{"id":217699,"date":"2024-08-29T07:01:02","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T11:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=217699"},"modified":"2024-08-30T15:31:05","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T19:31:05","slug":"uconn-trustee-creates-breakthrough-womens-leadership-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2024\/08\/uconn-trustee-creates-breakthrough-womens-leadership-initiative\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Trustee Creates Breakthrough Women\u2019s Leadership Initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

The absence of women leaders in engineering enterprises has long been recognized and unaddressed \u2013 until now.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In July, Jeanine Armstrong Gouin ’87 (ENG) \u2013 who is both a UConn Trustee and president of an environmental consulting firm \u2013 announced that she has endowed an initiative to begin tackling the challenge. She has made an undisclosed gift to endow the Jeanine Armstrong Gouin Initiative for Women in Leadership at the UConn College of Engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Jeanine
UConn Trustee Jeanine Armstrong Gouin and UConn Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Anne D\u2019Alleva celebrate Gouin’s recent gift.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gouin, a Civil Engineering graduate, is president of the U.S. division of SLR International Corp. and oversees nearly 500 employees in 27 offices throughout the US, including more than 50 UConn graduates. Throughout her career she has observed the void of women in managerial and executive positions, with many women engineers leaving the profession entirely after just a few years. The pattern is continuously repeated but has never been systematically addressed. Now Gouin will begin working with faculty and leading an external advisory board to launch the program.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe struggle to keep women in the profession, and particularly, we struggle to recruit them into executive and management positions,\u201d UConn Foundation President and CEO Amy Yancey said, reflecting on Gouin\u2019s gift. \u201cThere\u2019s plenty of talent, but for a number of reasons, it remains a challenge. Today, we celebrate the beginning of Jeanine\u2019s vision, an initiative for women in leadership in the UConn College of Engineering.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gouin\u2019s gift to UConn Engineering, announced and celebrated at a July 29 event on the UConn Storrs campus, will<\/span> provide financial support for leadership programs and activities that are available to all engineering students, not just women. The focus of the programing is on empowering women engineers to become confident leaders, but the programming will operate on an \u201call-comers\u201d participation policy, with men equally welcome as women to participate in the programming activities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTrustee Gouin, thank you so much for your gift in support of women in leadership,\u201d UConn Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Anne D\u2019Alleva told the group. \u201cI\u2019ve witnessed your passion for UConn and the College of Engineering, and your true desire to make a difference on the UConn Board of Trustees, while also serving as an executive in the world of engineering. That same care and thoughtfulness is represented in this gift.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Former Dean Kazerounian, who returned to the faculty the day after this celebration, said \u201cWe are profoundly grateful to Jeanine Gouin for her generous gift, which not only honors her remarkable achievements but also inspires the next generation of women leaders in engineering. Her commitment to fostering empowerment within our field is a beacon of hope and a call to action for all of us.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gouin acknowledged their thanks and talked about the challenges she\u2019s faced in her career, and how they influenced her decision to find ways to give back to the College.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Jeanine
Jeanine Armstrong Gouin meets with friends and colleagues during the July event.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI had the good fortune to be born as daughter number five to parents who didn\u2019t think it was \u2018weird,\u2019 that I wanted to be engineer,\u201d she said. \u201cMy parents taught me, through their actions, that kindness, compassion, respect, and integrity were far greater accomplishments than any amount of money that I could ever earn in my lifetime. There has never been a better time than right now to be a woman living on this Earth. And yet, so often, I look around rooms of leaders, executives and CEOs, and there are just so few women among us\u2026 in some cases, all that\u2019s needed is a little encouragement.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gouin has been twice elected an alumni representative on the UConn Board of Trustees and will have served for eight years if she steps down when her term expires in 2025. She was named as an Honoree of the Connecticut Women\u2019s Hall of Fame in 2019; was named to the Connecticut Technology Council\u2019s Women of Innovation in 2017; and was inducted into the UConn Academy of Distinguished Engineers in 2014.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For more information about donations and gifts to the College, visit UConn Engineering<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Editor’s Note:<\/strong> This story was updated on Aug. 30 to clarify that the programs and activities funded by the Jeanine Armstrong Gouin Initiative will be open to all students, regardless of gender]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gift catalyzes support for women in engineering leadership roles long overlooked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":150,"featured_media":217700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,1866,2472,2235,2306,2227,2233],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2315],"class_list":["post-217699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-engr","category-gifts-donors","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-voices","category-uconn-edu-homepage","category-university-news"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 07:14:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/150"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217699"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218044,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217699\/revisions\/218044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/217700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217699"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=217699"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=217699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}