09/21/2016
Boston Globe
By Beth Healy
The University of Massachusetts Lowell has received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to narrow the gender gap in the teaching of science and technology.
The five-year grant will fund research, training, surveys and feedback about ways to increase numbers of women entering the faculty and rising through the ranks of academia.
It’s not unlike the push in corporate America in recent years to get women onto boards and corner offices, and into the conversations that once were the purview of the golf course.
“It’s not that UMass Lowell is any worse or better than any other institution,’’ said the school’s vice chancellor for research and innovation, Julie Chen. But the goal is to make things like hiring and promotion decisions fairer, not just subject to the whims of one or two people.
“There’s a great opportunity for subtle bias -- or even not-so-subtle bias -- to happen,’’ she said. “We want to make the process more open and transparent.”
According to UMass Lowell, women earn nearly half of all college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math. But only about a quarter of professors teaching those subjects are women.
Of the school’s total faculty of 1,061, there are 442 women, according to a spokeswoman. In the science, technology, and math disciplines, 217 are men and 125 are women.
In addition to studying the way hiring and promoting is done -- and to create a model to improve those practices -- part of the plan is also to look at so-called micro-agressions. These are the less obvious negative messages women and minorities may receive that persuade them not to pursue ambitious positions or projects.
“People say these offhand comments that seem to be not horrible but if you hear them all the time they start to get to you,’’ Chen said. “A lot of people don’t want to confront a senior faculty member in a big meeting. It could make things worse.”
The faculty members running the program at UMass Lowell hope to make their research available to other institutions, and think the findings could have an impact beyond academia.