Project strategies included an institutional assessment and recommendations by IWITTS and facilitation of a community college WomenTech Leadership Team, which provided leadership and implemented strategies in the areas of recruitment, retention, employer involvement and institutionalization of the project. Our most successful site was the Community College of Rhode Island, which doubled the number of women in its technology programs, and upon whose strategies we drew heavily for our Best Practices CD, which documents the learnings of this three year project. The WomenTech Project at the Community College of Rhode Island received a best practice award from the American Association for Women in Community Colleges in March, 2003.

Simultaneously, IWITTS worked on a national level to develop www.womentechworld.org, an online community for women technicians to connect with each other. The Web site features include over 50 pages of content and biographies of women role models in a range of technology occupations. The site also has several interactive areas designed to facilitate peer support among women in technology, including:

• WomenTech Talk, an online e-mail discussion group combining peer support and expert career panels.
• E-Mentoring, an online place for women to find an e-mail mentor who is successfully working in a male-dominated career.
• E-Job Center, an online site for female-friendly technology and trades employers to post open positions and for women to search for jobs.
• Career Links to other Web sites providing services for women, girls and people of color.

Another important component of this project was to disseminate our results nationally. While the WomenTech Project Best Practices CD was originally intended as a print publication, we felt strongly that the information we had developed lent itself to a multi-media format, so we stretched project dollars in order to create a CD. The five sections of the CD - Recruitment, Retention, Employers, Institutionalization and Institutional Assessment - each stand alone, yet they also build upon and cross reference one another, since project strategies are interwoven with one another.

The CD includes over 100 pages of content with both strategies for increasing and retaining females in your technology programs and actual examples of how the WomenTech Project implemented these strategies in the community college demonstration sites. The story of this project is really told within the content of the WomenTech Project Best Practices CD. We invite you to explore a sample page at our e-Store - you may find you'll want to use what we learned to apply to your own school or community college!