By Virginia Gewin

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A free mentoring toolkit that helps female Middle Eastern scientists around the world to find and support one another is available online.

Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist based at Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan, developed the toolkit to inspire female researchers to build the networks they need to support, collaborate and advise one another as they move forward in their careers.

The number of female researchers in Middle Eastern countries varies wildly. A 2016 report found that women represent around 35.5% of total researchers in the 57 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation countries. Still, the numbers of employed women in some Middle Eastern countries are much lower. In Jordan and Algeria, just 12% of women work and in Saudi Arabia, 14% are employed.

Dajani built a mentoring network in Jordan in 2013, pairing 10 mentees with 10 mentors. From that experience, and with funding from the US National Academies of Science and the US National Science Foundation, she created ‘Three Circles of Alemat’, a three-year project to develop and test the mentoring toolkit. Working with female researchers from 17 universities across the Middle East, she and her team created a low-cost method to improve personal and professional success for both women and men. The final phase of her mentoring project, Three Circles of Alemat, brought together a cross-regional group of female Middle Eastern scientists this year in Boston, Massachusetts, at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

The mentoring toolkit is available for free through the website of the Society for the Advancement of Science and Technology in the Arab World. Another organization, 500 Women Scientists, a network of 19,000 women worldwide, has also adopted the toolkit. “We did not want to provide a centralized forum for mentors to find mentees because it is costly,” says Dajani, who is spending this year as a fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writing a book about women redefining success. “Rather, we wanted people to take control and start their own creative forums.”

Virginia Gewin is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

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