Category: ADVANCE Weekly Roundup

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Groundskeeping leadership style: leading to support the advancement of others

Dr. Beronda Montgomery, in “Academic Leadership: Gatekeeping or Groundskeeping?” encourages academic institutions to rethink the kind of leader hired to lead academic units. Rather than fostering gatekeeping, or the mentality that the leader is measuring individual traits and performance to appraise if someone is worthy of advancement or leadership, Montgomery suggests choosing leaders who promote . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Association of Women in Science responds to the resignation of the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy: Ignoring or disregarding complaints harms climate.

The Association of Women in Science (AWIS) recently issued this statement in response to a high level director’s resignation from a key government STEM office. Their statement calls out an ongoing pattern (both at the national and local level) of institutional negligence in which organizational leaders have regularly failed to proactively respond to practices of . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: High school chemistry textbooks fail to advance positive role of women in field

Many young people are introduced to professions like Chemistry in high school and textbooks play a major role in informing students about the discipline and the people who work within it. An article in Chemistry World shines a light on what happens when textbooks are biased in their representation. A study of four widely used . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Acknowledging structural barriers – a visualization shift from leaky pipeline to a hostile obstacle course in academia

Equal practices are often mistaken as synonymous with equitable practices.  However, the path to get from point A to point B can be different for different people because the surrounding system of people (faculty, staff, students, society) does not respond to all individuals similarly. For example, those who have regularly been extended the benefit of . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Recommendations for LGBTQ+ Inclusivity

Creating more inclusive academic communities and making equity and diversity hallmarks of campus culture are lofty goals. What are the actual practices that can make such goals concrete features of university life? A recent essay in CBE-Life Sciences Education makes the case that inclusivity requires thoughtful, proactive strategies. Specifically, the authors advance fourteen actionable recommendations . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Supporting Indigenous Students

As we work to diversify our student body, we need to reflect and adapt commonplace practices to be inclusive of the needs of students from different backgrounds. Today’s Roundup features a study of stresses related to self-beliefs, ethnic identity, and cultural congruency experienced by Native American undergraduates and how we might adapt to better support . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Gender Inequities in Academic Medicine and the Life Sciences

You may have read the article in the New York Times that came out recently about women physicians earning 2 million less over their lifetimes than men physicians.This study and a variety of research topics on gender inequities within medicine and the academic life sciences are discussed in a recent Freakonomics MD podcast led by . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: The importance of leaders developing support for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

This week’s article from the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education explores the importance of academic leadership in developing support for diversity, equity, inclusion, and sense of belonging (DEIS) among faculty. Academic leaders with more visibly favorable attitudes towards diversity positively influence faculty in their awareness and support for DEIS. This research suggests that this . . .