ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Faculty Service: The Value of Data-Driven Measures

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 . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Respect and representation: Indigenous scientists seek inclusion for their knowledge and for themselves

November is Native American Heritage Month, and this week’s Roundup is focused on Indigenous researchers in academia, who remain poorly represented, particularly in STEM fields. In the Second Nature article, “Respect and Representation,” four Indigenous scientists speak about the challenges early-career researchers face, and how scientists can respectfully and effectively bring together traditional knowledge and . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup featuring two new studies: Still finding gender biases and ageism in student teaching evaluations; implications on promotion & performance assessments.

Students, especially STEMM students, prefer male professors, according to research. Two recent studies highlighted in Inside Higher Ed show that this bias increases both during a course and as the professor ages. In one study, student evaluations of men and women instructors were similar at the beginning of the course. Still, when students received their . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Emotional Labor Disrupted Research Productivity During Covid

The transition to remote or hybrid work during the Covid pandemic was more disruptive to women faculty’s academic research than to men’s because of the additional caretaking work they often had to manage, a finding confirmed in several recent studies. Now, research suggests that the pandemic also disproportionately impacted women faculty (particularly Black, Indigenous, and . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Achieving Fairness in Promotions to Full

Research on bias in academia has focused more on tenure and less on promotion to Full Professor. This week’s feature article from the Chronicle of Higher Education is an exception, describing a study of 2000 promotion to full cases across 10 universities. The study found several potential sources of bias that tend to affect women . . .

Disability – An Axis of Diversity

This week’s article spotlights disability as an axis of diversity. According to this article, 26% of adult Americans have at least one disability, yet data from 2004 suggest that only 4% of faculty members report a disability. Stigmas or biases, inability to fund graduate education while maintaining necessary medical care, lack of role models, and . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Faculty Burnout Is Institutional Not Individual

Post-Covid burnout, disengagement, and demoralization have become widespread throughout academia as in the broader workforce. We highlight two recent review essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In her essay, Rebecca Pope-Ruark explains burnout as “a collection of related symptoms, under the umbrellas of (1) exhaustion, (2) cynicism or depersonalization, and (3) feelings of reduced . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Sexism Undermines Accomplished Women

This week we showcase a blog post that suggests how women who are talented and capable can be undermined by gendered biases. The blog revisits incidents in which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been publicly slighted by men in power. A particularly well-publicized moment was dubbed “Sofagate” after European Council President Charles . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and impactful scientific work

Today’s ADVANCE article comes from the field of medical sciences, where women are increasingly more prevalent; simultaneously, the field is moving towards more team approaches to research. The study authors collected a set of 6.6 million medical research papers over the last 20 years to assess the impacts of gender diversity among research authors on . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Hiring Rubrics Don’t Ensure Objectivity

Candidate assessment rubrics are helpful in conducting objective faculty searches but do not adequately mitigate bias according to two recent studies. One four-year-long study of the searches in an Engineering department evaluated whether hiring rubrics countered biases. The study found that search committees consistently scored women candidates lower than men on rubrics about research although . . .