Women's leadership

 

7 challenges women STILL face in higher ed  - and how to fix them

By Laura Ascione, Managing Editor, Content Services, @eSN_Laura

 

Low numbers of women in higher education present challenges the industry must solve.

 

 

 

While more than half of all college students are women, less than one-third of all full-time professors are women–and the troubling gaps in academia are proving difficult to close.

But the low representation of women in higher education isn’t indicative of their qualifications to be higher-ed leaders, according to Higher Ed Spotlight: Pipelines, Pathways, and Institutional Leadership: An Update on the Status of Women in Higher Education.

The pipeline myth, or the idea that there are too few women qualified to hold leadership positions, is exactly that–a myth. While there may be qualified women, are they holding higher-ed leadership positions at a stead rate?

The report offers an update on women in higher education and sheds some light on the positions and degrees they hold, salary gaps, and more.

1. New data indicate there are more than enough qualified women in higher education who can fill available leadership positions, and women are being prepared at a greater rate than men. Women have earned more than 50 percent of all doctoral degrees since 2006, more than 50 percent of all bachelor’s degrees since 1982, more than 50 percent of all master’s degrees since 1987, and more than 50 percent of all associate degrees since 1978.

2. But despite these encouraging statistics and despite women’s availability for higher-ed leadership positions, they do not hold associate professor or full professor positions at the same rate as men.

3. The higher the academic rank, the fewer women present. Women of color often outnumber men of color in lower-ranking faculty positions, but men of color hold full professor positions more often than women of color.

4. Perhaps one of the biggest indicators is the pay gap between men and women who hold the same faculty rank. During the 2015-2016 academic year, male faculty members made an average of $89,190, and female faculty members made an average of $73,782. Men are more likely than women to earn a higher salary and to hold a tenure track position.

5. The number of women presidents has increased since 1986, but as of 2016, women only hold 30 percent of presidencies across all higher-ed institutions. However, women presidents are more likely to have a PhD or EdD than their male peers.

6. Women presidents are more likely to have served as a chief academic officer, provost or other senior executive in academic affairs. Male presidents are more likely to come from outside higher ed or have had a different senior campus executive role than women presidents.

7. The percentage of women serving in a chief academic officer position has declined from 2008 to 2013 in public doctoral degree-granting institutions.

Benchmarking Women’s Leadership in the United States, a report published by the University of Denver’s Colorado Women’s College, suggests areas of future action to help close the leadership gap:

1. The governing board and the senior staff should annually review the institution’s commitment to diversity to evaluate how well it is working.

2. Identify, support, and advance women and women of color to become chief academic officers, provosts, and senior executives. These positions are stepping-stones to the presidency.

3. Look beyond sitting presidents in order to increase the pool of potential presidential selections. Because women are more likely to have followed a nontraditional career path, the best candidates may come from farther afield.

4. Review hiring and promotion policies to ensure they are fair and equitable and do not disproportionately encumber women. For example, if the majority of non-tenure track positions do not have equal standing in promotion, and women predominantly occupy these positions, then the university must critically evaluate its hiring process.

5. Evaluate the lack of tenure track hires and consider how promotion may be re-evaluated.

6. Insist that pools of candidates for faculty and senior leadership positions be diverse. Women cannot get hired if they are not in the pool of candidates.

7. Diversify search committees for presidential, senior leadership, and faculty positions. Often diversification on the committee helps ensure a search will be expanded to the broadest range of qualified candidates.

8. Make certain search committees have data on the status and benefits of women and women of color candidates.

9. If universities hire search firms, they should ensure the firms have a reputation for providing diverse pools of candidates.

10. Public institutions should pay particular attention to the declining number of women leaders. Among all the sectors, academia is the only one that has this trend. Typically, public organizations, entities, and offices have a better representation of women overall.

Faculty inertia

 

‘Fear of Looking Stupid’

Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods.

David Matthews

An anthropologist who had the unenviable task of sitting through academics’ meetings and reading their email chains to find out why they fail to change their teaching styles has come to a surprising conclusion: they are simply too afraid of looking stupid in front of their students to try something new.

Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.

For example, one of the university’s online courses in statistics, which has been shown to be “incredibly effective at teaching students in half the time,” was not adapted by the statistics department for use on campus, said Richard Scheines, dean of the department of humanities and social sciences. “This is a source of real frustration,” he told the Global Learning Council Summit 2017 in Berlin last month.

Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews.

She followed the progress of four projects to improve teaching -- such as the introduction of a test to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses before starting their courses -- two of which failed.

One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that ”a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.”

But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their “personal identity affirmation” -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ “No. 1 challenge” was to make sure that they were “not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.”

Herckis also found that many academics clung to a “very strong” idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975.

“When our gut tells us to do one thing and an article tells us another,” Herckis told delegates, it is very difficult to change behavior. Another issue was that faculty were much more likely to be more enthusiastic about making a change that they had come up with by themselves, rather than adopting something tried and tested by others.

With universities in many countries under pressure to improve their teaching quality, the project could be of interest to other institutions seeking to overturn ineffective teaching methods. Scheines argued that higher education needs to invest far more in similar anthropological projects to work out how change actually happens. “We need ears and eyes telling us what’s happening on the adoption,” he said.

About 20 years ago, clinical medicine created an entire field of “implementation science” to check whether doctors were adopting best practices, and higher education now needs to do the same, he argued.

In line with the project results, Carnegie Mellon lecturers would be showered with “love” and told not to “worry if students hate you for a semester” if they experimented with new ways of teaching, he said.

Faculty development

Creating Sustainable Engagement for Faculty Development Initiatives

By Rachel C. Plews, EdD As a faculty member working in educational development, there is a question at the forefront of my work—how do we drive and maintain engagement in faculty development initiatives? In the book The Four Cultures of the Academy (Bergquist, 1992), those in academia who identify with developmental culture can be seen as idealistic and unproductive; they are busy imagining what things should be like as opposed to the more pragmatic colleagues in the collegial and managerial cultures who focus on plans and strategies that are often easier to implement and produce quantifiable impacts. With these competing forces and priorities, it can be easy for initiatives related to faculty development to get left behind or relegated to the compliance box of the checklist of things we simply must have. So how do we move away from this and promote a culture of sustainable engagement for faculty development? Here are five simple points to consider: 1.     Leverage marketing. Get back to the basics of the four Ps of marketing, also known as the “marketing mix” (Kotler, 2011): product, price, place, and promotion. In the context of faculty development, the product, or what we are “offering,” is the service of professional development. Although sometimes there is a financial cost, the most significant price for faculty is time. For place, the development is traditionally done in a face-to-face environment whether on or off campus. With the advancement of digital tools and new technologies, we can offer online solutions in both synchronous and asynchronous formats, including courses, webinars, and virtual environments. Finally, we increase awareness of what is available through promotion. Consider the ways in which you promote your workshops or programs. E-mails are easy to ignore and easy to delete. Consider something new, but make sure the core message is still present. Recently, I promoted a pedagogical working group series using Adobe Spark. Click on this link to see a sample: https://spark.adobe.com/page/DZOWsTlksIOBU/ 2.   Embrace the power of social media. In addition to a departmental website or LMS page, develop an active presence on social media platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Twitter, and many others. These platforms are a great way to increase the visibility of your work inside and outside of your institution. It is also a great way to stay connected with faculty, expand your network, and share resources. 3.   Experiment with new teaching practices. Stay up-to-date with digital tools that enhance teaching methods and activities, but have discriminating taste. Just because something is new doesn’t make it applicable to all contexts. I always refer to the 3E Framework for Technology Enhanced Learning (Smyth, 2012) to help faculty evaluate what might work in their classrooms or for a particular activity. The 3E Framework encourages faculty to look at technology use in the classroom at three levels—enhance, empower, and extend. Most faculty can say they use technology to enhance teaching. An example we can all relate to is using PowerPoint for lecture slides as opposed to delivering a traditional lecture without visuals. Reaching the second and third levels—empower and extend— involves leveraging technology to promote active learning. This involves activities in which students create, share, and apply knowledge in their current context and other professional and personal contexts. 4.   Solicit feedback: As educational developers, we are often used to delivering feedback, but we must be open to receiving feedback as well. Actively solicit feedback and be quick to react to advice that could improve your teaching. 5.    Be accessible, approachable, and authentic. Those in the developmental culture often exhibit a power labeled “charisma,” the ability to persuade and motivate other people (Weber, 1947). Educational developers are academic partners who are there to support teaching and learning activities, not to judge or direct. Although these ideas are related to sustainable engagement, sparking initial engagement might be tied to the structure and perception of faculty development itself in your institution.   The work that we do in faculty development is aimed at continuous improvement of our faculty, our students, our institutions, and the higher education community. This is what guides sustainable engagement and the significance of our work. Rachel C. Plews is a conseillère pédagogique and lecturer at the Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne, where she coordinates faculty development initiatives and programming. References Bergquist, W. H. (1992). The four cultures of the academy. Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104-1310. Kotler, P., Keller, K. L., Manceau, D., & Hémonnet-Goujot, A. (2015). Marketing management (Vol. 14). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Smyth, K. (2012). Exploring and applying the 3E Framework for technology-enhanced learning. In ASCILITE-Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education Annual Conference (Vol. 2012, No. 1). Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press.

Student engagement

Six Things Faculty Can Do to Promote Student Engagement

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Last week’s post (What Does Student Engagement Look Like?)

encouraged us to reconsider what student engagement means and entails. Today I’d like to explore just some of the things teachers can do to better promote it. I’m offering six ideas here and encourage you to add to the list. 

Redefine participation. Let it include more than verbal comments. Invite students to contribute electronically—with an email or post on the course website—with a question they didn’t ask in class, a comment they didn’t get to make, or a thought that came to them after class. Remind students that listening is also part of participation! Model and promote good listening skills. “Did you hear what Fredric just said? That’s an explanation that belongs in your notes.” Let the definition of participation honor silence—and give students the time needed to think about a question and assemble an answer. Maybe it’s time to stop grading participation and let students speak because they have something to say.

Cultivate a teacher presence that invites engagement. It starts with being present. This means not just being there physically but also being mentally attentive to what’s happening every day and in every interaction. An engaging teaching presence is communicated by nonverbal behaviors that convey confidence, comfort, anticipation, and great expectations. The classroom space, whether it’s physical or virtual, is one you share with fellow learners. Move about in it. See who’s in class. Smile, extend a greeting, or comment on the weather or a current event. There are lots of different ways you can show that you are present. Your actions will promote student engagement so long as they’re genuine and authentic and so long as you are engaged—with the content, with the students, and with the learning.

Devote time to talk about learning—what it entails and why it’s important. This is not the same tired old lecture about how this is such a hard course and a certain percentage of students won’t make it through. Yes, there’s tough content to master, but with effort it can be conquered. It’s about your own ongoing love affair with learning. Most students haven’t yet fallen in love with learning. They think they like easy learning, memorizing bits of information they can then forget, or getting by doing the bare minimum. Let yours be the class that introduces students to learning that captivates their attention, arouses their curiosity, stretches their minds, and makes them feel accomplished.

Give students a stake in the process. Teachers make all the decisions about learning for students. They decide what students will learn, how they will learn (taking tests, writing papers, etc.), the pace at which they will learn, and the conditions under which they will learn. Teachers then decide whether students have learned it. Students can be given some control without abrogating responsibilities associated with the teacher. Let students start making small decisions about learning—what topics they want discussed in the exam review session, whether quizzes will count 10% or 20% of their grade, whether the teacher calls on them or they volunteer, whether their final project is a paper or a presentation—and watch what happens to their engagement.

Design authentic assignments and learning experiences. Doing the work of the discipline is more likely to engage students than hearing how the discipline does its work. Try presenting students with a hypothesis and asking them to predict the results or introducing them to the concept of literary criticism and having them critique a reading. Will they do the work of the discipline well? Probably not. They’re novices working with difficult content in front of an expert. But making mistakes is how we learn. Furthermore, doing the work of the discipline feels like work that matters—and that motivates engagement.

Use cumulative quizzes, finals, and exams. If you’re interested in long-term retention of course content and if you want students to transfer and/or apply knowledge, then their exposure to the material needs to be ongoing. Every time they retrieve what they’ve learned, that material becomes easier to remember. Students would rather have unit exams. Three weeks of content is easier to manage than six weeks of content. Teachers can help students prepare for cumulative exams by creating activities that require regular reviews of course material, such as challenging them to find something in their notes or opening class with a short review session—not on the content covered in yesterday’s class but instead on the content covered last week or the week before. Scheduling regular quizzes can also provide low-stakes opportunities for learning and support the intensive study students will require before a high-stakes exam.

Mentoring

What does it take to be a mentor?

Being a great M.E.N.T.O.R will help you just as much as your students, says Nirmala Hariharan

Mentoring is one of the most crucial roles played by faculty on a day to day basis. As a mentor, you provide scientific and technical guidance, and serve as the pillar of support for your team of students, postdocs and trainees. Mentoring can consume a lot of your time, and be very demanding, but has several long term benefits that will help you run a successful lab. Here’s what a great M.E.N.T.O.R provides for their students.

Nirmala Hariharan

Motivation. You’re the constant source of motivation for your team; you need to see the big picture and guide your team through the ups and downs. You’re the leader that inspires excellence and encourages scientific innovation. As a good mentor, you must recognise the true potential of your mentees – even if they don’t – and know how to bring out the best in them. In short, you should make them realise what they’re capable of.

Emotional Support and Connection. As a mentor, you need to provide emotional support to your mentees as they struggle to find their place in science. Career decisions are strongly impacted by the irregularities of life generally, so be willing to discuss and share incidents from your life that helped you tackle problems in science, and balance your personal life with your work.

Connecting with your mentees on an emotional and personal level helps them recognise that you’re available when they need support and encourages them to reach out when they need it. An emotional connection helps in building a mutually beneficial, professional relationship of respect and friendship, which will hopefully last for many years.

Networking. One of the most important roles of a mentor is to help mentees build strong professional relationships by introducing them to your own network. Conferences are fantastic avenues to network, and giving credit to your mentee and directly introducing them to your friends and colleagues has tremendous advantages for both of you.

Teaching. A good mentor has to be a good teacher. Your day to day tasks will include teaching experimental procedure, scientific concepts and writing, and helping with data analysis and general troubleshooting. Mentoring requires tremendous patience and – importantly – also requires allowing your mentees to make mistakes and learn from them themselves.

Opportunities for Career Growth. Providing opportunities for your mentee’s career growth is extremely important, so make sure to discuss goals often, and encourage mentees to think about their progress.

There are many ways you can provide opportunities for career development to your students – review their CV and professional materials, encourage them to apply for awards that demonstrate their excellence, discuss potential job opportunities and alternative career choices, and teach them how to excel at self-promotion. The more your mentees grow in their careers, the more satisfaction and recognition you’ll get for being an awesome mentor.

Role model. Ultimately to be a good mentor you have to be an excellent role model. Practice what you preach, demonstrate integrity in your professional and personal interactions, and show by example how to balance work and life. Be resilient, handle rejections, efficiently manage time and make sure to be a caring mentor.

It’s never too early to learn how to mentor – start now if you haven’t already. Mentoring is different from classroom teaching and requires hours of personal interaction. Getting over your inhibitions or issues with communication are important to excel as a mentor. Have patience and keep developing as you mentor people with different personalities. Remember it takes time to build trust with your mentee and you’ll get better with time and practice. Get feedback, and take suggestions and negative critiques seriously, so you can improve.

Being a mentor means being a ‘Guru’, a Sanskrit word that literally means ‘one who dispels darkness’ – a person that shows the way to pure knowledge. Mentoring is one of the most rewarding and exciting aspects of being a faculty member. Enjoy the ride because the more you give, the more you get back.

Nirmala Hariharan is an adjunct assistant professor at UC Davis’ School of Medicine, where she mentors in and researches molecular signalling pathways for basic cardiovascular sciences.

Social media

Who’s misbehaving? Perceptions of unprofessional social media use by medical students and faculty

 

Elizabeth A. Kitsis , Felise B. Milan, Hillel W. Cohen, Daniel Myers, Patrick Herron, Mimi McEvoy,
Jacqueline Weingarten and Martha S. Grayson

 

BMC Medical Education 2016 16:67

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-016-0572-x

Abstract

Background

Social media use by physicians offers potential benefits but may also be associated with professionalism problems. The objectives of this study were: 1) to examine and compare characteristics of social media use by medical students and faculty; 2) to explore the scope of self- and peer-posting of unprofessional online content; and 3) to determine what actions were taken when unprofessional content was viewed.

Methods

An anonymous, web-based survey was sent to medical students and faculty in October, 2013 at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York.

Results

Three-quarters of medical students reported using social media “very frequently” (several times a day), whereas less than one-third of faculty did so (p < .001). Medical students reported using privacy settings more often than faculty (96.5 % v. 78.1 %, p  < .001). Most medical students (94.2 %) and faculty (94.1 %) reported “never” or “occasionally” monitoring their online presence (p = 0.94). Medical students reported self-posting of profanity, depiction of intoxication, and sexually suggestive material more often than faculty (p < .001). Medical students and faculty both reported peer-posting of unprofessional content significantly more often than self-posting. There was no association between year of medical school and posting of unprofessional content.

Conclusion

Medical students reported spending more time using social media and posting unprofessional content more often than did faculty.

Click here to read the paper.