ADVANCE program (link, link)

Rationale

For many decades, an increasing number of women have obtained STEM doctoral degrees, however, women, particularly women of color, continue to be significantly underrepresented in almost all STEM academic positions. While the degree of underrepresentation varies among STEM disciplines, women's advancement to senior professorial ranks and leadership roles is an issue in all fields. The underrepresentation of women is also a critical issue for the nation, at large, as its need to develop a globally competitive and diverse workforce increases.

Research has shown that women's representation and advancement in academic STEM positions are affected by many external factors that are unrelated to their ability, interest and technical skills (Spencer, et al, 1999; Halpern and Tan, 2001; Hyde, 2005; National Academy of Sciences, 2007). Such factors include, but are not limited to: stereotype threat, societal impacts, organizational constraints of academic institutions; differential effect of work and family demands; implicit and explicit bias; and lack of women in academic leadership and decision-making positions. The cumulative effect of such diverse factors has been to create infrastructural barriers that impact the number of women entering, persisting and advancing in STEM careers.

Thus, the goal of the ADVANCE program is to develop systemic approaches to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic STEM careers, thereby contributing to the development of a more diverse science and engineering workforce. ADVANCE also has as its goal to seminally contribute to and inform the general knowledge base on gender equity in the academic STEM disciplines.

To this end, ADVANCE will support the following types of projects: Institutional Transformation (IT)

Institutional Transformation awards are expected to include innovative and systemic organizational approaches to transform institutions of higher education in ways that will increase the participation and advancement of women in STEM academic careers. These awards support comprehensive programs for institution-wide change. Additionally, IT projects must include a supplementary 5-page research study designed to investigate theory-driven models and innovations related to the participation and advancement of women in the academic STEM disciplines. It is expected that the research study will inform institutional transformation, or other relevant areas of academic investigation. Research that investigates novel aspects of the proposal is especially encouraged.

USA Gender Equality in Science. A Leading Example: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

In the 1990s, a group of MIT's women faculty perceived patterns of inequitable resource allocation between them and their male colleagues. They collected data that demonstrated and quantified the problem, and they alerted the Institute's leadership, in a search for practical remedies. Compelled by the evidence, MIT responded. Today, a new Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT delivers the encouraging news that the process launched by these faculty women has made a lasting, positive difference for women faculty at MIT(pdf).