The Association for Women in Science (AWIS) is a recognized national leader and innovator in developing mentoring and leadership programs. AWIS proposes to build on a previous project on academic climate funded by the Sloan Foundation. This project developed surveys for assessing the institutional climate for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty.
In addition to surveys, site visit protocols were developed for campus visits. Nine central issues for faculty emerged from this work: (1) Recruitment, hiring, and retention; (2) Tenure and promotion; (3) Dual careers; (4) Family and work; (5) communication; (6) Mentoring faculty; (7) Mentoring students; (8) Informal networking and socializing; and (9) Career development.
Recommendations were developed to address these issues and sample model policies were collected. AWIS has been involved in the dissemination of these materials for the past three years. Recently, with the MIT Report, the demand has outpaced the ability of AWIS to supply materials on an individual basis. AWIS proposes to develop an on-line Institutional Climate Assessment Kit that institutions can use to implement their own programs. In addition to the kit, AWIS will have a section on Model Academic Policies that address many of the nine topics listed above and a bi-weekly on-line column that tackles these issues. As a result of the proposed project, AWIS anticipates three clear and realistic outcomes, including (1) An institutional Climate Assessment Kit that will provide an evaluated and tested model for replication by the institutions; (2) Model Academic Policies that can be used by science societies and institutions; and (3) explicit professional science society linkages that will facilitate replication and sustainability of the project.
This project is supported by the National Institutes of Health through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers
