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.
The Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) ADVANCE-IT project will implement institutional transformation through two objectives: decreasing the barriers that prevent faculty diversity; and improving the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women and underrepresented minority (URM) STEM faculty. Much of the work of decreasing barriers will be accomplished through the recruitment, training, and resulting efforts of "Immunity to Change" (ITC) facilitators. The ITC facilitators will lead ITC workshops, work directly with departments and other stakeholder groups, and provide support for the second set of initiatives designed to promote recruitment, retention, and advancement. The second set of initiatives include ITC-focused efforts targeting STEM search committees; a cluster hire initiative; promotion and tenure policies and practices; and workshops for administrators on career-life integration policy and cultural competency in leadership. Other proposed efforts include innovative workshops and mentoring programs for STEM faculty to facilitate professional development and advancement across career stages. This work is important because it is attempting to address the factors that compete and complicate the process of making changes that are otherwise widely accepted and valued within an institution. There is potential for this project to result in a new model that can be adapted by other organizations and institutions interesting in improving their organization's culture and climate.
The Immunity to Change framework suggests that institutional transformation based on identifying and removing barriers to equity may fall short of achieving broad institutional change. This project will develop new strategies to identify and mitigate competing and contradictory commitments that undermine change goals and weaken commitments to those goals. The VCU ADVANCE-IT project evaluation and research will further understanding of how ITC can be used for institutional transformation and equity goals. The research project is a mixed-method study that frames academic departments as "complex adaptive systems" and the role the department has in the management of immunities to change within the department. Given the centrality of the academic department to institutional change, 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.
