by supervisors and colleagues who supported or undermined, also exercised a profound inu- ence on women engineers satisfaction, commitment, and ultimately, their desire to leave the company and/or the profes- sion. Women engineers will be more likely to fully invest their talents in companies where they see they are being treated with fairness and respect, their contributions are recognized and valued, their professional skills developed and enhanced, and their work-life balance needs respected and addressed. Keeping women in engineering will require a multi-pronged approach that includes improving interpersonal and organizational cli- mate along with tangible changes to promotion and opportunity structures within the company. e next phase of this research will see us following our sample of women engineers over the next two years and collecting compa- rable longitudinal data on male engineers career experiences. MTNadya A. Fouad is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. Romila Singh is an associate professor at the Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.