
NSF Org: |
EES Div. of Equity for Excellence in STEM |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | August 26, 2008 |
Latest Amendment Date: | August 25, 2014 |
Award Number: | 0811123 |
Award Instrument: | Cooperative Agreement |
Program Manager: |
Jessie Dearo
jdearo@nsf.gov (703)292-5350 EES Div. of Equity for Excellence in STEM EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
Start Date: | September 1, 2008 |
End Date: | August 31, 2015 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $3,622,853.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $3,968,147.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2009 = $657,532.00 FY 2010 = $703,922.00 FY 2011 = $796,164.00 FY 2012 = $798,685.00 FY 2013 = $340,413.00 FY 2014 = $4,881.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1960 KENNY RD Columbus OH US 43210-1016 (614)688-8734 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
1960 KENNY RD COLUMBUS OH US 43210-1016 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): |
ADVANCE - INSTITUTIONAL TRANSF, CLB-Advance-IT |
Primary Program Source: |
01000910DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001011DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001112DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001314DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01000809DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 04001011DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001112DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001213DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001314DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001415DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
The Ohio State University has highly progressive policies that allow for time off the tenure clock, part-time appointments on the tenure track, dual career placement and on-campus child care. We also have an infrastructure of support offices that promote gender equity (notably the President's Council on Women and the Women's Place) and extensive training in leadership (through Human Resources and the Women's Place). Yet the institution is highly decentralized, with individual colleges being responsible for implementing policies locally. Departmental culture is the single most important factor affecting recruitment and retention for women at Ohio State, and our decentralized system therefore requires active participation of deans and department chairs to effect institutional change. The Comprehensive Equity at Ohio State (CEOS) project involves four colleges that span the breadth of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM): Biological Sciences, Engineering, Mathematical & Physical Sciences, and Veterinary Medicine. Based upon a framework of transformational leadership, our interventions include structured workshops for administrative leaders in those four colleges that will culminate in formation of action project learning teams. Another program will focus on structured peer mentoring for women leaders in the four colleges. We will provide a two-year workshop on entrepreneurship for women interested in commercializing their intellectual property. Both formative and summative evaluation research will occur throughout the project, including analysis of quantitative metrics and qualitative data from structured interviews and portfolio development. An Internal Advisory Team and an External Advisory Committee will provide additional guidance as the project unfolds.
Intellectual Merit: The CEOS project addresses entrenched, cultural barriers to equity for women and minorities. Research indicates that organizational culture, and especially deeply embedded cultural assumptions and taken-for-granted practices, support inequalities in the workplace. Higher education organizational research has shown that department chairs and college deans can play a crucial role facilitating culture change. The CEOS project at Ohio State, based on a transformational leadership model, will involve deans, chairs and women and men faculty in workshops, women leaders' circles, and action learning project teams. Analysis of data from these interventions will contribute to an understanding of how transformational leadership affects organizational change to remove cultural barriers for women and members of historically underrepresented groups in STEM. Research from this project will be presented at numerous conferences and will be submitted to scholarly journals.
Broader Impacts: Successfully transforming the culture in four colleges at Ohio State will nucleate further change in other STEM (and non-STEM) colleges. We will share our successes and challenges with the broader university community through regular communication with the President's Council on Women, the Provost's office, and in campus forums. We will share our research results on interventions and the utility of the transformational leadership model via an active website, presentations at conferences, publications in peer-refereed journals, and other academic outlets. We also will offer a 3-day workshop on entrepreneurship to a national audience as an outgrowth of our internal workshop.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Comprehensive Equity at Ohio State (CEOS), funded by the ADVANCE Program of the National Science Foundation, is an Institutional Transformation grant: its fundamental goal is to produce gender equity in science and engineering by examining and improving the everyday experience of men and women faculty.
We chose a primary focus on faculty retention and career progression, and have worked intensively with three large units: the College of Engineering, the Division of Natural and Mathematical Sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Veterinary Medicine. Several of our programs have reached out to other units as well, and some have tailored their own programs, based on those initiated by CEOS.
We designed our efforts around a model of Transformational Leadership, seeking to engage our academic leaders as well as our faculty in examining and challenging some norms in the academic workplace. Our efforts have been carefully assessed throughout in order to produce scholarly products, including conference presentations and peer-refereed publications.
CEOS had four major programs:
1) Workshops for Academic Leaders on Issues of Gender Equity.
Academic leaders not only balance budgets, assign courses, and manage personnel, but are also important arbiters for local culture. Science and engineering departments share a culture that values peer-reviewed publications, uses an apprentice model for graduate education, emphasizes data-driven decisions, and increasingly involves interdisciplinary teamwork. Less apparent aspects of the culture of science include unstated assumptions about when and how work is done, assumptions that can disadvantage women. We held regular workshops for deans and chairs to examine cultural assumptions that can impede the success of women faculty. Topics included implicit bias, the role of parenthood and partner placement, the business case for diversity, workload distribution, and related subjects. Each CEOS workshop included not only presentation and discussion of relevant psychological and sociological literature, but also focused on specific action steps that leaders could employ in their units.
Our workshops received very positive feedback from academic leaders, who took back lessons to use in their everyday work. Most importantly, our analysis of data from the OSU Culture Survey shows that gender gaps in faculty satisfaction have eased over the course of our work.
2) Peer Mentoring For Women Faculty
The peer mentoring model convenes groups of individuals to solve problems in real time by drawing upon the wisdom of the group. We convened women scientists and engineers in safe and confidential groups over a three-year period and engaged them in facilitated conversations about workplace issues. Participants reported they felt greatly supported, found solutions to difficult problems, and advanced in their careers as a result.
3) Entrepreneurship Training for Women Faculty
Women scientists and engineers underperform in commercializing their research, and we developed a curriculum (Project REACH) to spark their interest and give them tools to enter the world of entrepreneurial activity. Using a cohort model, we offered workshops on the world of commercialization, team-building, financing, and personal aptitude assessment. Followup surveys show that our curriculum indeed had the desired effects: women developed more partnership with industries and filed more patent disclosures. We used those experiences to mount two highly successful national conferences on entrepreneurship and gender in science, and currently are working to export our experience to other institutions.
4) Action Learning Teams for Cultural Change
Action learning is a technique often used in the private sector to identify, challenge, and change aspects of local culture that do not advance the company’s mission. We convened action learning teams of science faculty to explore issues of department culture that impede women’s progress; those teams developed reports that have been implemented. Even so, we found that the action learning platform is not well suited to academic institutions, which are highly decentralized relative to the private sector.
Additional programs included workshops for postdoctoral scientists of color, development of a Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, and analysis of access to resources and career satisfaction. Ohio State also instituted an Office of Gender Initiatives in STEMM (stemm.osu.edu) to continue our work now that the grant period has ended.
Last Modified: 09/29/2015
Modified by: Joan M Herbers
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