Women in Chemical Engineering (WChE), a student organization founded by ChemE professor Elizabeth Nance in 2016, isn’t just growing at UW — it’s now expanding around the country. The second chapter of WChE gained official status at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in December 2018. And students at University of Southern California and Arizona State University are exploring how to establish chapters at their schools, says Nance.

The WChE mission is clearly resonating across engineering programs. Bev Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering at UVA, remembers learning about WChE during a MolES recruitment weekend visit to UW. (Miller recounted her story in a recent UVA Engineering article.) When she got to Virginia, she leveraged the school’s openness to diversity initiatives and got to work starting the first group of its kind on the east coast. WChE at Virginia now has about 40 members.

The UW and UVA chapters share the focus of empowering women in the field by offering professional development, community networking, and outreach opportunities in an inclusive and open environment. The flagship WChE event in Seattle is the Fall Industry Panel, the third of which was held in November 2018. The evening features panelists working in a wide range of fields to facilitate ChemE students’ understanding of different career paths. Other activities throughout the year include STEM outreach, Q&As with researchers, and community building events. (Read more about UW WChE’s activities in their 2018 Year in Review.)

In the same vein as the UW chapter, the Virginia group has organized all-women industry panels and has sponsored various talks, such as one by visiting professor Ron Unnerstall about his involvement with diversity initiatives as a BP executive. The chapter also facilitates mentoring relationships and is fundraising for a professional clothing loaner program, according to the UVA Engineering news release.

The organization and its events aren’t just for women. “We welcome all genders who want to be allies for women,” says Miller, and all are indeed represented in the chapters’ membership and event attendance. After all, Nance adds, to gain respect and increase acceptance within a community, you can’t exclude half of the general population.

For Nance, the establishment of new WChE chapters represents a key step toward a larger vision for the organization. She says she would ultimately like to transition WChE into a non-profit organization that seeds chapters at universities around the country. And if the latest pioneering chapters are any indication, there’s plenty of room to grow.