diversity, equity and inclusion in academia – UW News /news Wed, 27 Nov 2019 18:18:53 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 15 years of success for UW center in recruiting, supporting female STEM faculty /news/2017/03/27/15-years-of-success-for-uw-center-in-recruiting-supporting-female-stem-faculty/ Mon, 27 Mar 2017 22:22:48 +0000 /news/?p=52549
Photo: Katherine B. Turner

Late last year, the 天美影视传媒’s quietly marked its 15th birthday. But now, with thriving programs for early-career faculty and record numbers of female faculty in STEM fields, the center is ready for a party.

On March 31, ADVANCE will hold a belated celebration of its work and achievements since it was founded in 2001. With workshops, new resources and mentoring services the center has strived to remake the faculty recruitment and retention process to emphasize diversity in the sciences and develop resources to support early-career faculty.

“Our work through ADVANCE is to build successful and productive faculty, because their success is the university’s success,” said , UW associate dean of engineering for diversity and access, professor of electrical engineering and faculty director of ADVANCE.

There’s a lot to celebrate. Since ADVANCE opened its doors, the UW has nearly doubled the number of female faculty in 19 STEM departments across three UW colleges, from 60 in 2000 to 112 in 2015. In addition to this 93 percent increase, more than half of the female faculty in those departments are now full professors with tenure, countering the stereotype that female faculty don’t achieve full professorship as often as their male colleagues.

The UW also boasts the among the top 50 engineering schools in the country.

ADVANCE has worked to both increase the number of female faculty members in the STEM fields where they are historically underrepresented and establish support networks for faculty in the early stages of their careers.

“At UW, the early-career stage for faculty is very different today than it was when ADVANCE started,” said center director . “Today in our STEM departments there is awareness of the critical importance of addressing faculty professional development, supporting faculty success at all levels and supporting our female faculty.”

The bulk of the center’s work currently focuses on three endeavors to promote faculty recruitment and retention:

  • Career development workshops for pre-tenure faculty
  • Workshops on effective leadership for department chairs and college deans
  • A 鈥淢entoring-for-Leadership鈥 lunch and speaker series for female faculty

ADVANCE designed its workshops for early-career faculty to address subjects that are important for faculty success, but which are often lacking in traditional doctoral and postdoctoral training.

“Our workshops cover topics that faculty have asked for help with, such as time management, personnel management, student mentoring and work-life balance,” said Yen. “Faculty want and need professional development. They know they can come to ADVANCE with questions and for help and resources. You don’t have to make it up as you go along or reinvent the wheel.”

Nine universities were in the first cohort of National Science Foundation ADVANCE grantees in 2001, each of whom was awarded a five-year grant. Each university’s ADVANCE program piloted a different approach. The UW center’s flagship innovation was to focus on leadership development at the university, particularly of department chairs and deans.

“A huge part of our success has been engagement with department chairs, because they have a significant impact on the success of early-career faculty,” said Riskin. “And since ADVANCE started working with chairs and deans back in 2002, we’ve found them terrific partners for recruiting and retaining diverse faculty, providing resources and addressing the problems and concerns of early-career faculty.”

Another endeavor is to help female faculty across the UW consider leadership opportunities as part of their career plans, such as becoming department chairs. This led to the 鈥淢entoring-for-Leadership鈥 lunch and speaker series, which is the only ADVANCE program open only to female faculty. One past speaker at this event was UW President , who was principal investigator for ADVANCE during much of its tenure.

Looking forward, Yen and Riskin said they want ADVANCE to continue these current projects, but also expand the center’s focus to include increasing female faculty from underrepresented minority groups and creating new programs to support mid-career faculty.

For its first six years, UW ADVANCE was supported by the National Science Foundation. The UW center continued thanks to additional grants and support from the UW, NSF and the National Institutes of Health.

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For more information, contact Yen at 206-543-4605 or joyceyen@uw.edu and Riskin at 206-685-2313 or riskin@uw.edu.

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Why do some STEM fields have fewer women than others? UW study may have the answer /news/2016/10/12/why-do-some-stem-fields-have-fewer-women-than-others-uw-study-may-have-the-answer/ Wed, 12 Oct 2016 21:27:22 +0000 /news/?p=49560

Women’s relative lack of participation in science, technology, engineering and math is well documented, but why women are more represented in some STEM areas than others is less clear.

A new 天美影视传媒 is among the first to address that question by comparing gender disparities across STEM fields. Published Oct. 12 in the journal Psychological Bulletin, the paper identifies three main factors driving the disparity 鈥 and the most powerful one, the researchers conclude, is a “masculine culture” that makes many women feel like they don’t belong.

“There is widespread knowledge that women are underrepresented in STEM, but people tend to lump STEM fields together,” said lead author , a UW associate professor of psychology. “This is one of the first attempts to really dig down into why women are more underrepresented in some STEM fields than others.”

Women now earn about 37 percent of undergraduate STEM degrees in the United States, but their representation varies widely across those fields. Women receive more than 40 percent of undergraduate degrees in math, for example, but just 18 percent of degrees in computer science.

The UW study focused on six of the largest science and engineering fields with the most undergraduate degrees: biology, chemistry and math, which have the highest proportions of female participation, and computer science, engineering and physics, which have bigger gender gaps.

The researchers analyzed more than 1,200 papers about women’s underrepresentation in STEM, and from those identified 10 factors that impact gender differences in students’ interest and participation in STEM. Then they winnowed the list down to the three factors most likely to explain gendered patterns in the six STEM fields 鈥 a lack of pre-college experience, gender gaps in belief about one鈥檚 abilities, and a masculine culture that discourages women from participating.

The paper identifies three main aspects of that masculine culture: stereotypes of the fields that are incompatible with how many women perceive themselves, negative stereotypes about women鈥檚 abilities and a dearth of role models. Those factors decrease women’s interest in a field by signaling that they do not belong there, the researchers write.

A lack of pre-college experience is also a factor, the paper finds. The gender gap in STEM interest is smaller among high school seniors at schools with stronger math and science offerings, the researchers note. But courses in computer science, engineering and physics are less likely to be offered and required in U.S. high schools than courses in biology, chemistry and mathematics 鈥 leaving students with little information about what those fields are like and who might be suited for them.

“Students are basing their educational decisions in large part on their perceptions of a field,” Cheryan said. “And not having early experience with what a field is really like makes it more likely that they will rely on their stereotypes about that field and who is good at it.”

A lack of experience does not itself cause women’s underrepresentation in STEM, the researchers write. Women are attracted to many fields that students are typically not exposed to before college, such as nursing and social work, the researchers note. But when a lack of early experience is accompanied by a masculine culture, the gender proportion skews male. Early learning opportunities in STEM, Cheryan said, will only attract girls if they convey that girls belong in those fields as much as boys do.

“If we鈥檙e not providing students with a welcoming culture, these efforts are not likely to succeed,” she said.

Belief in one’s abilities was a common theme in previous studies and may help explain current gender gaps, but Cheryan said inconsistent findings made it a less compelling factor. For example, she said, girls tend to report less confidence in their math abilities than boys, but the field of math is still relatively gender-balanced.

Similarly, Cheryan said, gender discrimination in hiring and other opportunities was not able to explain current patterns of variability. The researchers expected to find less discrimination in the fields with higher female representation, she said, but discovered that it differed little across the six areas.

The researchers embarked on the study focusing primarily on women鈥檚 choices, Cheryan said, but quickly realized that explaining women’s underrepresentation required also looking at men鈥檚 choices. The proportion of women receiving computer science degrees, for example, has declined steadily since the mid-1980s, due more to an influx of men to the field than a drop in women鈥檚 participation. Cultural historians attribute the shift to the advent of the personal computer and an accompanying stereotype of the nerdy male computer genius.

“When we drilled down into the numbers, we realized that if we just looked at women, that wouldn’t tell the whole story,” Cheryan said. “Underrepresentation is shaped just as much by what men are doing as by what women are doing.鈥

The researchers conclude that a more inclusive culture across STEM fields is the most effective way to boost female participation. That can be achieved, Cheryan said, by developing “subcultures” that make girls feel they belong, whether that involves to create a more welcoming environment or counteracting negative stereotypes about women鈥檚 abilities by making it clear that everyone has the potential to succeed.

“Cultural change is never easy, but there are lots of examples of it being done successfully, and it translates into changing who鈥檚 in a particular field,” she said.

The research was funded by the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The study’s co-authors are , a UW master鈥檚 student in psychology when the research was conducted; , a former UW undergraduate now at Ohio State University; and , former lab manager of the UW’s .

For more information, contact Cheryan at scheryan@uw.edu or 206-612-9812.

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