Effects of ADVANCE in the STEM Disciplines: Faculty Diversity, Women in Leadership, and Institutional Transformation

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Frank Dobbins, of Harvard University, proposes a three-year project to conduct and analyze a survey of diversity policies and equity program reforms at 1,000 universities in the United States between 1990 and 2014. Building upon work that he and his collaborators conducted on the effectiveness of diversity programs at corporations in the United States, they develop several new survey instruments to conduct a research evaluation of diversity programming at universities in the United States. In particular, they will assess the impact of policies and programs to promote diversity and equity on individual faculty members as well as on the institutions themselves. These kinds of programs include mentoring activities, networking, professional development activities, career life balances policies and other policy changes. They further compare equity outcomes for individuals and at the institutional level at institutions that have received funding from the National Science Foundation to promote gender equity, awards from the ADVANCE program. They will use data from the National Science Foundation Survey of Doctorate Recipients and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System as well as collect new data from the institutions themselves. Using these databases, the PI and his team will conduct a quantitative study to assess the effects of equity reforms, the persistence of equity reforms, and the diffusion of such reforms across types of institutions. Findings from this research has the potential to dramatically change the ways that universities in the United States address issues of gender equity because the study should result in identifying policies and programs that are most effective at achieving equity.The PI team will use a multi-level modeling methodology incorporating the data that they collect through the new surveys with the big data sets already available to them to fulfill the goals discussed above. In their research on corporate equity programs the Principal Investigators developed an evidence-based theory of the remediation of inequality built on four insights from sociology and social psychology. They will test those theoretical premises in the academic context. They incorporate insights from the work-autonomy and self-determination literatures, the labeling and self-determination theories, feminist theory, and accountability theory to build the models to test theories on how equity may be achieved in university settings. Testing these theories will advance research on gender inequality in academia and at work more generally. This will be the first study to utilize comprehensive longitudinal data from ADVANCE and peer institutions to evaluate the impact of diversity and equity programming.