Thanks for watching! FIU ADVANCE is aimed specifically at developing strategies to increase the number of women and minority professors in STEM and SBS at FIU, which includes retention and promotion as well as recruitment. The purpose behind the webinar was to explore potential COVID-related issues with retention and promotion as we move forward.

FIU ADVANCE is now entering its final year, and we offer a number of activities and programs that focus on inclusive excellence and institutional transformation. Our signature program, the Bystander Leadership Program, is a behavioral skills training program that educates faculty on implicit bias by raising awareness about the interplay between power, privilege, and bias often experienced by women and minorities. It then provides them with practice using a range of responses and actions that can be used to address instances of bias and to increase inclusion. Bystander was named the winner of the 2020 Council for Advancement and Support of Education Platinum Award in the category of Best Practices in Diversity Programming.

Our various STRIDE workshops (Strategies and Tactics for Recruitment to Increase Diversity and Excellence), facilitated by faculty members and institutionalized across the university, have been attended by more than 700 unique participants, the majority of whom found the workshops to be effective in helping them understand the benefits of having a diverse faculty and the role of stereotypes in career advancement, and in finding ways to address these issues.

Colleges and departments are now required to have a faculty diversity, equity and inclusion plan, and we've created initiatives such as the Diversity Mentor Program, which recruits multiple excellent STEM faculty to FIU who have a history of and commitment to the mentorship of women and underrepresented minority students in STEM, particularly Hispanic-American and African-American students, and the College Equity Advisor program, which help to ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion are considered in all aspects of the college’s academic life.

More information about all of our activities and programs is available at https://advance.fiu.edu/. 

Thank you for this wonderful presentation and breakdown of the grant's activities.  What have been your results with the STRIDE workshops, in terms of successful recruitment of diverse faculty?

It would seem that this webinar would be integral components of all of the programs under ADVANCE.  How has the success of the Bystander Leadership Program been measured?

In terms of STRIDE, we have shown incremental gains in hiring diverse faculty.  I would need to double-check the data, but I think our results have been stronger for STEM women than for faculty of color overall. 

One result I have heard reported anecdotally from search committee members is much more widespread awareness of and compliance with best practices, but one "weak spot" is on the front end in networking and recruiting people to apply.  (I'm not sure whether you were thinking specifically about extending offers and having them accepted, when you mentioned recruitment.) 

In part to that end, we have started requiring searches to have a "Diversity Advocate."  The DA gets extra training, is not necessarily a BIPOC and/or a woman, but is supposed to take the lead not only in ensuring the evaluation of files and treatment of candidates is equitable and continues to value diversity throughout the process, but also in targeting recruitment at the front end of the process.  (I think there's still a timeline issue there in some of our colleges, in terms of synching up the approval of an ad with the naming and training of a committee.)

As for Bystander, our team is still analyzing the quantitative data from our post-intervention surveys, so we hope to be writing up those results soon.  We spent a lot of this year retooling our presentations for Zoom because of Covid, as well as creating new STRIDES for T&P committees, which in practice meant that we did not get everything we wanted to do on the research side.  I suspect -- I know -- we are far from alone in this!

A very important conversation, definitely. Thank you for taking the time to watch our video! 

Thank you for your interest! If you send us an email at awed@fiu.edu, we'll be better able to provide you more information. 

Will do!  Thanks.