At the start of the 1895-96 academic year, Bascom established the first geology department at a U.S. women's college, at Bryn Mawr.
At the beginning of the 1895-1896 academic year, Florence Bascom founded the geology department at Bryn Mawr College, a pioneering women's institution in Pennsylvania. This marked the creation of the first dedicated geology department at any women's college in the United States.
Bascom built the department essentially from scratch, personally collecting rock and mineral specimens, designing laboratory curricula, and training her students in fieldwork techniques that were considered unusual, even radical, for women to undertake at the time. She insisted her students learn to conduct rigorous field surveys and petrographic microscope analysis, refusing to let gender limit the scope of scientific training she offered.
The department became a training ground for a generation of women geologists; several of Bascom's students went on to earn advanced degrees and pursue professional careers in geology, a field that had virtually excluded women before her efforts. Her work at Bryn Mawr exemplifies how she used institutional access, once she had personally broken through barriers at Johns Hopkins, to create durable structures that would benefit women scientists for generations. This legacy endures in the continued study of the earth sciences at Bryn Mawr and in the broader normalization of women's participation in geological fieldwork and research.