Ashley Garcia in Women in Higher Education
It’s no secret that the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have been dominated by men. It’s also no secret that there has been a recent push to attract more women and girls to STEM occupations. Suzanna Rose, founding associate provost of the Office to Advance Women, Equity & Diversity (AWED) at Florida International University (FIU), is doing her part to make that push successful.
Recruiting Women
Specifically, Rose is focused on how to attract, recruit, promote and retain women faculty members at FIU. FIU has a diverse undergraduate student body. The school is one of the top schools in the nation in awarding bachelor’s and master’s degrees to Latinx students and in granting STEM degrees to underrepresented minorities. However, that diversity isn’t reflected in the faculty. In 2011, just 12% of STEM faculty were women. Furthermore, the results of a 2010 faculty climate survey performed by Rose and her associates suggested a need for change. White women and women and men of color reported feeling as if they had less influence and respect in their departments than men. It was clear that something needed to be done to establish a more diverse and open atmosphere on campus.
With that in mind, and with the support of an NSF ADVANCE grant, Rose set out to develop strategies for increasing the number of professors from underrepresented groups in STEM fields and the social and behavioral sciences at the university.
Working Toward Diversity and Inclusion
The first step was to educate faculty members about the importance of diversity and inclusion during the hiring process. FIU’s STRIDE (Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence) Committee was formed to discuss issues related to diversity in faculty hiring and promotion.
To date, more than 300 faculty have participated in STRIDE workshops. Rose says that faculty appreciated learning about how unconscious biases and subtle, unintentional behaviors can impact the ability to attract and hire diverse candidates. She notes, “It was very enlightening to hear a diverse group of faculty from different departments discuss how unique implicit biases may affect our ability to recruit and hire the best candidate.”
Another one of the strategies was the creation of a symposium, geared toward women faculty at FIU and designed to promote leadership and strategic career planning. Over its eight‐year history, the Women Faculty Leadership Institute (WFLI) has grown in scope and size, with over 100 people attending the 2018 conference, and has covered topics like assertive communication, networking and work‐life balance.
The leadership skills taught at the WFLI already created tangible results on campus. A few years ago, one of the activities was to sit down in small groups and create lists of what female faculty members wanted to see at the school. One common suggestion was an office dedicated to promoting women’s issues.
The Council for Women and Minority Faculty proposed the idea of establishing such an office to Provost Kenneth G. Furton. The result was AWED, founded in 2016 to achieve and sustain faculty equity and diversity. Rose was named founding associate provost of the office. She was also one of the principal investigators on a second NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant awarded to the school in that same year, so Rose and AWED could continue building upon the positive work they had accomplished thus far.
Training Bystanders
The signature program of AWED’s new initiatives is the Bystander Leadership Project, an educational program for both women and men STEM faculty. The program not only raises awareness about the interplay between power, privilege, and bias often experienced by members of underrepresented groups, but also provides practice in using a toolkit of intervention responses and actions.
Rose thinks this type of experience is crucial to help in creating an atmosphere of inclusion and diversity. “In order for people to intervene in situations where gender, racial or other biases may be occurring, they must have the skill set and experience,” she says. “The Bystander Leadership Project places participants in different scenarios and experiments with different types of interventions so that they can be more effective at improving the climate in their department.”
The program has been in development for much of last year, and after a trial run in the spring of 2018, the vast majority of participants—who completed evaluation surveys at the end of the program—found the workshop increased their confidence about using intervention strategies and said they were more likely to intervene in similar situations of bias because of the workshop.
Early Results
AWED is also looking to collaborate with other local schools in order to achieve its goals. The ADVANCE Florida Network (AFN) provides mentoring and networking opportunities to STEM female faculty among the three urban public research universities of FIU, the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida. Under the AFN program, women tenure‐line STEM faculty and women postdoctoral associates can receive funding to offer research seminars at departments from either of the other two schools at which they are not teaching.
The program already made significant connections among female faculty. While giving a lecture on computer science at USF, UCF professor Pamela Wisniewski heard about the McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship, designed to promote excellence in teaching and research by underrepresented minorities and women. Not only was she one of the awardees, but another USF professor agreed to be her mentor for the William T. Grant Scholars Program, and she was recently named one of this year’s Grant Scholars.
Why is it so important to have more women in STEM? Rose says: “A diversity of perspectives enriches the sciences, mathematics and engineering, and it makes these professionals more responsive to global needs. At a time when engineering and science are increasingly important to our economy and competitiveness, we need a diverse pool of science and engineering faculty … to fuel our future.”
