Advancing and Supporting Female STEM faculty at a University in Transition

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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.Villanova University (VU) is in a time of transition in leadership, strategic priority, and most importantly to its new national status as a Doctoral Research University. The PIs propose to intentionally manage this transition to ensure that faculty, specifically STEM female and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty, flourish in the changing climate. Three main thrusts will be orchestrated to accomplish their goals. The first thrust, change management, will include retreats for administrators with a special focus on diversity and inclusion and faculty workshops focused on resilience during change. Hiring, promotion, and assessment, the second thrust, will include diversity statements for job candidates; diversity and inclusion goals; funds for bringing candidates to campus; broad stakeholder bias training; and policy review for bias. The final thrust, improving the culture for diversity, inclusion, and equity, will include administrator and faculty workshops on creating a diverse and equitable culture; workshops on allies, inclusive classrooms, and microaggressions; the expansion of intersectional conversations for faculty; leadership activities; Employee Resource Groups (ERGs); and the training and support of faculty allies. This ADVANCE IT project will result in new strategies to ensure equity for all STEM faculty during institutional transitions to increased research expectations of faculty. . As part of the Villanova ADVANCE IT project, research on the effects of chairperson mindfulness training on departmental climate will be conducted. Biases are especially prevalent when people engage in automatic rather than controlled thinking and automatic thinking is more likely when psychological resources are low such as when people are coping with stress. Mindfulness training has been shown to reduce stress and is at the cutting edge of psychological research and practice. Given these elements, the proposed research intends to measure the impact of mindfulness training of department chairpersons' stress and the potential change in departmental climate from the perspective of departmental stakeholders. The use of a randomized control group makes the experiment especially powerful as a way to isolate the effects of this training on departmental climate. Furthermore, given the centrality of the academic department to institutional change during the transition to increasing research expectations of faculty, this focus is especially promising.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.