Focusing efforts at the departmental level is important for promoting gender and racial/ethnic equity at the university. In particular, increasing understanding of specific departmental issues and establishing department-specific approaches can be invaluable for reducing microaggressions and other forms of bias as well as for increasing supports for greater diversity inclusion.
Thus, the WAVES team is partnering with departments to engage them in a process of self-assessment, goal setting, action planning, and annual progress. This process communicates and incentivizes a shared responsibility for promoting gender and racial/ethnic equity.
Four departments are participating in the first phase of the Accountability Initiative.
Each department is working with WAVES to:
- Form an action team of interested faculty members
- Conduct a self-assessment through interviews and surveys
- Engage the full department in a discussion of the assessment results
- Establish equity goals and identify annual benchmarks for assessing progress
- Design their own action plan and an organizational structure for ongoing monitoring of progress