COLLEGE PARK, MD (December, 2015) ADVANCE director KerryAnn OMeara and Associate Provost for Academic Planning and Programs and Physics Professor Elizabeth Beise have received a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the Faculty Workload and Rewards Project, a five-year experiment to transform outdated workplace structures and cultures that maintain inequality between STEM and Social Sciences men and women faculty in campus service, teaching, and mentoring workloads.
The three-year project, to take place at 42 STEM and Social Sciences academic departments from 13 public institutions in North Carolina, Maryland, and Massachusetts, will test whether academic departments that address workload inequality show improvements in women faculty members’ sense of procedural and distributive justice, retention, satisfaction, and organizational commitment with time spent on teaching and service versus research. Over the course of the project, a repository of dashboard templates will be created that can then be used by other institutions to assess micro-equities in workload and establish department-based organizational practices that make faculty workloads more transparent and equitable.
Abundant empirical evidence shows that women and underrepresented minority faculty spend more time than their male and white peers on teaching, mentoring, and other less-valued forms of academic service. Because research is valued more than service and teaching in most academic reward systems, spending more time on campus service, teaching, and mentoring may perpetuate inequality between men and women. These systemic inequities in workload have been identified as central to lower tenure and promotion rates, longer time to promotion to full professor, and greater career dissatisfaction for women in STEM fields.
This project is the first of its kind to take on the root causes of gender inequality in faculty workload.
Click here to learn more about the Faculty Workload and Rewards Project.
Dr. KerryAnn O'Meara is Professor of Higher Education, Director of the ADVANCE Program for Inclusive Excellence, and an affiliate faculty member in the University of Maryland’s Women’s Studies program. She investigates how faculty are retained and advanced within academic reward systems with the goal of improving higher education to be more equitable and inclusive of diverse faculty and more supportive of newer forms of scholarship.
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