Multi-Tiered Role Models in Career Workshops

Women and minority scientists remain a rarity in the scientific workplace. A female physicist may still be the only woman researcher or project manager in an optics company, or she may be a Ph.D. student in a physics department with only one or two female professors. In this sense, minority scientists (unlike those from the majority culture) gain no everyday experience of observing, interacting and learning from colleagues as they take each career step to leadership. There is no innate path for them to envisage their own future in a scientific career.