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 women 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) disciplines.
The University of New Mexico's (UNM) ADVANCE-IT project will create the Institute for Diversity and Equity Across STEM (IDEAS) to serve as the organizational catalyst of institutional transformation, promoting gender equity in the recruitment, retention and advancement of STEM faculty. UNM is in a majority-minority state and is a Carnegie Very High Research Activity University and a Hispanic-Serving Institution with a diverse student body. The project will implement strategies to engage STEM leaders, including senior faculty, as partners; create mentoring and networking programs; and improve the transparency of policies and processes that impact faculty.
IDEAS will implement a "managerial engagement model" developed by sociologists Dobbin and Kalev which proposes that engaging managers in programs to promote diversity, including connections with underrepresented groups, enhances their motivation and changes attitudes. IDEAS will show how this managerial engagement model, an evidence-based approach to promote diversity in organizational leadership, can be applied to universities. In addition, IDEAS will incorporate an intersectional perspective to address the distinct situations of minority women in STEM. IDEAS will generate evidence to inform comparative analyses of factors influencing the advancement of women and minorities across different types of organizations as well as of the strategies most appropriate to different subgroups of women. The goals of the project include the creation of a more inclusive, egalitarian, and supportive institutional climate and improving satisfaction with, and perceptions of fairness of, the tenure and promotion process at UNM.
