Transforming the academic workplace: An evaluation of the ADVANCE program in colleges of engineering (2001-2008)

Abstract

For over two decades, the US government has supported gender equity programs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In 2001, the National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) program with the primary goal to increase the representation of women in STEM. Since 2001, 37 institutions of higher education have received the NSF ADVANCE IT awards, and 19 have completed their five-year projects. Using the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) data, we assess the changes in the representation of full-time tenure-track women faculty in engineering colleges. While earlier cross-institutional studies of the ADVANCE IT program focus only on ADVANCE institutions, we also compare engineering colleges at ADVANCE institutions to their university peers. Our analysis suggests that while the average gains in the percentage of full-time tenure-track engineering women faculty for Cohort 2 were almost twice the national average, the gains were uneven not only between the two cohorts, but also among the engineering colleges in each cohort. Similarly, the ADVANCE institutions showed an uneven performance when compared with their peers. We therefore raise important questions regarding how success is defined and conclude by highlighting the most interesting instances of successful and not so successful efforts along with the importance of conducting multi-level comparative analyses of ADVANCE and non-ADVANCE institutions. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.