Building Bridges Between Middle East, Silicon Valley

An article in Al-Monitor shares the experience of Mona Karam, a young Egyptian civil engineer, as a participant of TechWomen. The program, run by the Institute for International Education's Center for Women's Leadership Initiatives in San Francisco, pairs each participant with two successful American women—a professional mentor and a cultural mentor—for five weeks of exchange and networking in the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC. "We lack the role models," said Karam. "That's why [women] drop out of ... STEM fields, because of the whole perception that it's a man-dominated field."