Recruiting and Retaining Women in STEM Fields

Shauna Morimoto: I’m Shauna Morimoto, and I’m an associate professor of sociology and criminology and the chair of the department. And I’m also PI on our NSF Advance grant.

Anne O’Leary-Kelly: And my name is Anne O’Leary-Kelly. I’m the senior associate dean in the Walton College of Business and also a professor of management.

Andy Albertson: Thank you both for taking the time to talk with us. Today we’re going to be talking about the NSF advance grant that the University of Arkansas received and the program you’ve developed called UA Engage. I’d like to start with… If you could tell me a little bit about what this program is.

SM: NSF has developed a program to address inequities for women in STEM, in academic fields and primarily looking at women faculty through institutions of higher education. The University of Arkansas received a grant this year to address this issue. And so with Anne and our collaborators, our entire research team, we’ve devised a program specific to the University of Arkansas to help address the issues of women’s equity on campus.

Shauna Morimoto

AOK: And I think it’s important to add that it’s really about transforming the institution and helping us identify some ways that we can exist differently in the future?

SM: Women in stem tend to have the lowest representation of faculty in academic fields, so you will see women underrepresented in areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as graduate students, but really, as primarily what we’re looking at, as assistant professors all the way up to ranks of distinguished professors and in academic leadership. And so one of the things that we really want to address is this inequity in the process, but also the ways that the institution constrains and enables the opportunities for women at the university.

AOK: You know, I think all of us can think back to a time where we felt excluded from a group. I mean it might be high school, it might be, you know, a job, but that is a really profound experience. And when it’s about your work working, you’ve trained for and invested in for so many years, to not find your footing, and to feel that you’re not able to have the same experience and connections as others, that is… that’s a really deep issue and, it’s not just a matter of, well, I don’t like everybody in my department. This is really profound stuff that affects how people can launch their careers and, and it’s often sort of occurs because of invisible, non-tangible things, so that’s what makes it so hard to address.

SM: And to follow up on Anne’s point, too, it’s something that we experience very personally, and it seems like something that is about us as individuals or that makes us behave in certain ways in groups or in our department or at our workplace? But it’s also part of the environment and part of the culture and so one of the things that the grant and the advance program generally tries to address is both that individual-level experience as well as the greater culture and structure of the environment that produces it.

AOK: And I think that’s the issue of the difference between diversity and inclusion and belonging, right? So I think sometimes we think, oh, we hired some women. So now we’ve got diversity, but what we’re talking about is inclusion and belonging, and those are in many ways harder to address and get people to see, but just as critically important to success to the institution, the department and the scholar.

Anne O’Leary-Kelly

SM: We have several things that are already underway and that we’ve launched, and we’re very excited about. Some people may have noticed or been involved in the mentoring programs that we have running through partially with Kathy Sloan, who is the vice provost for faculty affairs, and her office is working with us on creating mentoring circles and having mentoring available, peer mentoring for all faculty. We’ve also established what we call a bridge program and that is to welcome new faculty to campus when they arrive, and it’s to integrate them into the community, set them up with mentors and contacts, provide professionalization opportunities and let them know about resources that are available on campus. Some of the other things that are forthcoming are we’re looking at workload distributions and particularly how service is distributed for faculty across the board and ways to make that those distributions more transparent and obvious. One of the things that we found in our institutional data is that women tend to do a lot more service which is labor that is… tends to be unrecognized or given lower priority or importance. And so we want to find ways to both elevate the importance of that work, but also distribute it evenly among faculty. And so that is something that’s forthcoming. We also want to do more on leadership opportunities to make those available for faculty in general, but women in particular.

AOK: I think what’s great about the advanced program from NSF is that there are many, many universities that have received these grants, and one of them might have focused specifically on mentoring and identified really best practices around mentoring. And our particular area focus is the service issue that Shauna just described, but what we can do then is to really engage in a deep way with mentoring. It’s not the, okay, you go with this person and you go with that person. It’s truly trying to prepare people for the experience and to set expectations for the experience and help them kind of live into it in a way that brings about the really positive outcomes of mentoring.

SM: One common thing that people say about gender equity in general, but in academics in particular is that it’s a time thing. Women haven’t been educated at levels for as long as men and so over time over a few generations, and the numbers will equalize. That just doesn’t happen, and so at the university we’ve actually… overall, our numbers of women have gone down since 2013 at every level and not in every department or every field, but just sort of across the board. They’ve either stayed steady or gone down and not dramatically gone down but, but there aren’t that many. Women make up a significantly smaller percentage of the faculty than men, and so when we are unable to retain women faculty, we see it, we see it in our numbers. So one of our goals is to increase our ability to attract and retain women and then develop them, some of them into leadership positions.

Well, we’re very excited. We’re going to have a virtual launch event, which on October 13^th, and it will be a lunch-time event, and people can come in and join us on zoom. We have a guest speaker who will be delivering our keynote, which is Dr. Joycelyn Elders, and we’re very excited to meet her and think that her experience and her background speak to many of the things that we are addressing in our grant. And she is, you know, a native Arkansan and the first woman Surgeon General and first African American Surgeon General, I believe, and knows a lot about the Arkansas, her Arkansas roots and how that connects to her own experiences as a Black woman going through a science degree and medical school. And we’re very excited to have her join us for that event and also be an opportunity to meet the whole team and talk with us a little bit about the things that we have going on and get more details about how the project, the grant going forward.

One of the reasons that diversity and equity are so important is not just for representation or even for social justice issues or economic reality, right, we want we want women to be educated and educators in in a in a society to get the most out of that society. All of these are very important reasons. But also I feel like for academic institutions what you want is diversity of thought, and that’s the only way that knowledge really increases and you can attain excellence. And so if you have the same people doing it thinking the same things and going through the same process, you’re going to come up with slightly different but pretty much their same results. And so it’s so important to think about the ways that people’s lived experiences will differ their approaches to problems, whatever those problems are, if there are problems in physical science or problems in social science or problems in management science. Everybody has an experience that will speak to you, the ways they solve problems and the questions that they’re going to ask, and as we increase that pool of knowledge that will create a more educated society overall and help us advance.

Matt McGowan: Music for Short Talks From the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research, that’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.

A version of this story also appeared in the University of Arkansas’ Arkansas Research publication.