In April 2011, a committee overseen by the National Academies' standing Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine (CWSEM) convened a workshop in Washington, D.C. The workshop presentations came from a group of scholars and professionals who have been working for several years on documenting, analyzing, and interpreting the status of women in selected technical fields around the world.

The presentations demonstrated some of the evidentiary and epistemological challenges that scholars and professionals face in collecting and analyzing data from many different countries and regions (i.e. cross-cultural differences, social/political/economic mechanisms impacting women's participation, and the inverse correlations between levels in the scientific and technical career hierarchy and the number of women in science). "Blueprint" summarizes the workshop presentations, which provided an opportunity for dialogue about the issues that the authors have been pursuing in their work to date.