This project addresses the need to efficiently and effectively increase awareness of bias incidents in the academic work environment while also enhancing STEM faculty and university leaders' abilities to address bias incidents in a manner that will result in more positive outcomes for all. The project will create systemic institutional change by scaling up the levels of awareness about and interventions used to address implicit bias in scientific research and learning settings. The University of New Hampshire UNH, working with three partner institutions, Ohio State University, University of Virginia, and University of California at Irvine, will use rigorous research methods to develop and scale up the evidence-based, interactive intervention resources. Once developed and piloted at these institutions, the bias awareness guide and intervention tool will be distributed nationally. Information about the awareness tool and decision guide for addressing bias incidents will also be distributed broadly via professional associations such as The Association for Women in Science.
The research methodologies for developing this bias awareness guide and decision tool include the collection of extensive information from faculty across the partnering institutions. Thus, the partnership enables the project leaders to oversample STEM faculty whose personal backgrounds fit multiple underrepresented categories. In so doing, the researchers are able to incorporate rank and social identity differences between persons potentially acting in implicitly biased ways as well as rank and social identity differences among those on the receiving end of bias incidents. The project therefore captures intersectionality of faculty whose actions reinforce or disrupt barriers to equality as well as the intersectionality of those who must navigate equity barriers. Research conducted at the University of New Hampshire as part of its ADVANCE IT program confirms that bias incidents in the academic workplace create a negative climate for STEM women faculty and for other faculty with minority status in their respective fields. Negative climate, their research also shows, has a significant negative impact on STEM women faculty members' job satisfaction and increases their intention to quit. Prior research also shows that the greater faculty members' beliefs in their colleagues' propensity to intervene when bias incidents occur, the lower the impact of bias incidents on workplace climate. Thus, increasing both faculty members' awareness of bias incidents and individual skills for addressing bias incidents when they occur helps to maximize positive workplace climate outcomes. The project's novel contributions also include the use of video vignettes to accurately contextualize intersectional faculty experiences, which will in turn enable the multiple institutions who adopt the bias awareness and intervention tools to raise awareness about and propensity for intervening in bias incidents of multiple kinds and in multiple contexts across their institutions.
The NSF 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 women faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in policies, processes, practices, and the organizational culture and climate.Â
