SWE Content Selected for National and International Awards of Excellence

Communications Concepts Inc. has awarded the Society of Women Engineers four honors in its 2025 Awards for Publication Excellence, or APEX, competition, and TABPI, the Trade Association and Business Publications International, has bestowed two gold-level awards and one honorable mention to SWE Magazine. This is the first time that the magazine has entered the TABPI, or Tabbies, awards.

In the APEX competition, SWE Magazine won a Grand Award, the highest level in the competition, for the State of Women in Engineering issue, published in March 2024, in the category of magazines, journals, and tabloids. This special issue presented SWE’s annual review of the literature on issues affecting women and girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, around the globe. The issue also included features on updates to Title IX, the status of women in STEM caucuses in the U.S. Congress, and roundtables held in Barcelona among members of the SWE Research Advisory Council, and Spanish and other global academics and professionals in STEM.

The magazine also won an Award of Excellence for writing about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the feature article “Women in STEM: Perceptions vs. Realities.” Written by Editor-in-Chief Laurie A. Shuster and published in the Conference 2024 issue, the feature addressed seven commonly held beliefs about gender equity in the STEM workplace, and how research, expert analyses, and the common experiences of women in the field differ from those myths.

Diverse, a SWE podcast, won an Award of Excellence for electronic media – podcasts for episode 288: CHIPS Act Update With Dr. Laurie E. Locascio of the U.S. Department of Commerce, produced by Larry Guthrie, SWE director of content strategy, and Kelsey Reed, manager of digital content and media at David James Group, SWE’s marketing partner. In a conversation with SWE CEO and Executive Director Karen Horting, CAE, Locascio shared insights on workforce development and efforts to increase the representation of women and underrepresented groups in STEM, including apprenticeships, upskilling, retraining, and returnships.

And SWE Magazine’s website, magazine.swe.org, won an Award of Excellence for websites hosted on WordPress, a popular online content management system. Guthrie and Dan Jasker, head of digital at David James Group, spearheaded an effort to redesign the website in 2023-24 to make the site more accessible, searchable, appealing, and easy to use. 

APEX award winners were selected from among 1,000 entries.

In the Tabbies competition, SWE Magazine won a gold award in the technical article category for the feature “Technology Targets Women’s Health,” by SWE contributor Seabright McCabe and published in the Spring 2024 issue. The feature documents the rise of “femtech,” tools that help women monitor and improve their health, and the women inventors and engineers behind the technologies. One reviewer commented: “From the writing choices to the design, everything added to the reading experience.”

The magazine also won a gold award for feature design for “Behind the Scenes & Ahead of Their Time,” the cover feature of the Summer 2024 issue, designed by JoAnn Dickey, art director. The article profiles the innovative women who developed new technologies to transform how movies look, feel, and entertain. One reviewer wrote: “Very successful in bringing the retro feel throughout.”

And the feature article “Women In STEM: Perceptions Vs. Realities,” was named as an honorable mention in the top 25 features category.