Changing an Institutional Environment through Appreciative Inquiry: Rochester Institute of Technology’s College of Liberal Arts (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Gender Science and Technology, 2009
The intent of Cal Poly Pomona's (CPP) NSF ADVANCE program is to create a universitywide system of recruitment and career development that will enable women faculty in STEM disciplines to be successful and advance into leadership positions. To begin the organizational transformation at CPP, eight Appreciative Inquiry focus groups were held with tenure-track and tenured faculty in the Colleges of Science and Engineering, with the goal of ascertaining current strengths in recruitment and career development efforts for new STEM female faculty at CPP. Findings revealed an array of recruitment strategies utilized to solicit good applicant pools, and career development practices that have assisted female faculty during the tenure and promotion process. Focus group participants also designed useful actions for further improvement of the recruiting and career development efforts for women STEM faculty at CPP. Out of the focus group findings, a variety of best practices for recruiting and developing women faculty in STEM disciplines are suggested.
2011
The ADVANCE IT-Catalyst project, “Establishing the Foundation for Future Organizational Reform and Transformation at Rochester Institute of Technology” is a three-year study across six colleges which include computing, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines funded through the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation – CATALYST (project # 0723719, http://nsfadvance.rit.edu/). The research objective is to identify barriers for current women STEM faculty in regards to rank, tenure, career advancement, leadership role progression, and resource allocation in order to establish how well the university addresses issues that have been found to be important in the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women faculty. During the study, the research team seeks to answer six primary research questions: 1) What is the distribution of STEM faculty by gender, rank, and department? 2) What are the outcomes of institutional processes of recruitment ...
2007 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings, 2020
With funding from the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison designed and implemented training for chairs of faculty hiring committees. Training began in 2004 and continues to the present. The workshops are implemented using a variety of formats, but the common elements that make them successful include: • Peer Teaching: Incorporating faculty from the unit to deliver short presentations and serve as discussion facilitators; • Active Learning: Most time is spent in discussion and a sharing of practices from different departments; presentation is kept to a minimum; • Unconscious Biases & Assumptions: Participants are introduced to the social psychological literature on unconscious biases and assumptions, and learn how these tendencies might impact the hiring process; • Accountability: Participants report on their success at recruiting diverse applicants to their pools. In 2004 and 2005, over half (61%) of departments in biological and physical sciences sent at least one faculty member to this training (usually the chair of the search committee). Using data on faculty offers and faculty new hires, we have found that the departments who sent at least one person for training ("participating departments") did increase the percentage of offers that went to women as well as the number of new assistant professors who are women. In this same time period, non-participating departments actually saw the percentage of offers made to women and their percentage of women new assistant professors decline. The linkage between participation in the hiring workshops and offers made to faculty of color is less clear, although it does appear to be positive, especially in 2004. Additionally, using data from our faculty climate surveys, we found that new hires in participating departments reported increased satisfaction with the hiring process overall, compared to new hires in non-participating departments which saw a decline in their new hires' satisfaction from 2003 to 2006. Although a number of factors likely combined to produce these positive results (most significantly a selection effect, whereby those faculty most motivated and committed to faculty diversity in the hiring process were likely those who chose to attend the workshops), our data show that given a willing audience, our training appears to be correlated with increased hiring of women faculty, as well as other desirable changes to our hiring processes at UW-Madison. INTRODUCTION After years of attempting to increase the gender diversity of our academic science and engineering leadership through awards to individual women (e.g., Research Opportunities for Women, Visiting Professorships for Women, Career Advancement Awards, Faculty Page 12.1257.2 Awards for Women, and Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education 1), the National Science Foundation (NSF) changed course in the early 21 st century, choosing instead to focus on the institutions in which academic scientists and engineers are working rather than on the individuals within those institutions. In 2001, the ADVANCE program was announced with a new solicitation for proposals that would result in "institutional transformation." The goal of the ADVANCE program overall is to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering; as such, it is an effort focused primarily on transforming the policies, practices, and climates for faculty in U.S. research institutions 1,2. The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) was awarded one of the first ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grants in January 2002. The ADVANCE team co-PIs formed a research center-the Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI 3)-to centralize all ADVANCE-related activities. WISELI focused immediately on the faculty hiring process as an essential element of success. The primary way to increase the numbers of women faculty in STEM disciplines is to hire more of them. The faculty hiring process of any university determines the demographic composition of the faculty for decades, as the faculty career can span twenty to forty years. Emphasizing the search and screen process and working to add more women to the faculty by reforming that process is an important place to begin if the goal is to increase both the proportion and numbers of women faculty. While retention, promotion, and other factors are certainly important as well, if you cannot get the women hired in the first place you have no hope of retaining them in the future.
Frontiers in Psychology
This paper describes the Gender Equity Project (GEP) at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), funded by the U. S. NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award (ITA) program. ADVANCE supports system-level strategies to promote gender equity in the social and natural sciences, but has supported very few teaching-intensive institutions. Hunter College is a teaching-intensive institution in which research productivity among faculty is highly valued and counts toward tenure and promotion. We created the GEP to address the particular challenges that faculty, especially White women and faculty of color, face in maintaining research programs and advancing in their careers at teaching-intensive institutions. During the course of the ADVANCE award, its centerpiece was the Sponsorship Program, a multifaceted paid mentorship/sponsorship program that paired each participant with a successful scholar in her discipline. It offered extensive professional development opportunit...
Promising Organizational Practices for Increasing Faculty Gender Equity: A Case Study
Organizational change is hard. Even when individuals in organizations wish to make changes, generating new behaviors and practices is extremely challenging. Since academic institutions are relatively nonhierarchical and prize professional judgments by faculty in their departments, consistent change through the entire organization can be quite hard to achieve. Change can also be particularly difficult when attitudes feeding particular behaviors are based in deeply held cultural stereotypes.
Accelerating Change for Women Faculty of Color in STEM: Policy, Action, and Collaboration
PsycEXTRA Dataset
This report is part of a project to address the underrepresentation of women faculty of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) led by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). It summarizes highlights from a convening held in May 2013 that brought together nearly 50 experts, including professors, academic administrators, and representatives of government, professional societies, the corporate sector, and women's organizations. It addresses the barriers that make it difficult for women faculty of color to advance in STEM fields, key programmatic and policy shifts that would promote their success, and strategies for implementing promising changes and taking them to scale. The convening and report are part of IWPR's research on education and training, which includes early care and education, girls' experiences in the K-12 system, postsecondary attainment, and high-quality workforce development opportunities for STEM and other careers. IWPR's recent research in this area includes a profile of programs at community colleges designed to engage women in STEM fields, as well as reports exploring pedagogical methods to increase women's participation in engineering. About the Institute for Women's Policy Research The Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) conducts rigorous research and disseminates its findings to address the needs of women, promote public dialogue, and strengthen families, communities, and societies. IWPR works with policymakers, scholars, and public interest groups to design, execute, and disseminate research that illuminates economic and social policy issues affecting women and their families, and to build a network of individuals and organizations that conduct and use women-oriented policy research. The Institute's work is supported by foundation grants, government grants and contracts, donations from individuals, and contributions from organizations and corporations. IWPR is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that also works in affiliation with the women's studies and public policy and public administration programs at The George Washington University.