In 1996, two Kenyan scholars were awarded Fulbright Scholarships — honors the U.S. Department of State grants to promising young academics worldwide.

Fred Muyia Nafukho, who joined the 91̽�� earlier this year as the vice provost for academic personnel, vividly remembers the day he was called to the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

Nafukho learned he would attend Louisiana State University, but his colleague, the other Kenyan awardee that year, was going to “the finest and best university in the United States,” Nafukho remembers an attaché saying.

“She said, ‘The 91̽��, not in D.C., but in Seattle.’ That’s the first time I heard about the 91̽��,” Nafukho recalled in a recent interview.

Decades later, his colleague has returned to Kenya and is a preeminent scientist there. Nafukho stayed in the U.S., where he’s built a reputation of advancing equity and inclusion, most recently as the senior associate dean for faculty affairs at Texas A&M University.

Since February, Nafukho has been on a tour of the UW, listening, observing and learning.

“I have seen the mission threads of inclusive excellence, including diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, not only emphasized by the leadership at the UW, but also practiced,” Nafukho said.

According to a report by the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Personnel, the 91̽��had more than 4,800 professorial faculty members in 2022. Of those members,3,092 whose race was reported were white and 2,592 were male, roughly 54%. Of the remaining faculty, 881 were Asian, 247 were Hispanic, 137 were Black, 23 were American Indian, and seven were Pacific Islander.

While more work remains, Nafukho said the success in hiring diverse faculty is a result of multiple programs the 91̽��has in place and of a comprehensive approach from university leaders, what he calls “Shared Equity Leadership.”

“It requires all of us leaders across the university in our tri-campus system to work together,” Nafukho said.

While encouraging, faculty-hiring figures fluctuate year to year and are dependent on a variety of factors, including retirements. As a result, Nafukho said, the 91̽��instead should measure success by focusing on a supportive learning and working environment that builds a sense of belonging. In that way, he aims to transform the Office of Academic Personnel into what he calls the office of “Faculty Success.”

That begins with intentional faculty recruitment, development, and retention, Nafukho said, and by scaling existing successful programs.

Chadwick Allen, the associate vice provost for faculty advancement, works with hiring teams across the university to implement practices that interrupt bias.

“Everyone thinks they know how to do this well, and then they really start doing it and realize the complexity,” he said. “Particularly if people are trying to diversify their hiring pools of applicants.”

Allen said much of his work is about intentionally changing the culture and redefining how various fields define excellence.

Because various disciplines have different entrenched cultures, no one approach to diversification is effective across the board.

The UW’s ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change has been advocating for women faculty in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields since 2001. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, the center’s work today is supported by academic units including the College of Engineering, the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of the Environment, and the Office of the Provost.

In 2004, more than a decade before ascending to her role as 91̽��President, Ana Mari Cauce was a principal investigator for ADVANCE. Today, Joyce Yen is the center’s full-time director.

“We can see over the course of those 20-plus years increases in not only the number of women faculty, but also the diversity of those women faculty in terms of race and ethnicity,” Yen said.

It’s more than just hiring. It’s also about creating a professional development ecosystem that supports faculty at different stages throughout their career, she said. Because the 91̽��must compete with well-resourced industry jobs and higher salaries at private universities, fostering community on campus is key to retention.

“Multiple people have told me that part of the reason they stay at the 91̽��is because of the community that they found through our resources,” Yen said. “We’re not the only thing, but we’re part of the equation that contributes to their sense of belonging, their sense of connection, and feeling valued at the university.”

Different efforts have taken shape across the UW, including the Faculty Development Program, led by Alexes Harris, a 91̽��Faculty Regent and a professor of sociology.

At 91̽��Medicine, creating an environment where all professionals can thrive is vital to the success of delivering quality health care, said Paula Houston, 91̽��Medicine’s chief equity officer and an affiliate professor of family medicine.

That includes a variety of opportunities for early career faculty, such as the . Now run by Dr. Michelle Terry, a clinical professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the assistant dean for Underrepresented in Medicine and Science (URMS) Career Development, SURF creates community and help foster skills to succeed in academia.

Another program, , is a cohort of mid-career professionals, many of whom identify as URMS, with the aim of diversifying leadership.

People on the outside of the organization can peer in and see faculty who represent the communities we serve who are successful and being tapped for senior roles, Houston said.

“As they get into leadership positions, they have the opportunity to create pathways for other underrepresented or systemically marginalized people to come into the organization,” she said.

While 91̽��Medicine has made strides forward in the past several years, it’s important to continue to reach out to young people from diverse communities to pursue higher education and medicine. The Office of Healthcare Equity, led by Houston, does this through the programs in the the . Through focused community outreach and advocacy, these programs develop the ecosystem from which we can engage young people to pursue careers in healthcare and thus become our future leaders.

Across the university, too, there’s more work that needs to be done, Nafukho said. He’s hopeful that academic departments will use their discretionary budgets to fund collaborative efforts that build camaraderie.

In 2021, then-Provost Mark Richards announced a multimillion-dollar effort to diversify UW’s faculty. This year, Tricia Serio begins her work as provost, including an intentional effort to build on the programs Richards initiated.

For now, Nafukho said he’s confirmed what he heard many years ago at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

“The 91̽��is one of the finest and best universities in the United States,” he said. “So in the Office of Academic Personnel we are committed to becoming the office of faculty success.”

He called for ongoing cooperation, working across academic units, colleges, schools and campuses.

“We have to work collaboratively with others across the university. Working in silos cannot take us far,” Nafukho said. “I strongly believe that when our faculty are successful, they in turn ensure that our students are successful.”

In 2017, the Heising-Simons Foundation — a family foundation that works in climate and clean energy, science, education, and human rights — established the to support early-career astronomers engaged in planetary research. Just over a year later, the Foundation that it would overhaul the selection process for the program because, out of 12 fellowships awarded in the program’s first two years, only two — one each year — went to female scientists.

“Even with our good intentions, we find ourselves part of a system that drives to less rather than more diversity,” said the Foundation in . “We commit to working to change our Fellowship and that system for the better.”

Over the next year, the Foundation worked with — director of the 91̽��’s , an NSF-funded body to promote female STEM faculty on campus — to modify the application and evaluation process for the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship based on social science research. The goal: to put male and female scientists on a more equal footing.

The Heising-Simons Foundation used the revised method to choose its next class of fellows. In March of this year, the Foundation that six scientists would receive 51 Pegasi b Fellowships in 2019, four of them women.

In published Dec. 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy, Yen shared the changes that the Heising-Simons Foundation implemented, and how its lessons could inform changes in academia, education and philanthropy to boost diversity, equity and inclusion in all STEM fields. Yen sat down with 91̽��News to discuss this unique case study.

This is just one postdoctoral fellowship that researchers in astronomy can apply for. Why is this case so important?

These fellowships have a large impact on career trajectory. When postdoctoral researchers apply for faculty positions, grants or other opportunities, they’ll be evaluated in part based on research they’ve already done and fellowships they’ve previously earned. So, when the process to award things like postdoctoral fellowships already treats male and female candidates differently, it has an impact not just in regard to diversity, equity and inclusion, but also the demographic makeup of faculty, senior researchers, administrators and mentors.

What prompted the Heising-Simons Foundation to change the way that this fellowship was awarded?

With just two fellowships going to female scientists in its first two years, there were strong reactions from the astronomy and philanthropic communities, all essentially asking: Why is the gender diversity so skewed in these fellowships while we’re having these conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion?

The Heising-Simons Foundation listened, and asked, “How can we make this better?” They reached out to experts and began a year-long process to change the way that they solicit applications and evaluate candidates.

How did you approach working with the Foundation for this fellowship?

I worked with them to evaluate the application process and as a facilitator during the evaluation and review process. Our goal was to bring changes to the fellowship application and evaluation process that reflected effective practices for diversity, equity and inclusion.

What are some of those best practices?

First, don’t narrow the applicant pool any earlier than you need to. That makes it more likely that fellowships will be awarded in a way that addresses diversity, equity and inclusion. Second, ensure that the information collected from applicants actually captures what we want to know about them, and also create an evaluation rubric for reviewers. This avoids situations in which evaluators might “fill in the blanks,” read between the lines or make assumptions about applicants that might introduce bias into the selection process. Also, we just want to ensure that we’re aware and acknowledge that bias happens to all of us.

So what are some of the changes that the Heising-Simons Foundation put in place to reflect those best practices?

Previously, postdoctoral researchers would apply through the universities that they wanted to work at. The universities would then pick which applications to send to the Heising-Simons Foundation. We changed the process so that postdoctoral researchers would apply directly to the Foundation, which would then forward those applications to the relevant universities. This keeps the universities involved in the selection process, which the Foundation wanted, but also increased the percentage of female applicants from less than 25% under the old system to more than 30%.

What about changes to the information given by applicants?

Research has shown that we’re not as good as we think we are in evaluating applications without bias coming into play. This is true even in science. Part of overhauling the process involved changes to the application itself — the information we’re requesting from the applicant. This involved stepping back and asking, “What do we really want?” Do we want someone innovative, for example? If so, how do we collect information that will let us identify innovation, for example, among the pool of applicants? And what criteria will reviewers use to evaluate and score the applications?

By starting from those types of goal-oriented questions, we made changes to the application, such as asking for an open-ended statement from the applicants about diversity, equity and inclusion. We also improved the rubric for reviewers to use in evaluating and scoring applications, including justifications for their score.

What about steps to reduce bias in the evaluation and selection process?

We did quite a lot. To provide a common context among the reviewers, I provided background research about bias — that it happens, often in counterintuitive ways, and can affect outcomes like who receives a fellowship. They reviewed applications in-person, and we took concrete steps to avoid introducing bias through things like “decision fatigue.” This is a well-documented phenomenon, and happens when you just “plow through” a list of cases with no breaks. Here, we handled the applications in randomized bundles of six, followed by a brief break. This randomized discussion also helped with anchoring bias where we latch onto a first impression — like an ordinal score or ranking — that influences our future thinking about that application.

On paper, these might look like lots of changes, but they really aren’t. They’re small changes that required a modest investment in time and resources to come up with and implement. But that investment had a large effect on reducing bias and ensuring that the evaluation and selection process is sensitive to diversity, equity and inclusion. These changes support the overall goal of scientific excellence, noting that excellence has many dimensions.

These changes don’t seem specific to astronomy.

That is correct. They’re widely applicable to STEM fields, academia and funding organizations. Many types of organizations have made commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM fields. But it takes a lot of leadership to actually make it happen. The Heising-Simons Foundation said that it wants to make the investment — caring enough to not just say, “We want to do better,” but to actually do better. And even after a change like this, the work is not over. This is an ongoing conversation, and the work must continue.

How would you like to see conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion evolve?

I would like people to consider diversity as part of excellence. People right now want to know what the value of diversity is in an organization. But let’s put it another way: What’s the value — or the cost — of being homogenous?

For more information, contact Yen at 206-543-4605 or joyceyen@uw.edu.

Five years ago, Nature — one of the most prestigious research journals in science — published an pledging to improve on the low number of women editors and authors in its pages.

For many readers and scientists, that acknowledgement was a long time in coming. Yet with the hindsight of today’s re-examination of the treatment of women at all levels of society, the editorial could seem almost prescient.

In the time since that editorial, however, not much has changed, according to a new 91̽�� study published and cited in a printed March 7 in Nature. The preliminary study, by 91̽��psychology professor and doctoral student , finds that many high-profile neuroscience journals had a low representation of female authors. For example, fewer than 25 percent of Nature research articles listed women as the first author — usually the junior scientist who led the research. Among last authors — typically the senior laboratory leader — just over 15 percent were women. Nature’s top-tier competitor, Science, had similarly low numbers of women authors.

What most concerned the 91̽��team was that over a 12-year period ending in 2017, the percentage of female authors across these journals showed little improvement: less than 1 percent annually, with many journals showing no increase at all.

For the sake of comparison, the 91̽��team also looked at the number of women who received major National Institute of Health grants during the same time period. Those numbers were much higher, and increased slowly but steadily, with just under 30 percent of grants in 2017 awarded to women.

“These research grants are awarded based on significance, impact and productivity. We shouldn’t see this huge discrepancy between NIH funding and last authorship in high impact journals,” Fine said. It’s particularly troubling, the study’s authors say, given that publishing in high-profile journals is virtually imperative for winning academic awards or positions at top-ranked institutions.

Gender disparities in STEM fields has garnered more attention in recent years. While National Science Foundation-compiled data show that women make up a proportion of STEM faculty, their numbers remain significantly lower than those of men. A 2016 by the Society for Neuroscience showed that a little more than half of neuroscience doctorates are awarded to women, but women make up an average of only 30 percent of neuroscience faculty.

Other studies of gender and authorship have also pointed to the possible contribution of publication bias. A small-scale focusing on Nature Neuroscience, in 2016, showed similar results to the 91̽��findings. And in 2013, a led by the UW’s Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, though an analysis of publications in the JSTOR digital library, found that women also are much less likely to be featured in prominent first- or last-author positions.

The issue extends beyond science: In spring 2017, an at the University of Liverpool found that papers written by female economists took an average of six months longer to get published than those written by men.

For this study, Shen, Fine, and their psychology co-authors research associate Jason Webster and professor, turned to the MEDLINE database of articles, which is hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. They focused on 15 journals that publish neuroscience research, accounting for nearly 167,000 research articles from 2005 to 2017, and analyzed the author bylines using another database that predicts gender based on more than 216,000 distinct first names.

Some journals did have a proportionate number of female authors. The journals with the highest percentage of first authors were Neuropsychology Review (53 percent) and Brain (43 percent); among last authors, numbers were highest in Neuropsychology Review (39 percent) and Current Opinion in Neurobiology (27 percent).

“From our analysis, it is not that women are not conducting research and publishing, they are just much less likely to get their work into the really high-profile journals,” Shen said.

Fine and Shen suggest several solutions for all journals: to record and report article authorship by gender; to train reviewers to avoid bias, provide reviewers with more specific review criteria, akin to those required for grant awards; to adopt double-blind reviewing; or to establish byline quotas.

“It’s ridiculous to think bias isn’t at play in these very elite journals,” Fine says. “There are glass ceilings in technology, in politics, in business. It’s very hard not to believe that this is not just another glass ceiling.”

Increasing the number of women faculty in STEM fields is the goal of the . But if publication presents a barrier, then some universities may be challenged to hire and promote women, said Eve Riskin, 91̽��associate dean of engineering for diversity and access, professor of electrical engineering and faculty director of ADVANCE.

“Research shows that diverse teams lead to better solutions,” Riskin said. “Research also shows that female students in STEM do better when they have female faculty as instructors.  Holding women to higher standards for publication makes it harder for universities to increase their number of female faculty members in STEM and in leadership positions.”

The study’s authors have also made their code publicly available, with the hope that students or faculty in other fields will take on the same challenge, determine the gender breakdown of bylines in a given set of journals, and call for change.

“These journals make a lot of money and wield a huge amount of power. Finding a way to fix this problem is the least they can do,” Fine said. “They are under the same legal obligations to avoid discrimination as other businesses.”

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For more information, contact Shen at psy.alicia@gmail.com or Fine at ionefine@uw.edu or 206-685-6157.

Late last year, the 91̽��’s quietly marked its 15th birthday. But now, with thriving programs for early-career faculty and record numbers of female faculty in STEM fields, the center is ready for a party.

On March 31, ADVANCE will hold a belated celebration of its work and achievements since it was founded in 2001. With workshops, new resources and mentoring services the center has strived to remake the faculty recruitment and retention process to emphasize diversity in the sciences and develop resources to support early-career faculty.

“Our work through ADVANCE is to build successful and productive faculty, because their success is the university’s success,” said , 91̽��associate dean of engineering for diversity and access, professor of electrical engineering and faculty director of ADVANCE.

There’s a lot to celebrate. Since ADVANCE opened its doors, the 91̽��has nearly doubled the number of female faculty in 19 STEM departments across three 91̽��colleges, from 60 in 2000 to 112 in 2015. In addition to this 93 percent increase, more than half of the female faculty in those departments are now full professors with tenure, countering the stereotype that female faculty don’t achieve full professorship as often as their male colleagues.

The 91̽��also boasts the among the top 50 engineering schools in the country.

ADVANCE has worked to both increase the number of female faculty members in the STEM fields where they are historically underrepresented and establish support networks for faculty in the early stages of their careers.

“At UW, the early-career stage for faculty is very different today than it was when ADVANCE started,” said center director . “Today in our STEM departments there is awareness of the critical importance of addressing faculty professional development, supporting faculty success at all levels and supporting our female faculty.”

The bulk of the center’s work currently focuses on three endeavors to promote faculty recruitment and retention:

• Career development workshops for pre-tenure faculty
• Workshops on effective leadership for department chairs and college deans
• A “Mentoring-for-Leadership” lunch and speaker series for female faculty

ADVANCE designed its workshops for early-career faculty to address subjects that are important for faculty success, but which are often lacking in traditional doctoral and postdoctoral training.

“Our workshops cover topics that faculty have asked for help with, such as time management, personnel management, student mentoring and work-life balance,” said Yen. “Faculty want and need professional development. They know they can come to ADVANCE with questions and for help and resources. You don’t have to make it up as you go along or reinvent the wheel.”

Nine universities were in the first cohort of National Science Foundation ADVANCE grantees in 2001, each of whom was awarded a five-year grant. Each university’s ADVANCE program piloted a different approach. The 91̽��center’s flagship innovation was to focus on leadership development at the university, particularly of department chairs and deans.

“A huge part of our success has been engagement with department chairs, because they have a significant impact on the success of early-career faculty,” said Riskin. “And since ADVANCE started working with chairs and deans back in 2002, we’ve found them terrific partners for recruiting and retaining diverse faculty, providing resources and addressing the problems and concerns of early-career faculty.”

Another endeavor is to help female faculty across the 91̽��consider leadership opportunities as part of their career plans, such as becoming department chairs. This led to the “Mentoring-for-Leadership” lunch and speaker series, which is the only ADVANCE program open only to female faculty. One past speaker at this event was 91̽��President , who was principal investigator for ADVANCE during much of its tenure.

Looking forward, Yen and Riskin said they want ADVANCE to continue these current projects, but also expand the center’s focus to include increasing female faculty from underrepresented minority groups and creating new programs to support mid-career faculty.

For its first six years, 91̽��ADVANCE was supported by the National Science Foundation. The 91̽��center continued thanks to additional grants and support from the UW, NSF and the National Institutes of Health.

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For more information, contact Yen at 206-543-4605 or joyceyen@uw.edu and Riskin at 206-685-2313 or riskin@uw.edu.

LATTICE stands for Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: An Intentional Community in Engineering. True to its name, the program focuses on forging connections and offering support to early-career women and underrepresented minority women in engineering who are interested in faculty careers.

LATTICE participants will gain a stronger sense of career self-efficacy and sense of belonging through a combination of symposia, networks and other support structures over a two-year-period.

The — to be held in Bainbridge Island, Washington, on May 18-21 — will focus on post-Ph.D., early-career women in electrical engineering and computer science, including postdoctoral researchers, assistant professors, assistant research professors and other pre-tenure level science positions. The for the first cohort is Jan. 16.

A second symposium to be held in 2019 will target women in all fields of engineering who are also members of racial or ethnic minorities or persons with disabilities. Each four-day retreat-like symposium will focus on early academic career skills such as teaching, proposal writing and funding, and tenure proposals – as well as offer time for self-reflection and discussions about identity and the academy.

In both cases, senior engineers and faculty will be available for mentoring and networking opportunities, as well as conversations about developing successful careers.

“LATTICE provides junior women support to become proactive and strategic about their careers,” said co-principal investigator , associate dean of diversity and access for the 91̽��College of Engineering and faculty director for the . “I was hired in electrical engineering at the 91̽��in 1990 and would have loved to have had such a program.”

The LATTICE communities forged at the national symposiums will be extended through peer mentoring circles and online connections. The circles are designed to offer frequent and safe forums to discuss concerns, receive constructive feedback and group wisdom, and set realistic personal goals. Discussions may include topics such as time management, navigating institutional culture, stress and conflict, writing and productivity, and self care.

Funded by a five-year National Science Foundation grant, LATTICE combines these professional development interventions with an ethnographic research study to understand which components are most effective. The project hopes to identify successful strategies and develop a replicable “recipe” for success for change agents looking to broaden participation in STEM fields.

For more information, contact lattice@uw.edu.

Pursuing scientific or engineering careers in industry, government or private research after getting a Ph.D. used to be considered a one-way ticket out of academia.

But new 91̽�� research finds numerous benefits — to students, researchers and academic institutions looking to diversify their faculty — in making that return trip easier.

Authors of a recently published in the Journal of Technology Transfer interviewed 10 women who successfully transitioned into university faculty or instructor positions after working as corporate scientists or industry or government researchers. Those conversations explored the challenges and rewards in making that leap, the support and tools that made it easier and how the skills women acquired in industry helped or hindered them.

All of the interviewees participated in “” workshops, which were held from 2009 to 2012 by UW’s and offered a new approach to increase women faculty in science, technology, engineering and math departments.

“We saw that there were some really good women out there who just needed some encouragement and a road map on how to translate their skills from industry into academia,” said , electrical engineering professor and associate dean for diversity and access at the 91̽��College of Engineering.

“A big part of it was helping them understand that maybe what they thought was a bug was actually a feature,” Riskin said.

One common strategy for increasing women faculty in STEM departments is to hire from other universities. But this approach fails to increase the number of female STEM faculty nationally.

The 91̽��On-Ramps workshops aimed to broaden the universe of women from which universities can hire — and ultimately to change the culture of STEM departments and make them more welcoming to underrepresented groups — by helping highly qualified women with nonacademic career trajectories navigate the transition to academic employment.

Many aspiring “on-rampers” had impressive research accomplishments, experience in rapid innovation and insider knowledge to prepare students for real-world jobs. But despite desirable skills, the pathway from industry or government back into academia or how they would fit in was far from clear.

Some had spent the bulk of their time developing products rather than publishing papers. Others who had worked in corporate settings were prevented from speaking in detail about their accomplishments because of intellectual property concerns. Many had been outnumbered by men when they were getting their doctorate degrees and questioned whether the academic culture in STEM departments had improved.

Ultimately, though, they found other dimensions of an academic career attractive enough to want to return.

“They wanted to do more than make a profit for their corporation, and they overcame their reticence with a passionate thirst for two things — having more intellectual freedom and feeling like they were doing good in the world through working with students,” said lead author , assistant professor of anthropology and science, technology and society at Cal Poly, who was previously a 91̽��ADVANCE postdoctoral scholar.

The 91̽��workshops offered professional development advice, in-depth discussions that included personal issues and life stories, interactions with other potential on-rampers and exploration of strategies for becoming the academics they wanted to be.

For some of the women scientists and engineers, simply finding mentors who were willing to connect them with jobs, who could assure them that having their name on patents would count in the academic evaluation process and who offered advice on resumes or salary negotiations was a key motivator.

Those mentors also helped craft strategies to remedy gaps in credentials, which led some interviewees to take teaching jobs or apply for postdoctoral research positions before putting themselves on the academic job market.

Once the women landed faculty positions, they expressed high levels of confidence in their abilities, value and contributions — especially in educating the next generation of scientists and engineers. They felt insights into what knowledge and skill sets are valued in the workplace and how utilitarian innovation happens added valuable dimensions to their research and teaching.

“They haven’t just been in an ivory tower,” said Riskin. “If you look at the percentage of engineering students graduating with bachelor’s degrees and going straight to industry jobs, it’s nearly 80 percent. So they’re bringing a real-world perspective that is really useful to the bulk of our students.”

Many of the on-rampers also expressed high degrees of personal satisfaction in their new positions, which offered levels of autonomy and creativity that few had experienced in their previous jobs.

“The one thing with academia is that you’re your own boss,” one interviewee said. “The intellectual freedom that you have in academia you have nowhere else … You can set your own agenda.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors include 91̽��Information School doctoral student Katie O’Leary, ADVANCE director and professor of bioengineering .

For more information contact Carrigan at cmcarrig@calpoly.edu or Riskin at riskin@u.washington.edu.

Grant number: NSF: HRD -0819407.

Among the nation’s top 50 engineering schools, the 91̽�� has the highest percentage of women in tenure-track engineering faculty positions: 22.4 percent.

Nationally, the figure is 14.5 percent, and that gap didn’t grow by accident.

Over the past 14 years, 91̽��has worked on everything from highlighting how unconscious bias can affect hiring practices to ensuring junior faculty feel comfortable extending tenure clocks to have children to providing leadership support.

The 91̽��chose early on to focus on one thing that can have an outsized influence on faculty members’ well-being — especially for women and other underrepresented groups in science, math and engineering. They created to help department chairs acquire skills to create equitable and inclusive environments that work well for all faculty members.

Now, the 91̽��is developing an online toolkit — called — that other universities can use to design and host their own department-focused workshops to advance STEM faculty diversity at their home institutions.

The 91̽��is hosting a special train-the-trainer workshop in Seattle in October 2015 that will give participants an early look at the coming online toolkit and the opportunity to get help planning a workshop on faculty recruitment for their own department chairs. until June 22.

“The departmental culture is the front line of how people experience a university — it’s where evaluations take place, where people are assigned to teaching, where decisions about salaries are made,” said , program and research manager for the that developed the LEAD workshops.

“Department chairs really influence that microclimate. But often they move into these positions after having been research superstars or individual investigators, and then they become managers of people. And they maybe have no formal education around how to do that well,” Yen said.

The full version of the open-source toolkit — which will allow users to share, upload, add to and rate materials — will be available in 2016. The online resources will include everything from sample budgets and invitational emails that are helpful in planning a workshop to content such as case studies, handouts and sample presentations.

The LEAD materials cover a wide range of topics, including how to effectively communicate, recruit faculty from nontraditional sources, recognize how unconscious biases perpetuate the status quo, manage up and down, effectively mentor a faculty member whose background may be different than one’s own and be cognizant of data that show, for instance, that women aren’t likely to negotiate as hard as men.

“We tell the chairs that if they’re hiring a man and a woman at the same time, make sure that when she says ‘thank you’ and he says ‘is that all?’ that she gets an equal amount,” said , an electrical engineering professor and associate dean of diversity and access for the 91̽��College of Engineering. “On the other hand, sometimes the woman may be offered a higher salary, and we tell the chair to make sure the man gets the higher salary, too.”

The UW’s original campus workshops grew out of an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant in 2001 to advance women faculty in science, engineering and mathematics and help create a diverse climate where all faculty in these disciplines receive support and recognition. These workshops continue today on the 91̽��campus. Additionally, three national LEAD workshops hosted by the 91̽��in 2007, 2008 and 2009 and the online toolkit have been funded by follow-up .

Since the first grant, the 91̽��has seen a 78 percent increase in the number of tenured or tenure-track women faculty in all ADVANCE departments, including an 100 percent increase in engineering departments and a 59 percent increase in science and math departments.

“One of the big reasons we’ve been doing so well with our women faculty hires is our history with this program and these workshops,” said Riskin. “Our chairs have really signed on and have worked hard to recruit women and do the right thing. And once you have a critical mass of female faculty in a department, it makes it so much easier to attract more.”

For more information, contact Yen at joyceyen@uw.edu or 206-543-4605 or Riskin at riskin@uw.edu or 206-685-2313.