FAMU ADVANCE IT: Using Cultural Humility to Balance the Institutional and Intersectional Barriers to Equity for STEM Faculty

Florida Agricultural And Mechanical University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

The ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in areas such as policy, practice, culture, and organizational climate. The ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (ADVANCE-IT) track supports the development of innovative organizational change strategies within an institution of higher education to enhance gender equity in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) academic workforce. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) is one of the nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and is committed to transforming its institutional climate and culture in support of gender equity and advancement of women faculty in STEM. The FAMU ADVANCE-IT project will promote gender equity by working to increase awareness of the role of cultural humility in decision-making and by implementing various ADVANCE initiatives including policy review and changes and support programs focused on the persistence and retention of women faculty in STEM such as professional development, career coaching, and mentoring. This project is important to understand how to increase the diversity of STEM faculty at HBCUs, the faculty at HBCUS does not always reflect the student population diversity at HBCUs. This project will expand the limited research on barriers to and strategies for advancement of women STEM faculty at HBCUs by infusing the concept of cultural humility in the ADVANCE interventions and in the proposed research. In the context of this proposal, cultural humility is the awareness that no gender/discipline/race/religion is the norm and that everyone belongs in FAMU's academic setting. The examination of Black women and other women of color in STEM at a large HBCU will extend the research of intersectionality by examining this phenomenon in a context where Black women students are the majority, but where Black women STEM faculty are the minority. Additionally, studying within-group differences of women of color will offer a deeper intersectional understanding of the complexities of gender issues at HBCUs, while also advancing more nuanced framing of challenges and factors for success. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.