Building Gender Equity in the Academy

Building Gender Equity in the Academy: Institutional Strategies for Change  comes from over a decade of research studying the experiences of ADVANCE projects in the the US that have sought to heighten gender equity on STEM faculties in higher education. Authors Sandra Laursen and Ann E. Austin have distilled this research into a handbook and how-to guide for leaders in academic institutions—busy people who want to make evidence-based decisions on what to do to increase gender equity, and who need to know how to do it.  And it is also for emerging leaders, young and old, who can nudge those in power and prepare to lead themselves someday. 

The heart of the book is a collection of 12 research-based strategies, organized in four groups by what part of the gender equity problem they address. The authors offer a rationale for each strategy, a variety of models, and advice from experience and data about how an institution might choose, implement and evaluate them. The opening section offers a succinct literature review—what is the problem, how is it gendered and grounded in STEM—and describes our research. And the book closes with a synthesis about how the strategies are context-sensitive and how to analyze your own organizational context to make choices about which of the strategies best fit for your particular institution.  

We wrote this book to help people make change.  While the research is based on institutions of higher education, we think the strategies are more broadly applicable to other workplaces that share some characteristics with academe, such as national labs, high tech, or R&D organizations.  And, while the ADVANCE projects we studied were focused on gender, many of the strategies also readily adapt to address other dimensions of equity, such as race, ethnicity, class, disability, Indigenous status, and more.  

Building Gender Equity in the Academy: Institutional Strategies for Change by Sandra Laursen and Ann E. Austin is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

• For video vignettes and other resources to complement the book, please visit the StratEGIC Toolkit. 
• For book information and the publisher's discount code, please download this flyer
• Press
  
  1. Interview with Laursen & Austin, 1/29/21. Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Education.
  2. MSU College of Education News, 2/1/21
  3. CU Connections, 2/11/21
  4. Johns Hopkins University Press blog, 2/25/21
  5. HigherEdJobs "Authors in Residence" blog series
     1. 4/15/21, Addressing STEM gender equity through institutional systemic change
     2. 6/22/21, Redesigning organizational practices and policies for equitable workplaces
     3. 8/10/21, Six more research-based strategies to advance equity
     4. 1/19/22, Creating and sustaining change with a systemic institutional approach
• Reviews
  1. Book review on Mirjam Glessmer's Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching blog, 6/24/21.
  2. Book review by Kyra Cook for ADVANCE Catalyst project at Missouri State, 10/25/21.
  3. STEMming the tide of inequity, book review by Umme Al-Wazedi for AAUP Academe, March 2022.
• Selected talks and workshops
  1. We led a 4-part learning series for the SEA Change community hosted by AAAS (Feb.-May 2021). The live events are past but new members can join the community and gain access to the recorded sessions and support materials.
  2. We spoke at the National Science Foundation to kick off a month-long series of talks for the 20th anniversary of ADVANCE, 3/3/21. 
  3. Austin spoke at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 5/5/22. Video-recorded talk
• For other talks and workshops by the authors, please see our calendar of events.

The authors thank our editors, Greg Britton and Kyle Gipson; our eagle-eyed copy editor, Merryl Sloane; our thoughtful indexer, Margaret Puskar-Pasewicz; our reviewers and endorsers; and the excellent team at JHUP who helped to bring this work to you. We are grateful to colleagues throughout the ADVANCE community for their work, their insights, and their generosity of information, ideas, and critical commentary.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards HRD-0930097 and HRD-1830185. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in these reports are those of the researchers, and do not necessarily represent the official views, opinions, or policy of the National Science Foundation.