Category: ADVANCE Weekly Roundup

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: It’s Time to Make Faculty Well-being a Priority

The conventional separation of “work” and “life” in academia encourages faculty to ignore or even actively undermine their well-being. This week, we feature several publications that extol the need to prioritize self-care in higher education. Although work-life balance is important for all academics, certain groups face more emotional fatigue from microaggressions, relentless inequities and the . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: An approach and resources to improve faculty evaluation practices

Multiple studies have scrutinized faculty evaluation practices and processes, identifying and quantifying the ways in which the historical construct of academic merit, upon which accolades and credit depend, is inequitable. While these findings can be discouraging and disheartening, ADVANCE is intentionally taking a broader perspective that the many studies about inequities in faculty evaluation systems . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Women Scientists Still Average Less Lab Space Than Men

The well-known 1999 report on space allocation at MIT by Nancy Hopkins alerted the research world to gender-based inequities in lab space allocations. In light of that report, the results of a recent assessment at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) are both stunning as well as concerning. The May 2022 “Space Allocation” report confirms that women scientists . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: How can a quick social belonging message help student retention?

College is often touted as a gateway to a better life, but if incoming students aren’t able to persist through college, they can be saddled with debt and no meaningful improvement in their career prospects.  Many students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are less likely to continue beyond their first year of college, . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Advancing Women Scientists/Engineers by Showcasing Contributions

Women’s History Month inspires both celebration and reflection on the role of women scientists/engineers across the STEM fields: women have contributed to scientific endeavors throughout history despite disparagement, marginalization, discrediting, and invisibility. This week, we call attention to some tributes to STEM women. For example, the recently published 600+-page Palgrave Handbook of Women and Science . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Shifting STEMM away from Ableism

People with disabilities are drastically underrepresented in science, both as researchers and study participants. For example, over 25% of Americans are disabled but only 3% of the STEMM workforce reports having a disability. This needs to change, says Bonnielin Swenor, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center, in a Q&A published . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Let’s exorcize academic “Ghosting”

The contemporary shift to online interactions has implications for the quality of academic relationships and experiences. One such pervasive yet troubling practice is “ghosting.” In “The Sad Humiliations of Academic Ghosting,” published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ghosting is defined as a sudden cessation of response by one party in a digital communication relationship . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: How to make STEM fields more welcoming

Research from the Pew Research Center in 2021 and 2022 shows that despite longstanding efforts to increase diversity in STEM, Blacks and Hispanics remain vastly underrepresented. How might we do better? A 2022 survey asked Black adults what would attract more young Black people into STEM careers and found that seeing “more examples of high . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: More Evidence of Bias in Government Research Funding Agencies

In a previous Weekly Roundup, we highlighted a meta-analysis of funding by the National Science Foundation over a 10-year period.  To review, in 2019, NSF funded 31.3% of proposals from White scientists, but only 22.4% for Asian scientists; the overall funding rate was 27.4%.  This translates into a single year award surplus of 798 grants . . .