AAUW Work Smart” – AAUW Pay Negotiation Workshops for Women
“Tech Trek” – Residential summer scholarship camp for 8th grade girls
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Career Conference – Dynamic career conference for middle-school girls
“AAUW Work Smart”
In mid-2016, AAUW selected the Long Beach branch, along with those in San Jose and San Diego, to pilot AAUW Work Smart in California. During the pilot phase, the branch trained 20 volunteers to be future workshop facilitators, and held three workshops in October and November with a total of 61 attendees (including 2 men).
The program, originally launched in Boston, Massachusetts and Washington DC, supports the public policy of fair pay. Women working full time in the United States typically are paid just 80 percent of what white men are paid, a gap of 20 percent — and it’s even worse for women of color. Through AAUW Work Smart, we are empowering women to close the pay gap, one workshop at a time.
AAUW Work Smart is an interactive two-hour workshop that teaches women effective techniques to negotiate their pay and benefits packages at different stages of their career. Workshops are free to the participants due to the generosity of sponsors.
AAUW’s facilitators lead discussions on the gender pay gap and its personal effects, while small group activities and role-play exercises give you the opportunity to create and perfect your persuasive pay pitches. You learn objective research and benchmarking skills to establish an equitable target pay, whether you are striving for a promotion, asking for a raise, or negotiating a new pay.
In every two-hour workshop, participants can expect to: 1) Understand the consequences of the gender wage gap; 2) Be able to identify the steps of pay and benefits negotiation; 3) Develop set a target pay and benefits; 4) Practice negotiation techniques in role-play exercises; 5) Feel confident in their ability to articulate their value and negotiate a fair and equitable pay and set of benefits.
If you are interested in attending an AAUW Work Smart workshop, please visit salary.aauw.org/longbeach to find a workshop near you and to register. If you would like to sponsor a workshop ($600), can provide a location so that 40 individuals may benefit from your forward-thinking generosity, or would like to be involved in the program implementation, please contact: AAUWLongBeach@gmail.com.
“Tech Trek”
Tech Trek is a one-week residential summer scholarship camp for rising eighth graders which was founded in 1998 with start-up funds from an AAUW Educational Foundation Community Action Grant. The camp was designed to encourage young women to continue studying science and math in middle school and beyond. An AAUW Educational Foundation research report, “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” indicated that young women tended to drop out of these courses during the middle school years.
Each campership is paid by AAUW Long Beach through donations from its members. If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution for Tech Trek, please email AAUW Long Beach at AAUWLongBeach@gmail.com for more information.
Tech Trek girls creating edible DNA and learning about spiders
Tech Trek’s goals are:
- to encourage young women of all backgrounds who are entering 8th grade to take math and science courses each year throughout high school
- to motivate these students to attend college
- to inspire young women to consider careers in science, technology, engineering or math
The selection process begins with the Tech Trek committee identifying Title I schools in the Long Beach Unified School District for candidates. The school’s principal is then notified of the program and requested to provide the name(s) of science and/or math teachers who would act as a focal point. The teacher then recommend girls who would benefit from our camp. The girls are requested to write a two-page essay detailing why they would like to attend our camp. The committee members interview the nominated girls. We then meet to determine our nominees and alternatives for camp.
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Career Conference
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Career Conference is organized by the AAUW Long Beach branch and held at Long Beach City College, Liberal Arts Campus. Women with careers in science, technology, engineering and math present workshops to middle-school girls to excite them about the possibilities of such careers and to encourage them to attend college.
A dynamic keynote speaker starts the conference with a message about overcoming obstacles and reaching one’s dreams. The girls then participate in two workshops to hear the details about careers, such as astrophysicist, environmental engineer, speech-language pathologist, architect or software engineer, and to explore hands-on activities. Over the past 16 years, 2442 girls have participated in the program.
Girls are registered through Long Beach middle schools and attend as members of closely supervised groups in the afternoon and early evening of the last Friday in February. The February 2019 Conference partnered with Franklin Classical Middle School, Hamilton Middle School, Jackie Robinson Academy, Muir Academy, Powell Academy for Success, Stephens Middle School and Washington Middle School to enroll, transport, and supervise these fortunate young women, many of whom are from economically challenged households. For these girls, this is often their first conference experience.
In 2015, the branch launched a five-year longitudinal study in concert with the Long Beach Unified School District to determine the effectiveness of this STEM career conference on middle-school girls in their pursuit of math, science and technology throughout high school and their enrollment in college. The 2015 cohort of 8th-grade attendees are being surveyed in Spring 2019, to be followed in Spring 2020 by the 2016 cohort of 8th-grade attendees.
More than 70 volunteers, comprised of AAUW Long Beach members and others, provide the support to put on this dynamic conference. We wish to thank the numerous businesses and individuals who contributed items to the girls’ conference bags and especially acknowledge our eight financial sponsors for their very generous support.
Below are pictures from our 2019 conference. See link below for our video of the conference:
https://tinyurl.com/2019stemvideo
