Tag: Workplace

Topics impacting performance, perception of performance, sense of belonging in the workplace.

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Aligning our behaviors, systems, and practices with our values to create climates that cultivate high social belonging

The climate or community that we create within our classroom and within our academic units can profoundly impact how individuals perform within those settings.  This recent study in the Journal of Chemical Education determined that students’ social belonging in a general chemistry course could predict academic performance in that course. Social belonging included both an . . .

EEOC and Caregiver Employment Discrimination

From the EEOC Newsroom: EEOC Releases Information about Employment Discrimination Against Caregivers.Although this article references COVID-19 situations specifically, discrimination based on a protected characteristics is always prohibited by federal and state laws/regulations. ADVANCE has written about the impacts COVID has had on caregivers in STEM. Articles of particular note are from July 31, 2020, March 10, . . .

ADVANCE Roundup: Institutional Ideas for Responding to Faculty Exhaustion and Demoralization

Although the early years of the pandemic are behind us, and we are beginning to adjust to a “new normal” in our classrooms, labs, and professional activities, faculty continue to report feeling exhausted and over-stressed. Two recent essays in Inside Higher Ed suggest unique institutional responses: a “Chapter 11” work relief declaration and a return . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Women do a majority of office ‘housework’; Women of Color do a majority of DEI in Tech and Engineering

This article compares workload distributions among faculty in Tech and Engineering. It documents that women do more of the work to keep things running smoothly, often referred to as office “housework.” Such work rarely earns formal credit or recognition. In technology fields, women of color report that they are asked to lead HR or DEI . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: When All Faculty Do DEIS Work

A common problem on college campuses is that the people who most often choose to participate in workshops, trainings, committees, mentorships and other programs aimed at improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and sense of belonging (DEIS) are those same people that are already committed to such efforts. So, participants can feel they’re in an echo chamber, . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Make feedback matter – steps to achieve high performance and retention

How and why do supervisors provide feedback? How does feedback influence retention? These questions are posed in this week’s Roundup article. While it focuses on the corporate world, the discussion also applies to the academic environment. Feedback is intended to help faculty, staff, and students improve performance, but the article notes that, “Telling people they . . .

ADVANCE Weekly Roundup: Chicken or the Egg: Is pay in a field low because women enter it or because women tend to prefer lower paying jobs?

We recently acknowledged March 15th as equal pay day, the date when women’s pay for the prior year finally equals what men earned. In other words, women must work 2-½ months longer to make the same amount and Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous women have to work even longer. Why? A popular explanation is that women . . .

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 . . .

When Bad Behavior Becomes Sexual Harassment

by Institutional Equity Sexual harassment is no joke. This topic is no longer off-limits, and allegations are being taken more seriously than ever before. But when does behavior cross from bad to unprofessional to sexual harassment? Is sexual harassment only egregious acts of physical touching or fondling? Does the behavior have to occur more than . . .