Advance Grant Establishes UMaine Center to Support Female Faculty
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — A five-year, $3.3 million National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant will fund a new University of Maine initiative to affect institutional change by improving the status of female faculty in the sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics and the social-behavioral sciences.
The grant will establish the Rising Tide Center, which will support the initiative at UMaine and in the University of Maine System. The goal of the center is to increase the number of female faculty members in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and social-behavioral sciences, defining the practices that attract and support the retention of female faculty, facilitate promotion through the academic ranks and to administrative positions, and provide professional satisfaction.
UMaine has a combined 114 female faculty members teaching in STEM and social-behavioral fields, compared to 284 male faculty members in those fields. Nationally, UMaine is below the national average in a number of STEM and social-behavioral fields.
“This grant will help us build on our commitment to providing greater opportunity for women scholars in these critical disciplines,” says Susan Hunter, UMaine’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. She is also a biology professor who will serve as the principal investigator on the project. “From Edith Patch to Doris Twitchell Allen to the women who help lead our faculty today, UMaine has a proud history upon which we can built to become a model institution for supporting female faculty members across the institution. This initiative will promote opportunity, enhance diversity and provide more of the role models who will help show our female students the pathways to success in STEM and social-behavioral science fields.”
Four other faculty members co-authored the ADVANCE grant: Karen Horton, associate professor of mechanical engineering technology; Amy Fried, associate professor of political science; Jody Jellison, professor of molecular plant pathology and director of the School of Biology and Ecology; and Susan Gardner, associate professor of higher education.
The goal of the NSF’s ADVANCE program is encourage the presentation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers, thereby contributing to the development of a more diverse and sustainable U.S. science and engineering workforce.
Since 2001, NSF has invested more than $130 million to support ADVANCE projects at more than 100 institutions of higher learning and STEM-related nonprofit organizations across the country.
At UMaine, Rising Tide’s other key goals include decreasing isolation felt by female STEM faculty members and pursuing diversity by creating a positive work environment through training, mentoring, improving evaluation mechanisms, better coordinating conflict resolution procedures, enhancing family-work policies, creating an internal grant competition to support research by and about women in STEM-and social-behavioral sciences fields, assisting with partner relocation, and engaging the other institutions of the University of Maine System and the faculty union. The project’s coordinators say that they believe most of these initiatives will benefit all faculty at UMaine.
The Rising Tide Center will have a director and staff, and will spearhead professional development and training initiatives. “Gardner will direct a social science team that will take on research-based studies of the ADVANCE efforts to determine the best practices of these initiatives. This effort will be guided by Elizabeth Allan, associate professor of higher education; Mary Madden, associate research professor in education; and Shannon McCoy, assistant professor of psychology. In addition, Sharon Barker, director of UMaine’s Women’s Resource Center, will take on additional responsibilities to research and develop methods to assist in providing partner and spousal career opportunities for newly hired faculty members.
There are a number of factors that make UMaine an ideal institution for assessing projects of institutional change in the STEM and SBS areas, including the fact that the representation of women faculty in every STEM or SBS field at UMaine is below the national average. UMaine is also the only research-intensive institution in a rural EPSCOR state where, as surveys show, isolation undermines recruitment and retention of women faculty.
Rising Tide is the latest in a series of UMaine initiatives since 1992 to attempt to establish efforts to increase the percentage of women faculty members, decrease discrepancies in salary between male and female faculty and support the advancement of women through the academic pipeline. However, most of the efforts were ad-hoc and difficult to sustain and implement.
In 2009, Hunter created the Advancement Initiative Council (AIC) in order to better align such efforts. AIC sponsored a faculty climate survey and collected data that included information about salaries, leadership training, mentoring, and exit interviews.
In order to prepare for the Rising Tide initiative, several campus meetings, including two full-day retreats, were held in 2009 with the goal of sharing data and scholarly knowledge about promoting gender equity.
UMaine has been investigating ADVANCE since 2004, when the university’s Task Force on the Retention of Women Faculty reviewed similar programs at the University of Rhode Island, New Mexico State University and Utah State University. The task force also conducted two surveys and recommended mechanisms for advancing women, including chair training and mentoring program for new faculty. Those programs are ongoing and will be developed further by the Rising Tide Center in partnership with UMaine’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Assessment.
UMaine does have a President’s Council on Women, which serves in an advisory role to the president. In addition, the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education (The Maine RiSE Center), led by UMaine physics professor Susan McKay, recently received a $12.3 million grant to help improve and strengthen STEM teaching in grades 6-9 in Maine.
“We have several effective pieces in place, and we have an academic community that sees significant value in taking a proactive approach to enhancing opportunities for female faculty members,” Hunter says. “This grant will allow us to create an institutional structure that will support all those related efforts and help us work effectively toward our goals.”