These workshops are used to debunk myths such as “department chairs have to nominate faculty members for them to be successfully promoted” and “if you haven’t been promoted after 5 years as an associate professor, it won’t ever happen,” to discuss strategies for developing competitive promotion portfolios, and to encourage women to progress to full professor. Attendees gain enhanced skills to assess their own readiness for promotion and receive information that makes them more likely to seek promotion.

Anne Klibanski Visiting Scholars Award 

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a survey was conducted among women faculty members to identify interventions to support them specifically. COVID-19-related travel bans resulted in canceled meetings, fewer networking opportunities, and subsequent difficulty in finding collaborators and mentors, and the lack of presentations was delaying promotions. However, the utilization of virtual platforms has opened doors for women, many of whom have constrained time to travel because of family obligations and can now “travel” virtually without worrying about child care. This award targets women who would benefit from speaking, mentoring, and networking opportunities at the national or international level. Faculty members apply to be a virtual visiting professor to give grand rounds at an extramural institute. They also are paired with a champion, who helps arrange the visiting lectureship and finds a mentor at the extramural institute. Coaching and a virtual career development seminar series are also provided.

Bringing in keynote speakers from outside the school, each annual conference has a theme.

Each professor is expected to develop a professional development plan and is given a small amount of compensation for doing so. These plans include exploration of their values and interests, assessment of their skills and deficiencies, and long- and short-term goals and timelines, with analysis of their goals in the context of their department and institution and establishing a mentoring network. Mentoring teams comprise two faculty members and the department chair; each mentoring team member takes training to understand the promotion process, being a mentor, and handling implicit bias.

These workshops were based on the Breaking the Bias Habit workshops but tailored for academic medicine. The 3-hour workshops cover implicit bias as a habit, becoming bias-literate, and strategies to break the bias habit.

This combines the encouragement of “motivated self-regulation of bias” with evidence-based recommendations for department-level policies and practices to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Breaking the Bias Habit: Workshops to Promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

An intervention focused on mitigating the impact of implicit gender bias, these workshops encourage “motivated self-regulation of bias” by promoting personal awareness of how bias functions, developing bias literacy, motivating participants to break the bias habit, and imparting self-efficacy to engage in gender equity actions.

This is an experiential and interactive training program, including interactive theater and embodied learning, to build behavioral skills and help move faculty members from insight to action. Specifically, the program builds faculty members’ skills in addressing gender and racial bias and discrimination. During the training, faculty members practice using a toolkit of intervention responses to build appreciation for diversity, greater knowledge of and use of prosocial skills, and diversity-affirming behaviors.

This is a competitive program for mid- and senior-level women faculty members in or aspiring to leadership. One full-day session is held per month over 9 months, bringing women together from multiple institutions. Topics include team building, institutional finances, decision-making for leaders, and creating and sustaining diversity. Presenters are external experts or senior faculty members from the School of Business or health care administrators. The intention of the program is to build leadership skills and confidence.

Initiatives included provision of annual negotiation workshops led by outside experts to improve women’s skills and comfort in negotiations. Four women were sponsored for Association of American Medical Colleges career development programs every year, and one person was sponsored for the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) program every year. A sponsorship program offers exposure to opportunities not always offered to women.

For mid- and late-career women (and later expanded to early-career faculty members) and their unique challenges, small cohorts meet over four sessions. Structured exercises focus on identifying values, goals, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and constraints to develop a 5-year vision.

This program provides small grants ($1,000 to $3,000) to diversify the pool of guest speakers by inviting and hosting women speakers, with priority for women of color.

Based on surveys with women faculty members with young children and the unique challenges faced by women with children, this program was started in 1997. The awards provide financial support for the research efforts of women junior faculty members during their child-rearing years. Each award provides $50,000 a year for 2 years and is intended to pay for a research assistant, graduate student, postdoc, or laboratory technician to help with night or weekend duties or other duties. Eligibility is limited to instructors or assistant professors who were appointed 10 years ago or less and who are responsible for the care of children.

This is a program for scholars seeking external funding. It provides guided project development, educational seminars, and intensive senior and peer mentorship for obtaining major external funding. Each scholar develops an individual career plan and receives multidisciplinary mentorship. There is also a scholarship program for people in underrepresented groups.

The workshops consisted of 45-minute presentations in each college, highlighting the benefits of diversity. The workshops also provided an overview of the historical and current status of faculty and student diversity in the respective colleges. The goal of these presentations was to create senior faculty accountability for faculty diversity and set goals for recruitment and retention of women, especially women of color.

Colorado Mentoring Training Program

This training program provides instruction in mentoring to faculty members who have mentored others for years without formal training. Evidence-based strategies provide mentor–mentee pairs skills to optimize their mentoring relationships.

This program provides internal grant funding to individual faculty and department projects. Grants support individual faculty scholarships, creation of faculty networks, and promoting faculty success. The size of the grants ranges from $1,000 to $13,500; 55% of proposals were funded from 2014 to 2019.

Early Career Development Program for Women 

This is a competitive program for women in the first 5 years of a faculty appointment and is modeled after the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Early Career Professional Development Seminar. The program creates a space for women to exchange ideas and perspectives and network. The program includes external and internal speakers for 1 day per month over 6 months but does not require time outside of the institution. Topics include conflict management and negotiation, the importance of mentors, goal setting and career management, and maximizing individual strengths.

For early-career faculty members (instructors and assistant professors), the program aims to network, guide, and mentor women through their promotion to associate professor. Mentor–mentee pairs are tracked annually with a survey. It includes a Mentor of the Year award.

This program provides seed funding, mentoring, and training to develop careers in research on women's health and sex and gender differences. Awards are decided based on peer review of applications.

Faculty development programs 

The Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine seeks to build leadership skills and develop social networks through experiential programming and both peer and senior mentoring. Different programs were developed for different faculty needs; programs included:

• A yearlong program to develop leadership skills for mid-career faculty members , emphasizing the development of skills, collaboration, and enhanced self-reflection and awareness. Project teams of four to five faculty members worked on projects to address major institutional challenges, including NIH K to R conversion, microaggressions, and increasing the number of diversity supplements. These projects themselves led to internal changes at the medical school (e.g., hiring a full-time person to facilitate diversity supplement applications).
• A development program for faculty members in groups that are underrepresented in medicine , including self-reflection and assessment, mentoring, development of a learning community, experiential seminars, academic writing coaching, and meetings with institutional leaders.
• The Women’s Leadership Program , which helps women build the tools necessary to navigate a successful career in academic medicine. The program consists of 14 2-hour sessions coupled with meeting mentors up to 10 times per year. The program includes self-assessment and reflection, experiential learning, and peer and senior mentorship.

The program is offered to all faculty ranks (tenure-line, research, clinical, and instructor). The program includes one-on-one mentoring, mentor training, networking events, and structured skills training to increase faculty productivity.

Faculty Pathways Program 

A 2-year career leadership program designed to enhance development of STEMM faculty members in the first phase of their careers, the program provides resources to guide faculty members’ career planning, personal development, and scholarly success. Leadership is developed through peer mentoring and individual reflection. Content experts lead the faculty career development portion of this program and focus on developing strategies for leadership, promotion, time management, communication, and career planning. The majority of enrollees have been women.

The Department of Medicine's Women's Committee  annually identified at least one female candidate for every internal award. The committee then facilitated each candidate's nomination for the award and shepherded the nomination through the submission process. The overall effort from the committee was less than 3 hours per submission.

National experts and evidence-based practices formed the basis of trainings for department heads, administrators, and faculty members. Content focused on problem-solving, understanding bias, employment patterns, changing cultures, retention, the future of leadership, monitoring progress, and planning. A series of expert guest speakers discussed specific topics and led workshops. An interactive live theater group led bias awareness and bystander training in a 1-day workshop.

These grants provide small financial support to women associate professors to implement plans for professional growth on an individual level. Women propose activities and receive “mini-grants.” These grants could support child care to enable travel to conferences, writing or editing support, enrollment in a faculty success program, or being able to visit the lab of a new collaborator.

Based on multiple rounds of debate and revision, promotion policies were revised especially for promotion from associate to full professor. The revision was based on Boyer’s multiple forms of scholarship and moved assessments beyond manuscript publication and external funding to include, for example, engagement and teaching. The new promotion policy included bias training for reviewers, which has four modules (defining and identifying bias, bias in promotion, mitigating the effects of bias, and an interactive session to practice strategies to mitigate bias).

Based on data collected in a climate survey and during town halls, the hiring processes were standardized across the university. The revised hiring process includes diversifying search committees to include a faculty member from outside the department, reviewing and revising job descriptions to ensure that language reflects diversity, and reviewing and approving job announcements and interview questions. Training is required for all search committees, covering implicit bias, developing evaluation criteria, developing a recruitment plan, best practices for screening applicants, and how to conduct interviews and campus visits. Overall guidelines for faculty member searches were developed. The university also joined the Greater Texas Higher Education Recruitment Consortium.

NIH Transforming Academic Culture (NIH-TAC) Trial 

Encompassing the entire medical school, the cluster-randomized trial assessed a multifaceted intervention for women assistant professors. The three levels of the intervention focused on professional development, department/division task forces, and department/division chairs and chiefs and other leaders. Professional development included manuscript writing workshops, skills building to increase productivity, and courses on work–life balance. The task forces created department/division-specific initiatives to improve the environment for women. Leaders were engaged for top-down support and accountability.

To improve governance and transparency, the initiative:

1. Restructured academic tracks with clear standards for advancement, especially for non-tenure-track positions;
2. Reorganized two key committees for appointments and promotion by increasing the number of people and increasing diversity in membership;
3. Conducted salary equity analyses and required annual reviews for assistant professors and biannual reviews of associate professors; and
4. Increased attention to women in leadership by tracking the number of women in leadership positions and increasing opportunities for women to be appointed to leadership positions, including endowed professorships. National searchers are required for leadership positions, and search committees are required to be balanced by gender and race/ethnicity, as are the candidates considered.

Personalized Healthcare Technology (PHT180)

PHT180 is a multifaceted program to signal RIT’s commitment to health care research and gender diversity using internal funding. Teams from four different colleges submitted proposals for an interdisciplinary research area competition. Teams were built with new faculty affiliates and by hiring student trainees, with a conscious effort to include gender and discipline diversity. A team of experienced mentors engages with the early-career faculty members, covering topics such as grant strategy development, best practices in managing effective research, guidance on grant mechanisms, refinement of concepts, and review of proposals. The program includes a support staff to aid faculty members in securing external funding (including tracking of NIH diversity supplements), disseminate outcomes, and provide post-award support (including website development, networking events, and managing creative services).

Specifically to support faculty retention, these workshops help to enhance and improve campus culture, with topics such as unconscious bias education and bystander awareness. In addition to holding workshops, AdvanceRIT has engaged the University of Michigan’s CRLT Players, a theater troupe. The AdvanceRIT project encourages, motivates, and informs conversations on important topics on campus through the creation of tip sheets and white papers, and the project leadership team has contributed directly to the significant improvements of tenure, promotion, and faculty evaluation policies.

Using baseline data on faculty members’ gender, race, and time in current rank, the Alliance for Women in Medicine and Science met with individual department chairs. These meetings reviewed faculty members who had been in the same academic rank for more than 5 years (and particularly more than 7 years) to encourage the development of plans for promotion.

The Office of Women Faculty Programs (now Faculty Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) sought to raise recognition for women researchers by increasing the honors and awards they receive. For internal awards, the Office of Women Faculty Programs develops a list of eligible women faculty members, updates it annually, and nominates at least one woman for each award every year. For external awards, the Office of Women Faculty Programs identifies eligible women faculty members and then supports them in applying for broad-based professional society awards and awards for women in science.

The recruiting process for open faculty positions was comprehensively reformed in the following ways:

1. Use of target of opportunity hires: Identify individual scholars and then recruit and hire them; they can be outside of the traditional search process to fill a gap in a program, department, or school. Over the past 10 years, more than one-third of hires have been target of opportunity hires; 70% of these are faculty members who identify as being part of a historically underrepresented race or ethnicity.
2. Recruiting from within: Assess scholars hired on non-tenure-track positions and transition  these scholars to tenure-track positions; members of underserved racial and ethnic groups historically tend to be overrepresented in non-tenure-track positions.
3. Spouse hiring: Deliberately include spousal/partner hiring in negotiations with prospective faculty members. Actively search for opportunities at the university for a spouse/partner.
4. Leadership: An Associate Dean for Diversity was appointed and given concrete tasks and reporting structures. These included the Diversity Committee, which regularly met with search committees to ensure they had implemented an equitable search plan and process and created a strategic plan for diversity that included measurable outcomes and accountability structures.
5. Training search committees and ensuring diversity on search committees: Workshops on equitable search practices are required for all committee members and ensure that every search committee is both gender-inclusive and racially/ethnically inclusive.

These seminars and workshops are offered to all women faculty members, with specific sessions targeting the needs of different career paths (clinical, research, education, and basic science), different populations (e.g., underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and LGBTQIA+ groups), and different career stages (early, mid, late), covering a variety of topics, including time management, negotiations, leading teams, imposter syndrome, self-promotion, work–life strategies, managing up, difficult conversations, and proactive career planning.

Charles River Campus STEM departments held interactive workshops for faculty members to provide guidance on core methodological skills, manuscript and grant writing, and finding mentorship. Programs included a 10-month program to move from being K or K-equivalent researchers to submitting R01 proposal.

This is an online course to build management skills for those who want to be research leaders. Course content includes an action learning plan and lessons on leadership; finance and administration; management; starting, growing, and maintaining teams; and mentorship. Content includes 150 video didactic lessons, personal stories, and Q&A interviews with early-career researchers, senior scientists, and administrative leaders from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

The J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering developed three key questions to provide a reliable qualitative rubric to identify candidates who align, may align, or do not align with the department’s mission. Before phone interviews, the department provided candidates with the proposed questions to level the playing field for all candidates. Prior to in-person visits, the department provided candidates with a document that detailed what the candidates needed to prepare and what they could expect during their visit, with an offer of a phone call to discuss details. Interview questions were structured to show the candidates that the department was interested in them as whole people. During visits, the department paired candidates with faculty members who not only matched their research interests but also could answer questions about the community, benefits, and other needs the candidates have; meetings were scheduled in informal settings to facilitate these types of questions. The department also restructured chalk talks to be “vision talks” covering all of the qualifications (diversity, teaching, etc.) of candidates, not just research, and used the vision talks as an introduction to subsequent smaller meetings.

Based on a salary equity study showing a gap between men’s and women’s salaries, a committee was formed to provide individuals a means of having salaries reviewed outside of the routine 3-year review process. The committee also served as a resource for department heads making decisions about adjusting faculty salaries.

This is an interactive workshop to help faculty search committee members understand and minimize unconscious bias and assumptions when evaluating job applicants. The workshop also includes practical advice on running effective committees, recruiting diverse applications, having an equitable interview process, and successfully hiring selected candidates.

The university required these workshops for all faculty searches and for all tenure and promotion committee members. The workshops were based on the University of Michigan’s ADVANCE program and provide faculty members with best practices for addressing gender and racial bias in hiring and promotion. In later years, the Diversity Advocate Workshop was added for one member of each faculty hiring committee to act as the point person on the search to ensure that good practices related to diversity are used for hiring faculty members.

The process of recruiting new faculty members was reevaluated to cast a wide net and garner an inclusive pool of applicants. Each step of the recruitment process was assessed (getting a completed application, giving serious consideration, interviewing, offering a position, and hiring) to ensure that women candidates were included.

This is a series of professional development workshops focusing on recruitment, retention, and advancement of faculty members. Themes are selected based on the faculty climate survey and a literature review and provide targeted support (e.g., grant writing), create opportunities (e.g., networking opportunities), assist efforts to promote culture change (e.g., unconscious bias education), and show that difference is valued (e.g., workshops targeting women of color or deaf and hard-of-hearing faculty members).

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists

This program supports physician-scientist assistant professors who are funded but face caregiving issues that might derail their careers by providing financial and mentoring support to those whom the institution might otherwise lose

The University of Houston provided funding for a community of support and advocacy exclusively for tenured and tenure-track women of color. The intention of the coalition is to help socialize new faculty members and increase the visibility and scholarly portfolios of faculty members who are women of color. Activities include community-building meetings, writing groups, professional development opportunities and institutional stimulus, and scholarly publication grant programs. The group is self-governing.

Vilas Life Cycle Professorships

This program provides grants to faculty members experiencing critical life events (a serious illness, needing to care for a family member, etc.). The faculty members use the grant funds to hire research staff members or obtain other resources to sustain their research.

Specifically for graduate students, postdocs, and early-career faculty members, this interdisciplinary course covers research on gender and leadership and bias literacy, using reflective journaling and student-generated case studies.

The Office of Women Faculty Programs (now Faculty Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) led a process to revise search policies and processes. Resulting actions included ensuring that women are at least 30% of search committees, the Office of Women Faculty Programs has a vote on all leadership search committees and reviewed committee membership prior to committee approval, and each short list of candidates contains a man and a woman and/or person from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. All search committee members now need to take unconscious bias and behavioral interview training to shift interviews away from questions about CVs and toward questions about leadership using appreciative inquiry. Deliberate efforts are taken to identify women candidates for positions, including from the internal faculty. For the final hiring or promotion decision, three unranked candidates are sent to the chief academic officer and president for selection.

This is a grassroots faculty network offering encouragement to faculty members in underrepresented groups to be leaders, promoting collaborations, providing professional development opportunities, and giving women a voice. These initiatives provide services, organize events and activities, and advocate for policy changes (e.g., drafting a parental leave policy).

Women Leadership Training Program

This is a yearlong workshop-based program for early-career women, taught by seven faculty members. Experiential learning, workshops, and didactic sessions focus on building skills in leadership, mentorship, and enhancing networks. Topics include negotiations, conflict resolution, resilience, CV review, meeting optimization, ways of leading, personality types, and emotional intelligence. Open to 50 women per year, the program also sponsors and funds faculty members so they can attend national women’s leadership development seminars (the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine [ELAM]).

Work–life integration 

The work–life integration subcommittee had three main activities:

• Using existing data from other institutions to make recommendations on a new parental leave policy;
• Reviewing and providing recommendations to update the current lactation room policy; and
• Holding a caregiving fair, where local agencies disseminated information and caregiving resources.