Category Archives: Institutional Climate

Carol Greider et al in Science: Increasing gender diversity in the STEM research workforce

Please read this comprehensive policy forum article published in Science yesterday. carol greider

The authors are led by our own Hopkins faculty member and Nobel laureate, Carol W. Greider, and also include Jason M. Sheltzer, Nancy C. Cantalupo, Wilbert B. Copeland, Nilanjana Dasgupta, Nancy Hopkins, Jaclyn M. Jansen, Leemor Joshua-Tor, Gary S. McDowell, Jessica L. Metcalf, BethAnn McLaughlin, Ann Olivarius, Erin K. O’Shea, Jennifer L. Raymond, David Ruebain, Joan A. Steitz, Bruce Stillman, Shirley M. Tilghman, Virginia Valian, Lydia Villa-Komaroff, and Joyce Y. Wong.

“Institutions and funding agencies have an obligation to ensure that they are supporting the best possible science and minimizing any gender-specific barriers that may hinder the advancement of women in academia.

We believe that by ending sexual harassment and breaking the power of unconscious bias, they will make substantial progress toward this crucial goal.”

PDF: 1108PolicyForum_FINALFINAL2

Where We Stand is today!

half-past-clock-309898Hope to see you at Mudd Atrium between 5:30-7pm.

Come for the good food and iconic nametags. Stay for the good company and lively engagement with issues of mentorship, community, and equity.

As always, kids are welcome, and what an amazing chance for them to see, dare we say, a Maryland superhero: Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Want to know more? Here’s her bio:

Senator Mikulski began her career as a social worker in Baltimore determined to make a difference her community. That determination led her to becoming the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right and the longest serving woman in the history of the United States Congress. A tenacious advocate, she’s stated that it’s not about how long you serve, but how well you serve. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

After retiring from the Senate in 2017, Sen. Mikulski became a Homewood Professor of Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-teaches undergraduate courses in Political Science, Sociology, and Public Health. She currently serves on the Boards of the National Democratic Institute and the Baltimore Community Foundation; she has been appointed to the federal Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and is serving as an honorary Co-chair for Baltimore City’s Census 2020 efforts. Senator Mikulski also participates in national speaking engagements related to leadership, innovation, advocacy, and women’s empowerment.

Join our round table discussions tomorrow: 5:30pm Monday @ Mudd

fleming, mikulski, weaver april 2018All JHU students, faculty, and staff are invited to join Women Faculty Forum on Monday evening for comments and discussion on mentorship, community, and equity. After comments by Professor Karen Fleming, Dean Beverly Wendland, and Senator Barbara Mikulski, join round table discussions anchored by:

Candice Baldwin, Director of Hop-In

Linda Boyd, Interim Asst Vice Provost & Title IX Coordinator

Irene Ferguson, Director of Student Enrichment Programs

Bertrand Garcia-Moreno, Biophysics

Joy Gaslevic, Interim VP for Institutional Equity

Jeff Gray, Chemical & Biomedical Engineering

Jeannine Heynes, Director of Women & Gender Resources

Bonnie Jin, News-Letter

Alexandra Lossada, English; PhD Student Advisory Committee

Chika Mese, Math

Diva Parekh, News-Letter

Gabrielle Spiegel, History

Gabi Swistara, News-Letter

Yi Wang, Math

Good food, good company, & kids welcome: that’s Where We Stand, in a nutshell, 5 years running! 🙂

“How to Mentor Minority Students”

We invite all students, staff, faculty, and their families (kids, yes!) to join Women Faculty Forum next Monday (Nov 4), 5:30-7pm in Mudd Atrium, to discuss mentorship, community-building, and equity at Homewood.

In that spirit, here’s some advice to consider from Shampa Biswas in the Chronicle:coffee cup

Based on my (continuing) experiences on this front, I offer the following lessons I’ve learned. I hope they will be of value to all faculty members, but especially to those who disproportionately take on the responsibilities of advising minority students.

They feel seen and unseen. Students of color can find themselves at opposite poles on the visibility spectrum:

  • On the one hand, they feel “invisible” — and inaudible. In certain settings and forums they are trying to be seen and heard but are constantly overlooked. Students notice, for example, if the professor calls only on white men in class discussions about male-normed topics such as “international security.”
  • On the other hand is the problem of being “hypervisible.” Either they are viewed as representatives of “their cultures” (e.g., an international student asked to speak for her country in class), or they are seen as the source of some infraction (e.g., a black male student profiled and singled out to show his ID in order to enter a campus party).

 . . .

There’s a lot of diversity in diversity. When a campus is relatively homogenous, like my own, there’s a tendency to clump all forms of difference into a broad category of “diversity,” and neglect the enormous heterogeneity of experiences, needs, interests, and occasional tensions that exist within.

 . . .

How approachable you seem will change. You might consider yourself an easygoing, open-minded faculty member. It is easy to forget that first-generation, minority, and foreign students can be very intimidated by college professors — and less willing than other students to seek out our advice.

 . . .

Be as open about your own vulnerabilities as you can. I have come to recognize that, whether or not I want to play the part, being in the very small minority of female faculty members of color who have made it into the rarefied upper echelons of academic rank, I serve as a “role model.” I will confess to sometimes experiencing that role as a burden rather than a gift, especially when I am exhausted by the need to constantly model a vocal presence on the campus in order to be taken seriously.

Iowa State Study: Informing students about bias in SETs may reduce bias

apple-3256487_1920Here’s the abstract:

Student evaluations of teaching are widely believed to contain gender bias. In this study, we conduct a randomized experiment with the student evaluations of teaching in four classes with large enrollments, two taught by male instructors and two taught by female instructors. In each of the courses, students were randomly assigned to either receive the standard evaluation instrument or the same instrument with language intended to reduce gender bias. Students in the anti-bias language condition had significantly higher rankings of female instructors than students in the standard treatment. There were no differences between treatment groups for male instructors. These results indicate that a relatively simple intervention in language can potentially mitigate gender bias in student evaluation of teaching.

 

From “Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching” by David A. M. Peterson, Lori A. Biederman, David Andersen, Tessa M. Ditonto, Kevin Roe