Mary Juhas: Creating a culture of entrepreneurship for women inventors at Ohio State

Since then, Mary Juhas, Ph.D., has served as the associate vice president for Ohio State ADVANCE, and has worked to create a culture that supports women in STEMM at Ohio State and provide opportunities, resources and tools they need to become leaders in their fields.

One important initiative out of Ohio State ADVANCE is REACH for Commercialization – a program helps develop an entrepreneurial mindset among women at Ohio State, thus providing a pathway for their innovations to have an impact on people’s lives. Since its inception, more than 100 women have benefitted from the program.

Ohio State ADVANCE continues to advance, sustain, and institutionalize the best practices and evidence-based strategies for women faculty recruitment and retention particularly in the STEMM fields. We recently asked Mary why it’s why this work is important and what she sees as the impact.  

More and more women are choosing to go into STEM fields. What’s led to this increase, particularly in academia?

While it’s true that the numbers of women choosing STEM disciplines for academic and career pursuits have increased, there are significant disparities when we examine the details --- the disciplines with the greatest percentage of women are in the social sciences.  The same trends appear for biological sciences.  Conversely, physics, engineering and computer science remain disappointingly stagnant.  Computer science is heading in the wrong direction since 1997 due to the tech boom.  Interestingly, the percentage of women studying computer science in the 1980s and early 1990s was quite healthy because  women studied math, perhaps to become a math teacher, and because women developed typing skills more than men.  Think of the movie Hidden Figures—as the tech boom unfolded, with intriguing stories of overnight millionaires, the hoodie culture became dominant, and women were forced out.  It was quick and decisive.

The higher percentages awarded to women at the master’s and PhD levels can be attributed to international students.  The biennial update to these data, due in 2021, will likely reflect the effects of recent unfavorable immigration trends and the pandemic.  If we further disaggregate the engineering disciplines, there are again clear and troubling trends. The highest percentages of women are in the environmental and biomedical-inspired fields.  On the other hand, the percentage of women in mechanical, electrical and computer engineering remains around 10 – 12%.  Importantly, the overall trend for women’s representation across all STEM fields is inversely proportional to the salaries; those with the highest earning potential have the fewest women and those with the greatest representation of women tend to have lower salaries.  The only way to correct this persistent societal imbalance is to increase and sustain the role models in our workforce: YOU CAN’T BE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE!  The pandemic has already widened the gender gap in STEM and these trends will not only damage our economy but compromise our global research status.

Tell us why a program like REACH for Commercialization™ is important? 

The US Patent and Trademark Office has documented the persistent gender gap in awarded patents.  The most recent data indicate that only about 13% of US patents are held by women inventors. They describe the women and underrepresented minorities who are excluded from the innovation ecosystem as the “Lost Einsteins.”  The REACH for Commercialization™ program is an innovation ecosphere, developed over 11 years, with readily accessible resources, advocacy, collaboration opportunities, and personalized counseling on entrepreneurial activities.  It is not a boot-camp model but rather a year-round resource with flexible on-ramps and off-ramps that accommodate competing demands at work or home.  REACH is expanding to women-led innovation ecosystems in major US metropolitan hubs through strategic partnerships.

What’s the biggest misconception faculty have about commercialization coming into the program?

Faculty often assume they have to do all the work to commercialize their innovation through a startup company – such as doing a patent search, finding legal counsel, writing a business plan, and finding capital.  Among the four REACH core program themes is “Building a Team,” one that we consider to be most important, and which cannot be overemphasized.  We feature speakers, many former REACH participants, who share their journeys and often invite their own team members to join in the discussion.  This paints a picture of how the innovator selects her team members, how the team may change over time depending upon the needs of the company and importantly, the role of each team member.

What do you see as the biggest benefit to the innovators that go through the program?

The network!  If we don’t have the answer, we can usually find it fairly quickly.  We have steadily developed a reliable, agile, accessible and friendly network that provides rapid response to the innovator.  We send flash surveys to all participants after each event to assess their satisfaction and learn about gaps or pain points.  This enables us to adjust our approach for the next event.  Our constellation workshops are open to all former participants from prior REACH cohorts.

This year, we introduced a new research team-based approach that includes women postdoctoral scholars and PhD students of former or current REACH cohort members.  This is a natural progression to prepare teams for I-Corps@Ohio or another activity that includes multiple members of the lab team such as major grant applications.

Another benefit is personalized mentoring that guides the innovator to what comes next.  We strive to demystify the commercialization process by offering clear pathways with as many options as possible.  Identifying collaborators for REACH participants is a major priority.  Our data reveal that women have fewer scholarly collaborations – and thus citations – compared with their male peers.  Productive research collaborations are a first step to innovation.

You’ve been an angel investor. What do angel investors add to the startup ecosystem? 

Angel capital provides early-stage funding that may follow support from accelerator award funding or SBIR/STTR grants and before venture capital funding.  Angel investors are often founders of their own start up (I am not among them) who choose to pay it forward to enable other innovators.  Last year, we were fortunate to welcome an angel investor who is a woman of color onto the REACH zoom stage.  That was a big win.