This award to the Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI), an NSF-funded ADVANCE Institutional Transformation project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, supports further development and evaluation of interventions to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering. The PAID funds will enable WISELI to (1) continue conducting and evaluating two workshop series and (2) produce ten evidence-based brochures/booklets. The UW-Madison and other universities will use these tools in their efforts to increase the hiring, retention, and promotion of women and underrepresented minority faculty in STEM fields. The workshops and evidence-based guides serve to educate faculty, staff, and administrators on the impact of unconscious biases and assumptions.
Two specific workshops will be continued at UW-Madison. In Workshops for Search Committee Chairs, a variety of formats is used to reach chairs of search committees, search committee members, and administrators who interact with search committees. Through an interactive format, five essential elements of a successful search are highlighted, stressing the importance of understanding how unconscious biases and assumptions might enter the search and screen process. An effective format for disseminating the workshops themselves has already been developed and implemented, and this award will support further evaluation and dissemination of the effective practices that can be adapted for use in other institutional settings. The second workshop series is a Climate Workshop for Department Chairs. Based on principles of active learning, this three-session workshop relies on a skilled faculty facilitator who works with a small group of chairs to gain a deep understanding of how climate is manifested in their departments, and together design concrete steps to take which will improve climate in their departments. A dissemination plan for these workshops will be developed during the PAID grant period. Guides will be developed and field-tested in connection with these workshops, and in other national workshops run by fellow ADVANCE sites.
The intellectual merit of the project is in the integration of scholarship from the existing literature on unconscious biases and assumptions and the effects of these assumptions on the advancement of women. Evaluation of workshop results indicates that educating individuals about the existence of these unconscious tendencies can reduce or eliminate their impact.
The broader impacts of this project lie in the promise of increased participation of women and minorities in the highest levels of academic science and engineering. The guides are a mechanism for increasing the diversity of faculty, providing useful tools to campuses interested in educating their faculties and administrators about the impacts of unconscious biases and assumptions on important evaluation points such as hiring or tenure, and on departmental climate.
