Project Leadership

We aim to solve the problem of the underrepresentation of women and non-binary people in STEM leadership positions. While women make up 35% of STEM majors, there’s a drop of women to 29% in the STEM labor force, another drop to 19% in STEM company board members and a further drop to 3% as STEM company CEO’s. In health-care, women make up 80% of the workforce, but only about 33% of doctors and 21% of health executives or board members. Furthermore, across nationally funded research laboratories, only 5% of lab directors are women. 

Statistics for non-binary, non-gender conforming or transgender people in STEM are difficult to find, but sources point to lower retention of non-binary students in STEM and virtually invisible in higher education and STEM leadership.

To estimate the scale of the problem and affected people, we track the problem from college education onward. Assuming that women account for 35% of the 400,000 STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded every year in the US, we estimate that this problem affects about 140,000 people who face the challenge of becoming leaders in STEM fields. If we expand our estimate to include the number of women or non-binary people missing in STEM college education, we see that this problem additionally affects 120,000 people. A major factor contributing to the problem is the confidence gap that starts to show up as early as 3rd grade, where gender difference in confidence is larger that difference in both achievement and interest. 

Several factors are proposed to contribute to the leadership gender-gap including 1) a lack of training opportunities, 2) an incongruence between how women and leaders are expected to behave, and 3) women not identifying themselves as leaders.

These factors have a two-pronged impact on our affected population, first compromising internal ambition to see themselves as leaders and second lowering external acceptance of them as leaders. 

We want to solve both these pain points for our affected population of women and non-binary people, so that they can be empowered to identify as leaders and also be seen as leaders by their peers.

We developed Project Leadership as our solution to address the challenges that women and non-binary people face such as lack of leadership training opportunities, prejudice, and a lack of identifying oneself as a leader. Project Leadership is an App for team work in STEM educational settings like university courses. The App is designed to increase the diversity of STEM leadership by empowering all individuals to develop leadership skills in themselves and recognize different leadership approaches.

Within the App, students learn best practices of leadership including skillful listening, developing a team mission, interpersonal communication, critical thinking, implementation, facilitation, and delivery of constructive feedback. A tutorial guide for students using Project Leadership is available here. Before each class, students identify a leadership skill that they will focus on and through which team role; they then communicate their choice via the App. After completing their role in class, students receive feedback through peer comments and self-reflection.

The design prompts students to make implementation intentions at the beginning of the period about developing their own leadership skills by making them declare not only what skill they want to develop but also how they are going to do it. Implementation intentions are a proven tool in behavior change for higher likelihood of follow-through. Moreover, because the feedback is constrained to be concise it’s less intimidating to receive and promotes incremental growth.

Students who are made aware of their peers’ goals and roles and know that they are expected to give feedback become better listeners and are attentive to how their peers perform. Further, because they are expected to give feedback that is detail-oriented their observations need to be grounded in facts and deliverables thus reducing the bias and prejudice. 

Through the processes of self-reflection and giving feedback from sharp observation, students recognize effective leadership based on individual’s skills, perspectives, and lived experiences and they expand the image of a leader to be inclusive of race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sex.

An additional feature of the App is that it can record progress over time and generate an individual portfolio of evidence showcasing both their leadership development and areas that they can actively improve. This feature implements evidence based self-reflection which is a prominent practice used to mitigate imposter syndrome and motivates individuals to persist through short-term lows by providing perspective of long-term growth. 

We piloted Project Leadership during the Spring 2023 semester in a Princeton University Molecular Biology sophomore research course and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from students. One student commented, “I have had very positive experiences with leadership in this course. I feel that this course made me realize that leadership involves a wide array of factors and skills and this has made me overall rethink how I approach leadership.” Another student stated that, “Selecting a specific leadership skill to focus on definitely helped me to discover the areas in which I am a good leader.” Based on the success of this pilot implementation, we are confident in the feasibility of our technology.

According to the leadership identity model, there are two critical components that determine whether someone is identified as a leader. First, an individual needs to recognize themself as a leader. Second, an individual needs to be recognized by others as a leader. Thus, expanding the diversity of STEM leadership requires underrepresented genders to have self-recognition and acceptance from peers in the STEM community.

Project Leadership allows STEM students to specify leadership skills and exchange feedback, thus providing access to tangible evidence of their development that is tracked over a longer term. This helps STEM students who are the future STEM workforce to expand on who they consider to be a leader - both themselves and others whom they hadn’t yet considered to be a leader. Moreover by having leadership skills and associated roles in a team we hope to promote effective shared leadership in which each person contributes as a leader. This brings leadership skill development to women and non-binary people in STEM who are otherwise underrepresented and underserved. Additionally, because we imagine all STEM students would be using Project Leadership we hope to bring acceptance for women and non-binary people from the future STEM community. 

In developing skills for Project Leadership, three underrepresented students have been actively involved in writing evidence-based leadership skills to meet user needs. This ensures the skills resonate with underrepresented students we want to serve and we can maximize impact for them. Moving forward with Project Leadership, we will consistently involve underrepresented students in identifying, researching, and adding on to the leadership skills we track and develop through the app.

We will ensure that Project Leadership is meeting its users needs by including students in formative and summative assessments. Student feedback on using the App is used in an iterative process to ensure that we are developing Project Leadership into an engaging App that promotes authentic user engagement. Our summative assessments include IRB approved pre- and post- surveys that are analyzed by an independent evaluator at Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and learning.

Having demonstrated the feasibility of using Project Leadership within a research course, our plan is to scale Project Leadership so that it can be used in courses of STEM Higher Ed institutions, K-12 classrooms, and Professional Development Training Programs. By scaling the use of Project Leadership within and across these STEM educational settings, we hypothesize that we will be able to further diversify STEM leadership by introducing a mindset shift to recognizing women and non-binary people as leaders at every level.

We are a diverse team representing identities of students and women in STEM whom we intend to serve. Our Team Lead, Laurel Lorenz, PhD, is a female scientist who first identified herself as a leader at the age of 35 through her involvement in Toastmasters International, a program to teach adults Public Speaking and Leadership Skills. Before Toastmasters, she did not recognize that the skills that she used in undergraduate studies such as listening, organizing, and planning are leadership skills. Now, as a Lecturer in the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton University, she teaches courses in which she helps students develop both content knowledge and transferable skills. In addition, over the past two years, she has worked with several underrepresented STEM students to create evidenced-based definitions of leadership skills used in Project Leadership.

Anvitha Sudhakar is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Princeton University. Growing up as a woman in middle-class India and getting into the best engineering school in the country was a tough road with a bitter-sweet ending of being in a class of more than 90% men. From her experiences, she deeply understands the difficulty in finding your voice and being productive when you’re underrepresented in your workplace. Her experiences and values drew her to join Project Leadership where she is passionate about maximizing the impact it can have on improving racial and gender equity in STEM. She has pursued several and will continue to pursue mentoring opportunities to be visible as a woman with leadership skills in STEM and to engage with students keeping her aware of the communities’ needs.

Tejas Dethe is a graduate student researcher in Princeton’s Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Tejas’ interest, experience, and expertise lies in pedagogical design for inclusive educational spaces, where he is extensively involved in both teaching and creating courses. Tejas holds a Graduate Fellowship in Pedagogy with the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative where he designs courses, recommends pedagogical strategies, and is an Instructor for math courses offered to associates’ degree-seeking justice-impacted students inside the charged environments of New Jersey carceral facilities. Tejas has also been an Instructor for first-year undergraduate writing and critical thinking seminars with the Freshman Scholars Institute at Princeton’s Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity. He also designs workshops on STEM research practices and serves as a Mentor to justice-impacted researchers through summer research programs. Tejas’ diverse educational involvements add nuance and provide pedagogical context to the technical development of Project Leadership to foster inclusion through leadership.

Saadi Ahmad is a Princeton Computer Science undergraduate student and software developer who has worked with startups, nonprofits, nightclubs, and contemporary artists. Saadi’s experience in UX research has provided prior experience with interacting with stakeholders, users, finding and solving pain points, and iterating on a final product which help develop Project Leadership based on needs of the communities we aim to serve. Saadi hopes to bring an unconventional entrepreneurial perspective, technical understanding of software/design, and a keen eye for emerging technology and market opportunity.

Project Leadership has been used in one classroom with 9 students, A sister App called Project Collaboration, which only differs in referring to skills as collaboration skills instead of leadership skills, has been used in three classrooms with a total of 330 students.

Rutgers Nursing Management Program is interested in using it in Spring of 2024 and a Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine course is interested in using it in Fall of 2023.

By successfully implementing Project Leadership in a team-based research course, we are confident that students benefit from the time to focus on leadership skill development. However, we face three significant challenges to overcome before we can accumulate data to determine whether explicitly teaching leadership skills through Project Leadership increases the number of women and non-binary people who identify as STEM leaders. First, we need to expand the use of Project Leadership at many Higher Ed Institutions across the United States including additional R01 Universities, Primary Undergraduate Institutions, Community Colleges, and Minority Serving Institutions. Second, we need to fund an educational research project to thoroughly evaluate whether Project Leadership increases who is identified as a leader. Third, we need to develop Project Leadership into an engaging App that prompts authentic user experiences by improving the user interface to match the needs of our users.

We believe that these three challenges can be overcome by developing Project Leadership into a financially sustainable subscription based Software as a Service (SaaS) that provides values to institutions, instructors, and students through empowering students to see themselves and others as leaders. Our team will benefit from a comprehensive needs assessment to determine which approaches, resources, and support will help us to effectively develop and financially sustain Project Leadership. In addition, access to a network of partners, coaches, and learning modules will allow us to build and test our business model in a manner that creates sustained growth and scalability. Our team will also benefit from shared knowledge, experience, and reflection with peers working through innovations solving related problems. In particular, it will be helpful to learn within a network 1) how to prioritize different resources and tool development, 2) how to establish market value, 3) and how to identify which resources to build in-house and which resources to coordinate with others.

Dr. Lorenz is a Lecturer in the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton University and a member of Toastmasters International. Laurel’s experience as a Toastmaster member leader for over seven years as well as her Toastmasters leadership roles of Club President, Vice President of Education, Area Director, and Division Director provides a solid foundation for developing descriptions of skills and team roles that will be modeled from the Toastmasters International Curriculum. In addition, Laurel will align these leadership skills with pedagogical approaches described in Visions and Change, BioSkills Competencies, as well as College Leadership Programs. 

Outside of Toastmasters, Laurel has established a broad network of colleagues in discipline-based education research across the country through her participation in QUBES Faculty Mentoring Networks, the Genome Education Alliance, and attending several conferences including the QUBES Biome Institute, National Academy of Biology Teachers (NABT), Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER), and the Gordon Undergraduate Biology Education Research Conference. Through these networks and their annual conferences, Laurel continues to learn and integrate iterative ways in her classrooms to be inclusive of women as well as people identifying as non-binary, non-gender conforming, or transgender. 

While other Apps exist to promote student teamwork and leadership development of professionals, Project Leadership is the only web-based tool specifically designed for students to develop leadership skills. 

Goals for the next year:

• Establish an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly version of Project Leadership. We will accomplish this goal through user-experience surveys and software development.
• Implement Project Leadership at Rutgers University and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and create partnerships with five additional schools. Additional schools will be identified through networking with University Instructors through the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium and working through their program of Faculty Mentoring Networks (FMNs). FMNs allow faculty to work together to implement new learning strategies in their classrooms.

Goals for the next five years: 

• Complete IRB-approved research to determine whether Project Leadership increases the number of women, non-binary, non-gender confirming, and transgender individuals who identify as leaders. We will accomplish this goal by utilizing our IRB-approved protocol with a growing number of Project Leadership users.
• Identify and implement novel ways to authentically engage users with Project Leadership such as through leadership badges. We will establish a partnership with an expert in gamification, Rachel Niemer, at the University of Michigan to design novel ways to increase student engagement in the App. In addition, we will include students in the design of the engagement strategies so that the design fits students' needs.

Project Leadership is designed to support student development of leadership skills and expand who they perceive can be leaders. To see whether these goals are met, we have established an IRB-approved set of pre- and post- survey questions. The questions include both Likert scales and open-ended responses from previously published tools identifying a student's identity as a leader. In addition, the post-survey includes demographic questions to see who benefits from using Project Leadership. The survey responses will be evaluated by an external evaluator in Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning. The pre- and post-survey questions will allow us to observe changes in student perceptions and skill development. 

In addition, formative assessments will be administered once or twice during each semester depending on course context to 1) assess how students lead, 2) see how students work together in their teams, and 3) receive feedback to adapt the program and App to meet student needs. The results of the formative assessments will be used to make changes to the Project Leadership.

Our hypothesis that explicitly teaching leadership skills will increase the diversity of students who identify as leaders is informed by the theories of self-determination, social learning, and contact hypothesis. We used self-determination theory to design the App to address the three psychological needs of an internally motivated person: 1) autonomy (choosing a leadership skill and role), 2) competence (feedback on implementation of new skills) and 3) relatedness (being part of a team. Internal motivation is correlated with increased interest, enjoyment, and positive coping styles as well as increased perceived competence and lower dropout rates. By using the components of self-determination theory, we designed Project Leadership App to integrate internal motivation by allowing students to identify a leadership skill that they want to develop and in which team role. 

In addition, the hypothesis that students will learn teamwork and leadership skills through Project Leadership is guided by Bandura's social learning theory. This theory states that people learn behaviors through observation and imitation. Importantly, there are four components that play a critical role in learning: attention, retention, motor reproduction, and motivation. In essence, a person learns by first paying attention to new material, retaining the information so that it can be implemented, actively implementing the material, and finally receiving a reward such as fulfilling internal motivation. Because the social learning theory states that people learn by observing and imitating the behavior of others, we predict that focusing student awareness on leadership skills will help their development as leaders and broaden their perception of who is perceived as a leader.

Finally, our work is influenced by Allport's contact hypothesis theory. The theory states that prejudice can be reduced by allowing groups of different identities to work together toward a common goal. Although the original conditions predicted for reduced prejudice include the four components of 1) equal status, 2) a common mission, 3) cooperation, and 4) institutional support, Pettigrow and Tropp’s meta-analysis show that only intergroup interaction is required for reduced prejudice. Importantly, in Project Leadership we create diverse groups through student’s self-selection of the strength that they will bring to the team. For example, if a course has five groups and five students identify their strength as interpersonal communication, then each these five students will be distributed across the five groups. In this way, if there is a bias of a certain demographic identifying with a particular skill, then the associated bias will be distributed amongst each group and increase the chance of intergroup contact. In Project Leadership, the contact hypothesis is used as an underlying premise that exposure of students to different identities and leadership approaches will empower students to move away from a prototypical style of leadership to see themselves and others as leaders. By exposing students to people with different leadership approaches, the contact theory suggests that there will be reduced bias of the t person that can lead.

4 people work part-time on the solution team.

Laurel has been working on the development and implementation of Project Leadership since August 2020. Anvitha, Tejas, and Saadi joined the team in the Spring of 2023. 

Integration of the App within undergraduate classrooms has the potential to both increase the diversity of students who identify themselves as leaders and increase the diversity of who is seen as a leader. The long-term social goal is that by diversifying who is seen as a leader, STEM leadership will have more representation and inclusion of leaders that have been marginalized by their race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sex. 

Our business model is centered around annual SaaS commercial licenses sold to institutions or instructors on a usage basis. Business models centered around educational institutions includes an annual subscription paid per course and an institution level license both priced based on a pre-defined cap on total number of student users. The subscription and license can be purchased at the institutional, departmental, or individual instructor level. To achieve the social benefits, there will be a model for qualifying instructors and educational institutions in underserved communities to use the App for free. 

For higher educational institutions, we partner with the university teaching and learning centers to customize our app to support community specific goals and add any course-related modifications to the array of leadership skills that can be developed. 

We also plan a business model of limited-time use of our product priced per-seat for professional training programs and university leadership programs where we would track pre-defined goals for skills over the limited short term for each participant.

We plan to use a similar model to serve classrooms in K-12 schools and later expand to athletic teams in K-12 and colleges.

Outside of the classroom, future commercial applications include monthly subscriptions of individuals or businesses to pay for the App on a per seat basis. Young professionals, professionals, and businesses may find the App useful to both develop leadership in individuals, and to manage leadership skills of new managers, and provide peer feedback and engagement within teams.

We aim to complete customer discovery and alpha development when funded by grants. Currently we are availing the NSF Northeast Regional I-Corps grant to conduct preliminary customer discovery and are working our way to NSF Nationals I-Corps grant for further customer discovery. With sufficient evidence from customer discovery, we want to define our first market and want to fund development and scaling our technology through a grant from a federal or regional entity (SBIR, NSF, STTR, NJEDA). We then intend to design pricing for our subscription, license-based and limited-time business models to sustain long-term growth and continue to scale Project Leadership to other markets. Our pricing design would include to supporting no-cost usage by educational institutions in underserved communities.

Dr. Lorenz has received funding to support Project Leadership through University Grants, Prizes, and Departmental Support. She received Departmental Support ($14,000) towards software developments of Project Leadership; she received Princeton's 250th Anniversary Fund ($23,000) to support the development of evidenced-based roles and skills; she placed Second in the Princeton's Innovation Forum ($7,500) towards future development of Project Leadership. In addition, three students that Laurel mentored each received funding through a grant from New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science (NJACTS) to write leadership skills ($12,000 total).