The Ohio State University has highly progressive policies that allow for time off the tenure clock, part-time appointments on the tenure track, dual career placement and on-campus child care. We also have an infrastructure of support offices that promote gender equity (notably the President's Council on Women and the Women's Place) and extensive training in leadership (through Human Resources and the Women's Place). Yet the institution is highly decentralized, with individual colleges being responsible for implementing policies locally. Departmental culture is the single most important factor affecting recruitment and retention for women at Ohio State, and our decentralized system therefore requires active participation of deans and department chairs to effect institutional change. The Comprehensive Equity at Ohio State (CEOS) project involves four colleges that span the breadth of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM): Biological Sciences, Engineering, Mathematical & Physical Sciences, and Veterinary Medicine. Based upon a framework of transformational leadership, our interventions include structured workshops for administrative leaders in those four colleges that will culminate in formation of action project learning teams. Another program will focus on structured peer mentoring for women leaders in the four colleges. We will provide a two-year workshop on entrepreneurship for women interested in commercializing their intellectual property. Both formative and summative evaluation research will occur throughout the project, including analysis of quantitative metrics and qualitative data from structured interviews and portfolio development. An Internal Advisory Team and an External Advisory Committee will provide additional guidance as the project unfolds.
Intellectual Merit: The CEOS project addresses entrenched, cultural barriers to equity for women and minorities. Research indicates that organizational culture, and especially deeply embedded cultural assumptions and taken-for-granted practices, support inequalities in the workplace. Higher education organizational research has shown that department chairs and college deans can play a crucial role facilitating culture change. The CEOS project at Ohio State, based on a transformational leadership model, will involve deans, chairs and women and men faculty in workshops, women leaders' circles, and action learning project teams. Analysis of data from these interventions will contribute to an understanding of how transformational leadership affects organizational change to remove cultural barriers for women and members of historically underrepresented groups in STEM. Research from this project will be presented at numerous conferences and will be submitted to scholarly journals.
Broader Impacts: Successfully transforming the culture in four colleges at Ohio State will nucleate further change in other STEM (and non-STEM) colleges. We will share our successes and challenges with the broader university community through regular communication with the President's Council on Women, the Provost's office, and in campus forums. We will share our research results on interventions and the utility of the transformational leadership model via an active website, presentations at conferences, publications in peer-refereed journals, and other academic outlets. We also will offer a 3-day workshop on entrepreneurship to a national audience as an outgrowth of our internal workshop.
