When Linsey C. Marr was pregnant, she worried that temporarily scaling back her workload once her baby arrived could be perceived badly.
“I didn’t want it to seem as if I was asking for a special favor from the department,” says Ms. Marr, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, who gave birth to a boy, Jasper, in 2007.
But a new “modified duties” policy let Ms. Marr take a break from the classroom for the spring 2008 semester and still receive full pay. She became a teaching mentor to an engineering Ph.D. student, observing him in the classroom and giving written feedback. Ms. Marr’s own class was taught by an instructor who was paid with money her department received from the institution.
“They put their money where their mouth was,” Ms. Marr says.
The policy, but not the money, came out of a federal grant program designed to help institutions attract, retain, and promote more female scientists and engineers—a perennial problem. Since grant money doesn’t last forever, Virginia Tech and other colleges have had to find cash—often their own—to sustain the momentum.
By finding on-campus resources, garnering support among top administrators, and scaling back in response to budget cuts, today these colleges can point to new or revised policies, programs, and practices that continue to aid in recruitment and retention. When they can’t find the money, as happened with a University of Washington program to help scientists and engineers with major life transitions, the effort ends.
“It’s easy to just lapse back into the old system and doing things the old way,” says Lynn T. Singer, deputy provost and vice president for academic programs at Case Western Reserve University, who was a principal investigator of one of these grants. “You have to keep the message going all the time.”
Making an Advance
The grant program is called Advance and comes from the National Science Foundation. The “institutional transformation” awards typically are for a period of five years. From the outset, colleges are urged to think about what the science foundation calls “institutionalization,” or how to make sure efforts undertaken during the grant period don’t disappear.
At Virginia Tech, “work-life policies turned out to be our niche,” says Patricia B. Hyer, associate provost and a co-principal investigator for the college’s grant.
Because Virginia Tech is in a rural location, Ms. Hyer was eager to let dual-career couples know the institution would make an effort to find a job for a spouse or partner, either on the campus or off. The college now has a dual-career assistance office and has coached department heads on how to broach the subject with candidates. In addition, the provost’s office has set aside money to help departments make those additional hires, Ms. Hyer says.
“If I were to call a department head 10 years ago about possible openings for a candidate’s spouse, they really didn’t know how to respond or even if they should respond,” Ms. Hyer says. “But really, I feel the conversations have changed. Nobody says they’re not going to at least pay attention to this issue.”
Another significant work-life improvement at Virginia Tech is day care. Research that the Advance program conducted in 2004 uncovered many complaints about the lack of child-care options. Professors can now take their children to a new day-care center that opened in August near the campus. All of the institution’s deans agreed to contribute money annually from unrestricted funds at their disposal to a local day-care provider to guarantee that the majority of nearly 250 slots will be reserved for children of faculty members and others with ties to Virginia Tech.
“I have had faculty members come to me and say that they couldn’t come back to work because there wasn’t a place for their infant,” Ms Hyer says. When the center opened, “we immediately filled that new building.”
Like other Advance grant recipients, Virginia Tech also revised its tenure policy in 2006 to include an automatic one-year extension for new parents, and it adopted a part-time tenure track.
One goal of the Advance programgrants has been for each institution to develop a signature project whose popularity and effectiveness makes it a top candidate to continue on the institution’s own dime or with some other grant.
The Georgia Institute of Technology, for instance, developed a Web-based interactive tool used by its promotion-and-tenure committees, says Sue V. Rosser, a former co-principal investigator for the institution’s Advance grant and now provost at San Francisco State University. The tool features case studies designed to highlight for committee members ways in which subtle gender and racial biases can color conversations about tenure and promotion and distort judgment of a candidate’s merit.
And at Case Western, professors continue to give high marks to executive coaching sessions, developed as an Advance project, which are available to new chairs and deans and new female professors in science and engineering who need help settling into their roles.
Heather Morrison, a professor of astronomy at Case Western who recently ended a nearly four-year stint as chair of her department, says she would have “flailed around a lot more” in that position without her coach’s help. Her tenure as chair included some “sticky times,” and her coach made some “really good suggestions about how to write performance evaluations and other personnel matters,” she says. “She made me more effective, and that’s good for everyone.”
Running Short of Cash
When Advance programs don’t become a permanent part of the fabric of an institution, the reason is often money. At the University of Washington, for instance, professors were able to apply for money from an Advance “transitional support program” to help them deal with major life changes such as becoming a parent, caring for an elderly relative, or handling the death of a family member. But that Advance program was discontinued when the institution’s grant period ended in 2007.
It did make a difference when it was running: In a report to the NSF, the institution told the story of an assistant professor whose research was crippled by the amount of time she had to spend seeking treatment for her disabled son. A transitional support grant of $20,000 allowed her to buy supplies to begin a new research project that later received almost $800,000 in NSF funds. She has since been granted tenure.
“I really wish we could have kept that going,” says Eve A. Riskin, an engineer and associate dean for academic affairs, who directs the university’s continuing Advance efforts. “But it cost lots of money, and we just don’t have that.”
There are ways, however, to sidestep financial obstacles. Sometimes scaling back a project does the trick. Ms. Rosser says an annual overnight retreat that let female faculty members at Georgia Tech network with the provost, deans, and department chairs at the college has morphed into workshops that feature much of the same information.
Other universities have found ways to align their Advance programs with other campus efforts. Case Western turned to its women’s center to find a home for the networking and professional-development seminars that their Advance grant once covered, says Diana Bilimoria, an associate professor of organizational behavior and co-principal investigator of the institution’s Advance grant. Also important when it comes to keeping up the momentum are top-level administrators who truly embrace the Advance agenda. Their support can make the difference between efforts that continue to make an impact and those that peter out.
That kind of support was evident at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, whose five-year Advance grant has ended. Administrators, however, agreed to pony up $800,000 a year—an amount equal to what the NSF had provided. A simple conversation with Michigan’s provost was essentially all it took, says Abigail Stewart, director of the institution’s Advance program and a professor of psychology and women’s studies.
“I always had a relationship with the provost’s office, and I went to the provost and said, ‘This grant is ending, what do you want to do?’” Ms. Stewart says. The provost had seen the gains made during the Advance grant and did not want to lose them.
Friends at the Top
Indeed, relationships do make a difference. Ms. Singer, of Case Western, says her position as vice provost and Advance investigator was particularly helpful as the university cycled through several provosts and other top administrators, including its president, during the life of the institution’s grant.
“Every time we turned around, we were starting over with different people,” Ms. Singer says. But as an administrator herself, she always had access to the newcomers to sell the Advance program. And she also had the inside track on possible pools of money.
Still, the hunt for financing never stops, particularly as successful programs move to broaden their scope. At Michigan, administrators have asked the Advance program to expand its mission and reach out to support and help increase the ranks of professors from underrepresented minority groups or who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Ms. Stewart says she was “thrilled” by the request. But now she’s beginning to feel that although the money the institution has committed to Advance was “appropriate nine years ago, that’s not going to get us where we need to be.”
Says Ms. Riskin: “You definitely have to be thinking about institutionalization early on. Five years goes by a lot more quickly than you think.”