Research is showing that data-driven insights are critical to recognizing and rectifying inequities in faculty workloads, particularly service tasks that are expected but don’t count for promotion, such as standing committee membership or mentoring a colleague. Too often, such tasks are expected or requested of women and BIPOC faculty. Rather than “fixing the women/underrepresented” with strategies for “saying no,” this Chronicle of Higher Education opinion essay advises collecting data on who is asked and assigned to do non-promotable tasks (NPTs).
At Harvard’s Kennedy School, for example, administrative tasks are assigned points and faculty have flexibility in meeting a target number of points to fulfill their service obligations. At Michigan Tech, the ADVANCE Faculty Equity Query Tool (AFEQT) has been developed to provide chairs and deans with real-time comparisons of multiple measures to enable data-based insights and decision-making that impact diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are currently exploring ways to enhance the tool with data related to faculty service. Please provide us with your ideas using this Google form.
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The ADVANCE Weekly Roundup is brought to you by ADVANCE at Michigan Tech, which is an NSF-funded initiative dedicated to improving faculty career success, retention, diversity, equity, and inclusion. These articles are available on the ADVANCE Newsblog (https://blogs.mtu.edu/advance/). To learn more about this week’s topic, our mission, programming efforts, and to check out our growing collection of resources, contact us at (advance-mtu@mtu.edu) or visit our website: www.mtu.edu/advance.