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 Arizona State University (ASU) ADVANCE-IT project will build on its successful transition to an interdisciplinary institutional structure and extend their operating theory of public values-based institutional design thinking to issues of equity for STEM faculty. Public values-based institutional design employs design thinking at all levels of the institution to enact policies and practices that forward goals in the public interest. The project will focus on improving outcomes for mid-to-late career STEM faculty at ASU through three initiatives to: 1) ensure that procedures on recruiting, promotion, evaluation, and retention explicitly address how to improve equity and diversity in an interdisciplinary structure; 2) provide appropriate and accessible professional development and mentoring opportunities; and 3) design, implement, and evaluate digital administrative systems to monitor equity-related processes, and empower administrators to intervene to ensure equitable opportunities and outcomes. This work is important since challenges in science and engineering require new approaches and it will be important to ensure all faculty - both traditionally disciplinary as well as those who operate as interdisciplinary scholars - can be successful and are not disadvantaged as STEM research moves toward more interdisciplinary structures.
ASU ADVANCE takes a life course approach to support professors from the beginning of the career, into the middle, and through senior and leadership positions. The social science research component of the project will use a mixed-methods approach to investigate how intersectionality and an interdisciplinary institutional structure play out across the academic life course. ASU is a strategic research site uniquely well-suited to study how disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship may change over the academic life course. ASU ADVANCE will enable the analysis of how known bases of difference in the academic life course - gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, foreign-born status, disability, rank, and discipline - interact with the interdisciplinary context to create opportunities and barriers to academic career advancement.
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.
