Introduction

As happens so often in trying to understand and discuss other cultures, wording trips up specialists. When they claim to have never found “a true matriarchy,” these anthropologists are envisioning a mirror image of patriarchy, a vision that ignores the differing ways in which females conceptualize and wield power. (Ryan and Jetha, p. 133)

If a friend describes a hiking trip, you might have a vision of reaching beautiful waterfalls and mountains with little effort. Or perhaps you see only the beautifully crafted photo on Instagram, where the sweat has magically disappeared, and the hiker is in a triumphant pose with a stunning view behind her. Often the career of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is narrated in the same way. You hear a famous name followed by a highlight reel of her amazing accomplishments in science and engineering. Often the rocky parts of the journey are not explored. All the times she lost her way or faced a setback have been omitted from the record. However, it is exactly the challenging times, the falls, bumps, lost paths, that make her successful, foster her resilience, and ultimately lead to success.

The number of female graduates in STEM fields has continued to increase, though the number of faculty members has remained stagnant [1]. While women account for nearly half of the US workforce, they only hold 25% of jobs in STEM occupations [2]. Many factors contribute to gender disparities in STEM fields. Researchers have found that the lack of supportive networks and gender identity in STEM fields plays a strong role in women’s decision to leave the field [1]. In addition to striving for gender equity within organizations, there is a clear need to foster supportive environments for women in STEM that focus on enhancing women’s roles in technical positions.

We hope to share with the reader some of our own experiences navigating the career path as a woman in engineering alone, and also the power of tackling a career journey with great collaborators. Building trust in other collaborators has been a key mechanism for how we found new paths and peaks together. Coming together has both fostered our individual abilities and confidence as well as supported us to pursue new paths that were only accessible as a group (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Hiking is a good metaphor for the complex journey that many women in STEM fields experience. (Sketch by Heather Dillon)

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This chapter leverages the hiking metaphor to explore the ways that women might build supportive networks and environments. We have used the techniques we outline here to build a trusting and productive research team that operates fully remotely. Together we have navigated complex trails on our own professional journeys. We have come to believe that who you hike with on your research journey may be more important than the destination. Along our journeys, our research team has also demonstrated resilience to challenges and the capacity to navigate ambiguity, with many changed directions and research questions over the years, supported by the confidence we have in each other.

The authors include three avid hikers and researchers. Dr. Heather Dillon is Professor and Chair of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington Tacoma, where her team is researching thermodynamics and energy systems. Dr. Rachel Dzombak is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and runs an independent consultancy. In both roles, she supports individuals and organizations to foster innovation and solve complex problems, including how to enable a circular economy. Chrissi Antonopoulos is Senior Analyst at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where she leads a team focused on innovative energy research in building science. Together, our research has focused on the circular economy, life cycle assessment, equity, and economic drivers in the field of energy and environment.

Background

Why is it worth unpacking what positive collaboration looks like? At least for the women within this collaboration, finding academic partnerships where our voices are heard and our skills appreciated, and where mutual support is freely given, had been a rare occurrence. At the same time, due to the increasing complexity of today’s challenges and problem spaces, working in interdisciplinary and diverse teams is increasingly critical in science and engineering [3]. Teaming is “a way of working that brings people together to generate new ideas, find answers and solve problems. But people have to learn to team; it doesn’t come naturally” [4]. The latter point is critical. We often are placed or work in teams, though few individuals have ever learned the principles of good teaming.

Teaming matters because finding solutions to the complex, wicked problems that we are faced with today necessitates bringing together perspectives from multiple disciplines and teaming across disciplinary boundaries [5, 6]. When good teaming is practiced, teams are able to leverage the available diversity of team members. Leveraging diversity entails creating space for all of the ways that individuals see and solve problems [7]. How we see problems is informed by our cultural experiences, race, gender, socioeconomic background, and much more. For example, someone who grew up in Berkeley, CA, is going to see and understand the problem of climate change differently than someone who grew up in New Orleans, LA. Furthermore, diversity also encompasses the ways in which we solve problems and ensures that solutions disseminate to diverse groups. If your team members all have a background in engineering from the same school, then you are going to be limited in the approaches you bring to the problem at hand.

Research has shown that diverse teams either significantly under- or out-perform more homogeneous teams [8]. When teams ignore the diversity that is present or treat it with stereotypes (e.g., you are the only woman on the team, you must have the best handwriting so you take all of the notes!), they tend to underperform. On the other hand, teams outperform when they collectively adopt a learning mindset [9], both about each other and the challenge at hand, which enables them to both learn and experiment with the different perspectives and heuristics that are brought by the team members.

A critical enabler of leveraging diversity on teams can be achieved by establishing psychological safety. A term coined by Prof. Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is, “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” Psychological safety can manifest as the willingness of a team member to throw out a wild idea or engaging in a tough conversation about a project aspect that didn’t go as planned. In a study of teams at Google, psychological safety was established to be the most critical factor for team success [10]. Within organizations, the values held and the norms practiced can reduce teams’ anxiety and support the tendency for risk taking.

In the subsequent sections, we detail the journey of our partnership and how we intentionally created a high degree of psychological safety through our collective values held and norms practiced. We also include a discussion of how leveraging available diversity on our team leads to a productive and supportive research program.

Our Journey Begins

In the beginning, we were all hiking alone. Heather had worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for many years and already understood the power of collaboration for scientific discovery when she met Chrissi, who at the time was a new hire to PNNL. Heather and Chrissi worked in the same office but with different project teams, and gradually became friends. As a senior staff, Heather became a mentor to Chrissi, and over time they began developing projects they could work on together. Heather knew that it is easier to motivate yourself to hike up a steep hill when your friends are counting on you. Together, Chrissi and Heather worked on renewable energy and energy efficiency projects for building science [11, 12]. When Heather took a job in academia, the two had developed a working relationship with high levels of trust that allowed them to creatively look for ways to continue collaboration.

A short time later, Heather met Rachel, a third-year graduate student at the time, at a lighting conference when they spoke on a panel together. At the time, Rachel was navigating to find a project to focus her dissertation around and struggling to find a project fit. She recalls, “at that meeting (where I had felt like an imposter), Heather acknowledged the value of my work and told me she was interested in working together. At that moment I felt very seen.” A few months later, Rachel faced an intense crossroads when her graduate advisor passed away unexpectedly. She sent a panicked email to Heather asking to talk, because she didn’t know anyone within her institution that would be able to step into an advising role. Heather thankfully responded quickly and invited her to join the team. Starting the hike was as easy as setting up a 30-min weekly video call.

Our paths first crossed in different ways, at a conference, in a shared office space, and we each identified that a new trail had appeared. Why did we choose to walk together? Our collaboration was sparked not because our research efforts or focal were perfectly aligned, rather because our values were aligned. As individuals we implicitly realized this alignment existed early on, though our values surfaced initially through conversations about our individual goals and how we might develop mutually beneficial shared goals together. We further recognized the respect and support from the start was different than other partnerships. Because of the trust these early conversations engendered, vocalizing the values and norms we individually and collectively hold has become an important practice that we have each adopted as we work with new teams.

Team Motivation and Values

In research, there are always interesting problems to study and solve, and often the most interesting engineering problems come with human obstacles. Sometimes the obstacles are senior colleagues that insist on being first author on every publication. Sometimes the obstacles are a lack of funding. We have confirmed that if you find a group of friends that enjoy working together, you can accomplish great things and tackle these obstacles together. In order to develop this chapter, we engaged in a process of reflection on our work together. We each considered the values that our work showcases and then we participated in a series of sessions to converge on the list of team values below. In sharing, we help to showcase a set of values and norms that can help guide future collaborations (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Finding a way past a tricky career challenge is often difficult in research. Team discussions can be a method for finding a path forward

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Our team is composed of three female scientists. During our time together we have all advanced in our academic and research/industry career. At this time our work identities include a tenured professor and two research-focused industry roles. Our motivation to support one another is one of the most important facets of our partnership. Many of the core values we share were important to each of us before we worked together, but we quickly realized that reinforcing these values in the team increased our productivity.

The research obstacles we had all encountered helped us develop a shared set of values. Each of these values contributed to team resilience and trust. Below we outline the values that we hold in our research partnership, including compassion, authenticity, humility, and listening. At the core, the collaboration centers on prioritizing the humans involved over any research or academic accolade, using our commitment to each other to drive accountability, and upholding a culture of trust. In this section, we additionally outline the norms that we have in our collaboration, which we see as our values in action.

Values: a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life [13].

Compassion and Kindness

Our team shares deep compassion for one another and the environment. We are strongly committed to using our scientific and engineering backgrounds to promote technologies, processes and frameworks to address and reverse climate change. This manifests in our dedication to each other as well as the ways in which we treat each other. Compassion also emerges from seeing what each team member cares about and then considering how we can integrate that topic into our work. Overall, we developed a shared value of compassion, based on the importance of our own beliefs and the desire to support the team.

For example, when Heather encountered bias and leadership integrity violations in her job, the team helped her courageously explore the best path forward. The team helped remind Heather she should stick to her own values, that changing oneself for an institution is not a good long-term career choice. Rachel put it succinctly, “I think at times we are more compassionate for each other than we are even for ourselves.”

We also make time for kindness. Kindness might show up in small ways, like a text message before a presentation, or a gift for an engagement. And kindness is manifested every week when we make time and space for one another in our meetings. Because each member of the team can list several examples of how this type of compassion and kindness impacted their work, we included this as a shared value.

Authenticity and Respect

Our research agenda is rooted in respect for the planet and one another. We are focused on helping individuals and organizations to more effectively steward natural resources and move away from extractive practices. The same authenticity and respect naturally extended to our work with one another.

Authenticity allows us to explore the truest version of ourselves as we each change and grow over time. Freedom to cry when the big emotional blows occur is one example.

Rachel’s example: There’s bringing your whole self to work and then there is bringing your whole messy self. After going through a painful breakup, I remember logging onto our video meeting and just weeping. I couldn’t hold it together and was truly depressed. Heather stopped what she was doing and focused in. Really held me in that moment and normalized how I was feeling. There was time for pep talks and strategies later. At the time there was a need to just stop and let it be. That has remained consistent – though crying on the phone was a rough moment of authenticity – the rest of the spectrum of emotions is also allowed. Being really excited about a research idea, frustrated with a colleague, happy because it’s warm outside – whatever it is I feel like we give ourselves the time and space to be.

This example demonstrates the trust the team has built around the space for personal sharing. We always take time to treat one another with respect, every aspect of our shared humanity deserves time and respect. We recognize that people have things going on in their lives that may affect their ability to show up on a week-to-week basis, and that is valid. After all, we are more than the sum of our dynamic parts. Moving, childcare, illness, are all examples of things that demand our attention and we respect the individual who may need to step away and prioritize another facet of life.

Humility and Equity

Another important value for the team is humility. While each member of the team is confident, there is no sense of privilege, even when the professional titles might imply it. We each work consistently to support each other to contribute in whatever way we can, even if that week contributing just looks like showing up to the meeting and providing words of encouragement to others. While humility and equity may have been important to us before we joined this team, the weekly practice of these skills has been a powerful reinforcer for each of us.

We leverage each other’s strengths, ask for input, and use collective ideas to form research agendas. At times it feels like none of us care what we are working on, as long as we are working together. The good of the team is always the priority. There are no back channels supporting gossip – we each make decisions that are best for the group in that moment. There are no fights over authorship order, a unique experience when most of us have had very negative authorship issues in the past. Instead we take turns as first author, just as we take turns playing the lead on different projects. Often the author order is based on who might be leading a specific type of inquiry, or the career timing that might benefit most from a first author publication. When we reflected on our shared values, this type of equity in authorship was one of the important values of the team that was emphasized by each person.

Listening and Happiness

One of our most important shared practices is listening to one another. We don’t have preconceived notions of what each other should be doing to make ourselves happy. We listen actively and trace each other’s energy and see what makes that person light up – what makes them come alive. Ultimately the behavior of paying attention to each other’s happiness, we think, unlocks better research because we can see what drives and motivates that person. This shared value emerged organically in our team, but it quickly became an important weekly habit.

We listen carefully to how each person is feeling and track how that is changing over time. It’s not just noticing a feeling but also remembering to speak up if we’re seeing a behavior pattern over a longer period of time. We push each other to grow and leverage this empathy into ways we can each take action.

Heather’s Example: I believe Rachel and Chrissi realized I needed to adjust my career long before I did. Over a year of conversations, they patiently listened as I described troubling patterns of micro-aggressions from colleagues. While they never told me what I ought to do, they did support me in determining possible paths I could take. In the end I think they understood that I needed to adjust my career in a way that would allow me to be my authentic self, and I am grateful to have a trusted team to process that with.

Trust

Each of our shared values help us to create a culture of trust to do excellent research in our team. Trust means that we can throw each other the ball and know that the other person will catch it. When someone says they’re going to do something they do it, and moreover, they do it in a way that doesn’t require a cross-check. Fundamentally, we work together, with an inherent understanding that our contributions will result in a strong work product. We give each other space and time; if we run into issues or conflicts, we work together to solve problem. This value emerged over time as we grew in our team.

Hiking together requires a great deal of trust in your team, particularly for long journeys. You need to trust that your friend packed the fire starter, but it is also helpful if you don’t each need to carry every tool because it gets heavy. Our values help us determine the types of tools and journeys we wish to travel on together. We consider what roads we would like to explore together, and then think carefully about the skills that each of us might be able to pack for that type of research project.

Setting Norms: How We Manifest Our Values

A norm exists in a given social setting to the extent that individuals usually act in a certain way and are often [held accountable] when seen not to be acting in this way. (Adapted from [14])

Norms describe human behavior, and the willingness to adapt, adopt and make decisions. While values lay the foundations of who we are as people, many times it’s societal norms that help inform our behaviors and guide our actions in specific settings. Norms help to ensure that values are practiced and don’t just live in our minds. In our collaboration, we connected on shared values and over time, worked to develop norms in our collaboration to manifest those values. Part of norms includes holding people accountable to the values that are set. By finding ways to constructively and compassionately give and receive feedback, we also encouraged each other to grow and uphold who we wanted to be within our research partnership. Our norms further connected to a broader agenda. Our behavior as a team is rooted in our strong environmental ethic and understanding of the need to solve some of the complex climate issues that face our society. As our society reaches a critical junction related to climate change, and our ability to effectively combat it, norms play a crucial role. From an environmental perspective, social norms are necessary for society to focus on the common good and find resolution to the world’s environmental problems [15].

Checking In

We start every meeting by checking in with one another and seeing what is going on in each of our lives. The unique part about being at three different institutions is that we don’t see each other on a day-to-day basis. We are not in each other’s work environments or social circles in a daily way. In fact, we’ve all only been together in person once. That doesn’t stop us from recognizing that there is a human being on the other side of the computer screen that has a life behind them, and we make sure to give space to be vulnerable and share the truth of what is happening on any given day of any given week. This norm is deliberate and connected to our value of listening and compassion for one another.

Stretching

Our group overall is flexible and one of the most important norms that we have is the ability to stretch and shapeshift into what the group needs at a given moment – whether that looks like developing new expertise to fit in with an emergent research need to support one person’s project, or it looks like adopting new personalities when someone needs cheering section behind them as they embark on a new adventure. Sometimes the stretch only lasts one 30-min meeting or sometimes it lasts years as we are stepping into a space to allow someone to reach a professional goal or build-out work in a new domain. We made the decision a long time ago to show up as ourselves and as what the others in the group need. This norm is closely tied to our value of authenticity and respect.

Advocating

Our group is a strong sounding board for each other. Each of us has faced a professional dilemma and over the years there have been many. We each take the approach of first helping each other unpack the situation and spend time to develop the team’s perspective on it. For example, when one of us stepped into a new role and was marginalized by their boss, we brought the situation to the group to discuss. At first, the predominant narrative in the situation was about being overwhelmed and frustrated; action took a backseat to emotion. Once we gave space to the big emotions, the conversation transitioned to a focus on what needed to be done. We helped her prepare to advocate for herself (and of course she already had everything she needed within herself) and to craft her point of view on her arguments and her approach to the conversation. This norm is connected to our value of listening and happiness.

Positioning

One of our norms we exhibit is quite subtle. We are good at positioning each other’s work because, despite a high level of general confidence in ourselves, we can each see each other as bigger and brighter than we see ourselves. Rachel is excellent at providing big-picture connections to the most complex environmental system. Chrissi is great at positioning our work as interesting and fundable to people who want to see things happening in the world. She is also amazing at building partnerships. Heather is incredibly impactful about packaging the contributions we have made or work we have collaborated on, and she enjoys art so we often have whimsical figures to include in our publications. This norm is closely connected to our value of humility, each of us believes in the greatness of the others.

Work Norms

A simple but impactful norm is that we do not have one-hour meetings. Sometimes they only take 15 min. Sometimes they take 2 h. The format and the structure of the meetings doesn’t matter. Getting to the work matters and celebrating each other as individuals matters. And one feeds the others. Leaving space for the sparks and then trusting that the work products will emerge has proven to be an excellent and productive strategy. This norm is closely tied to our value of trust, we each trust that the work will get done even if we don’t meet for a specific time period.

Our norms have provided a concrete way for us to practice the values our team has developed. Whenever we do broaden our collaborations to a bigger group of people, the strength of the norms protects the integrity of the team. Several of us have also used the norms from this group in other teams and found them to be widely beneficial to any gathering.

How the Journey Has Changed Us

The journey of our collaboration started in 2012. As a research team that valued one another above academic outcomes, we have exceeded our own expectations for productivity. In the beginning, Chrissi was on a trail focused on energy-efficient buildings, Rachel was studying the circular economy, and Heather was looking at energy-efficient lighting. Over time, we were intentional about sharing different aspects of our background and skillsets, and through focused conversation and active listening, synergies emerged that led us to collaboratively create new pathways in our research.

Our team was initially focused on lighting with ties to the circular economy, in part due to questions that emerged from Rachel’s work as a graduate student [16]. Exploring the circular economy in the context of our collaborative partnership created new focus for Rachel’s dissertation and a collection of new publications on the end of life implications of lighting products [17,18,19]. As we continued our journey together, Chrissi contributed her perspective of the circular economy from an economics lens and Rachel integrated her work in design studies leading to a publication on assessing the waste burden implications of technological change [20]. Drawing on Heather and Chrissi’s previous work to view the circular economy from the broader context of building science also enabled us to integrate perspectives on exergy [21]. Throughout all of this, we had conversations about what new paths we could explore together.

This team has changed how we individually think about research careers. When most people finish a PhD program, they believe they will specialize in one topic forever. Instead, in this working group, we have found that the topic of research is significantly less important to sustaining interest in research. What we do care about is supporting the career aspirations of friends and colleagues. When we tackle a new topic as a group that might be a bit outside one person’s comfort zone technically, we embrace it! We do so with eagerness, knowing that friends will help guide our growth in a new topic and do so with generosity (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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Taking time to reflect on your own journey is a helpful way to stay motivated

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Heather’s example: I learned geographic information system (GIS) mapping last summer. This is a new skill set for me that I now feel confident and excited to expand. Chrissi’s mentorship in this area helped me explore this in the context of other technical work I was doing for one of our projects. I am growing because we are doing things I would never have tackled alone. It is exciting!

Chrissi’s example: Working in collaboration with Heather and Rachel has helped me realize my own personal and professional goals. Their support and encouragement helped me take the big leap to pursue a PhD and they have been there for me throughout the process. Having women in my life with similar goals and journeys has helped me gain confidence as a researcher and adds perspectives to my ideas that can only come from a trusting environment.

Conclusion: View from the Mountain

We have discovered that building a research culture that is based on shared values and norms contributes to a highly trusting and productive team. Working with other confident and kind women has made each of us more successful. Our team has published nine papers in 8 years, and we are still going strong with several new works pending. We have climbed far more mountains together than we ever could have climbed alone. We encourage women who are launching research careers in STEM, particularly focused on the environment, to consider ways to formalize norms and values for teams using the example we have outlined. We have found the trust that comes from this type of collaboration leads to high productivity. We have also found that cross-discipline collaborations that stretch us are powerful for tackling complex energy and environment challenges. Our model of collaborative research may be easiest to replicate in environment fields where principles of shared responsibility are often valued.

Creating a positive culture of collaboration can be transformative for every person in the team and highly productive scientifically. We hope that whatever research team you become a part of might be strengthened by embracing a new type of scientific culture, one that values each researcher’s journey more than the scientific method. Focusing on supporting another person is significantly more motivational than a stated goal that you might wish to write a specific number of papers this year. Rather, the focus of a career could become, how many people might we help succeed in new things this year? Your research matters, but your colleagues matter more!