Program ADVANCEs

Faculty and staff working to promote institutional change

Robert Nesmith
Communications & Marketing

A team comprised of Institute faculty and staff members is striving to aid Tech in hiring, promoting and retaining more women in faculty positions.

		The GT ADVANCE team professors are, from left, Mary Frank Fox, Mary Jean Harrold, Christina Shalley, Wing Li Suet, Mary Ann Ingram and Catherine Ross (right). Gilda Barabino (left) is vice provost for Academic Diversity.

Begun in 2001 with a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Georgia Tech ADVANCE Program for Institutional Transformation initially was founded to increase participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through increased representation and advancement of women in academic scientific and engineering careers.

After the grant period ended, the program was institutionalized at Tech, overseen by the Office of the Provost and in partnership with the Center for the Study of Women, Science and Technology (WST). The team provides conferences, workshops, online resources and other activities to aid and inform individual faculty members and campus leadership.

ADVANCE professors initially were chosen from the colleges of Sciences, Engineering, Computing and the Ivan Allen College in 2001 to serve for five years. With funding moving from the NSF to the Provost’s and President’s offices in 2006, the program expanded to include the College of Architecture and the College of Management. While each professor works to initiate cultural change across the Institute, they also work within their college, advising school chairs and other departmental heads. “[Former Provost Jean-Lou Chameau] felt it should be campus-wide,” said Management Professor Christina Shalley. As one of the “new” ADVANCE professors, she is in the third year of her five-year commitment.

Other ADVANCE Professors include Mary Frank Fox with the Ivan Allen College; Mary Jean Harrold with the College of Computing; Mary Ann Ingram with the College of Engineering; Wing Suet Li with the College of Sciences; and Catherine Ross in the College of Architecture. Monique Tavares and Donna Redmon, both with the Provost’s Office; and Literature, Communication and Culture Professor Carol Colatrella and Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering Associate Professor Mary Lynn Realff—WST co-directors—round out the Georgia Tech ADVANCE team. At the helm is Gilda Barabino, vice provost for Academic Diversity (VPAD).

“It’s an honor to be named an ADVANCE professor, but it also involves a lot of work,” Shalley said. “Performing service is part of being a faculty member, and it’s rewarding to be able to work on something that you care about; that you think is important.” Since being named to the team, Shalley says she has been working to make the promotion and tenure process across campus more transparent. “It’s a critical process for faculty retention and development.”

While planning campus workshops and events, Shalley says the team meets every two weeks. Otherwise, the group meets monthly, at a minimum. “It’s a very positive sign [from the Institute] to now have Vice Provost Barabino,” she said. Last year’s naming of Barabino as VPAD places someone in charge of the Institute’s program, bringing a synergy to Tech’s overarching diversity initiatives. “We work as a team—not just in planning the events but also in identifying the issues,” Tavares, also director for the Office of Faculty Career Development Services, said, adding that the goal is true Institute transformation.

Under the NSF-funded grant, Sandi Bramblett in the Office of Institutional Research and Planning tracked trends and information on the number of women in faculty positions, as well as those on committees, including the Promotion and Tenure Committee. As part of the institutionalization of the grant, the Provost’s Office is now charged with keeping track of such data and also manages the policies that evolved from the ADVANCE team’s efforts, such as stopping the tenure clock and the active service/modified duties program. “Our office helps support anything having to do with work/life balance,” Tavares said. Along with managing the nursing mothers’ rooms, the office also hosts the Georgia Tech parents’ network, a monthly lunch series providing faculty, staff and students with information on parenting issues.

On the Institute, college and school levels, the GT ADVANCE team works to make an impact in the recruitment and retention of women faculty through robust networking opportunities, tools and resources, gathering information from faculty, and developing best practices and policies for promotion and tenure. “It works really well to have a resource of professors in each college, where we can meet and get advice on how things are handled [across the Institute],” Shalley said.

One program tool that has come out of the ADVANCE program is ADEPT (Awareness of Decisions in Evaluating Promotion and Tenure), which provides users with a resource to achieve fair and objective evaluations. The material provided assists users—either faculty members up for or committees evaluating promotion and tenure—in achieving fair and objective evaluation by identifying bias within the process. “The resource can be very helpful in educating people about how to avoid making decisions that may be inadvertently biased,” Shalley said.

She cited an example of two faculty members up for promotion and tenure. One candidate is male with six years in rank and the other is female with seven years, because she “stopped the tenure clock for a year” to have a child. “It is important that these cases be considered as equal in time at the Institute without any bias toward the woman,” Shalley said. “While men can also ‘stop the clock’ for a birth or adoption, it is an issue that is much more significant for women in academia, since they are the ones physically impacted by childbirth and are more likely to be the primary caregiver, especially during the child’s first year.”

The program’s spring events kick off March 3 with a career coaching workshop. Faculty members have their curriculum vitas (CV) evaluated by senior faculty mentors. “It provides the opportunity for feedback from a variety of faculty members across the Institute, giving attendees ideas on how to improve their CV,” said Tavares. “They can also explore ideas for collaborations as they meet with coaches and network with other attendees.”

Many events—including career coaching—are open to all faculty members, not just women. For the future, Tavares says the program is exploring more workshops for school chairs. “We held one last year, focusing on recruitment and retention issues, while also exploring work/life balance issues for faculty members, such as child care,” she said. The Career Coaching workshops are generally a consistent format, while seminars for school chairs and faculty career development contain changing content. “In last semester’s faculty career development seminar, we examined the notion of scope and scale—what career paths exist once a faculty member reaches the rank of associate professor and achieves tenure.”

For now, the GT ADVANCE Program for Institutional Transformation is still working on collecting data and measuring the Institute’s progress. The team collected data from 2002 to 2006, during the NSF grant period, but has not conducted an Institute-wide climate survey of the faculty since that time. The Web site does contain the results of the Georgia Tech ADVANCE Survey of Faculty Perceptions, Needs and Experiences, conducted by Public Policy Professor and ADVANCE team member Mary Frank Fox.

The team is exploring the next iteration of surveys across colleges and the Institute to assess the climate. “We’re setting up tracking indicators across and within colleges,” Shalley said. Indicators include promotion rate, perceived climate—for teaching, research, developmental encouragement—who is looking to leave, overall satisfaction and interaction with others.

Shalley said during her time as an ADVANCE professor, she would like to see changes that the ADVANCE team are working on concerning the promotion and tenure process implemented in the faculty handbook, as well as more strength added to the family-friendly policies.

“Since ADVANCE has been in place, I have seen movement, but there’s more to be done,” Shalley said. “It’s helpful to have the ADVANCE professors in each college, so faculty know they have a senior faculty member whom they can approach with concerns or ask for advice.”