The NJIT ADVANCE IT project began in 2006 and has had a focus on examining the professional and research networks of women faculty in the STEM disciplines with the intent of using that knowledge to create distinct advantages for this target population. Among accomplishments reported in the first years of this project are: an interactive database of all NJIT faculty publications and use of statistical modeling and visual mapping to analyze gender patterns in network centrality. For the current project proposed, the NJIT ADVANCE IT program will develop career advancement tools as novel approaches to faculty mentoring.
Intellectual Merit. In the current renewal proposal, this project proposes to implement two mentoring tools including a research partner finding tool and a faculty research network mapping tool. These tools are based on prior successes and represent intriguing and innovative approaches to establishing formal mentoring networks at institutions of higher education.
Broader Impact. The New Jersey Institute of Technology ADVANCE IT project, because of its focus on network mapping, has the capacity to impact all women faculty in higher education. Reports of project findings are expected to be broadly disseminated using traditional means such as peer reviewed journal articles and national presentations. Additionally, the project PI has also initiated collaborations with other ADVANCE institutions who endeavor to use this tool as a mechanism for determining potential for advancement of women faculty at other institution types.
Project Outcomes that Address Intellectual Merit: "To know who we are, we must know how we are connected," write Cristakis and Fowler in their 2009 book on the power of social networks. The Advance Project at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) puts this insight into action, pioneering the use of social network analysis and research networking tools to support women STEM faculty researchers, diminish potential isolation, and monitor career advancement. Universities are more than buildings and organization charts. They are webs of human interaction. The complex structure of those webs is largely invisible to the people embedded in them, however. That is where NJIT Advance comes in: we use network mapping to make the invisible visible. Our new online collaboration tool (Research/Map) functions as a kind of GPS system for career management, providing potentially isolated faculty outsiders with an inside knowledge of network pathways (who's connected to whom) so they can find the most efficient route to the information and support they need. Research/Map allows faculty to identify potential collaborators who have similar or complementary research interests to their own. Even more importantly, it maps existing connections among researchers, allowing the faculty user to identify colleagues who can broker introductions to potential collaborators in the network--thus reducing the "transaction costs" traditionally associated with collaboration. The system also gives academic administrators an aerial view of collaborative research interactions within and among departments, allowing them to track information flow across the university and to identify, at a glance, disconnected individuals and dysfunctional structures. Understanding network structure is especially important for women in technological organizations. Because they are still relatively few in number, women scientists and engineers can become disconnected from the information flow without even realizing it. Organizational networks supply the social capital that powers career success, allowing young professionals to convert their human capital into status; so isolation can have a significant impact on the careers of women researchers. In addition to Research/Map, NJIT Advance has addressed this problem in a number of ways--by linking women researchers to each other and to their male peers; by supporting woman-led research projects; and, most importantly, by systematically analyzing patterns of faculty career success over a ten year period. Our conclusion--that there are statistically significant correlations among co-authorship, network structure, productivity, retention, and promotion--lend strong support to the NJIT Advance project's emphasis on the importance of fostering collaboration and, concomitantly, on the importance of early identification and remediation of potential faculty isolation. Social network analysis methodology and research networking tools can aid programs such as NSF Advance in addressing potential faculty isolation by giving us the ability to visualize career landscapes in meaningful ways, enhancing our ability to predict who will advance in academia and who is in danger of dropping out. Project Outcomes that Address Broader Impact: The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty expresses concern about female isolation and excess attrition of women assistant professors. The report calls for future research to explore "the causes for the attrition of women" and to explain why "female faculty, compared to their male counterparts, appear to continue to experience some sense of isolation." The work of NJIT Advance responds directly to NAS concerns, demonstrating that social network analysis can be used effectively to measure relative isolation and its impact of faculty careers--and that network mapping can be used to mitigate that impact by giving junior faculty access to the kind of aerial view of the organizational landscape normally available only to strategically positioned insiders. President Obama and other national leaders have repeatedly expressed concern about the fact that women are still significantly underrepresented in the STEM workforce, especially in academic research leadership positions. This underrepresentation creates a negative feedback loop that further discourages young women from entering the field.The gender imbalance in the US technological workforce has broad implications beyond technology itself, undercutting the country's ability to meet the pressing challenges of the 21st century, including rapidly increasing environmental degradation. Like NSF Advance as a whole, the NJIT Advance Project responds directly to these concerns. Our effort to support women science and engineering faculty, and thus the young people they inspire, is an important part of a larger effort to create a more representative, and therefore more robust collective response to the shared crises and opportunities of the near future.
