ADVANCE IT - Collaboration and Equity: The Resources, Relationships, and Recognition (R3) Model for Advancing Women and Underrepresented Faculty in Science and Engineering

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The ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in areas such as policy, practice, culture, and organizational climate. The ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (ADVANCE-IT) track supports the development of innovative organizational change strategies within an institution of higher education to enhance gender equity in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) academic workforce.University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) will implement an ADVANCE-IT project that will further our understanding of institutional practices and equity issues related to collaborative work by STEM faculty. Although collaborative work is crucial to solving current scientific and engineering challenges, which often require inter- and cross- disciplinary approaches, this type of work is not recognized professionally in the same way as individual work. In fact, universities historically reward individual success more than collaborative success. This project will attempt to mitigate this issue by developing and implementing strategies to recognize, reward, and encourage collaborative work by STEM faculty at UMass Amherst. Collaboration is considered an important issue for equity and inclusion of diverse STEM faculty as many women and underrepresented minority faculty are involved in collaborative work.The project model for change focuses on ensuring equitable access via three important components: resources, relationships, and recognition. Equity is stronger where resources, relationships, and recognition intersect (R3), having multiplicative rather than additive effects. The project tests hypotheses on how to foster collaboration in research, inclusive community, and shared decision-making. Interventions will create more equitable research collaboration, by using resources, relationships and recognition to develop collaborative research opportunities for all faculty. Interventions will aim for a more inclusive faculty community with both formal and informal mentoring and open communication for all faculty. Departments will have access to resources, recognition, and relationships for supporting shared decision-making structures. The project includes closely related social science research studies: analyses of experiences with collaborations for white, Asian, and underrepresented minority men and women; controlled experiments to determine whether implicit biases about gender and race and their intersection affect how university committees credit collaborations; and a comparative ethnography of departments with more and less collaborative decision-making structures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.