Climate Change
Engineering schools can increase gender equity at the top and improve their culture. Here’s how.
Opinion By Alec D. Gallimore
Often when I tell people that women occupy 13 of the 25 top leadership roles at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, I can almost see in their eyes an unspoken assumption: We must have passed over better-qualified male candidates. We rarely make the reverse assumption—even when men fill most or all of the senior ranks.
In our case, we expected more—not less—of our department chairs, associate deans, and executive-committee members. Being an accomplished engineer is still a requirement, but it is no longer sufficient. Our leaders also need to see where biases exist in the organization and propose ways to counter them. It turned out that the women who were hired as leaders in our latest round excelled on those measures.
We’ve been working toward this balance for roughly a decade—long before my tenure as dean. And we know that there is much more work to be done. Here are guidelines that helped us reach this point:
Measure where the playing field isn’t level. With the help of an ADVANCE grant from the National Science Foundation, Michigan examined why women left science and engineering, or never entered in the first place. The effort began in 2001 with a climate survey that polled all faculty members. Female scientists and engineers at Michigan rated the university more negatively than did their male colleagues on nearly every climate measure, but particularly on whether their department had a “gender-egalitarian atmosphere.” While our overall climate ratings have since improved, ADVANCE’s 2017 survey showed that women still rated it less favorably than did men.
Results of a second campuswide survey in 2017 held troubling implications for engineering in particular. When faculty members rated whether they felt valued for their research, scholarship, and creativity, there was a 25-point gap between the perceptions of men and women. In addition, 37 percent of women in the college reported experiencing gender discrimination. In a detail that the male leadership nearly overlooked, almost half the female engineers reported fearing for their physical safety on campus. We needed to identify the causes of these gender discrepancies and develop solutions.
Hiring committees need both to spot and challenge unconscious biases. Our ADVANCE program zeroed in on unconscious bias in hiring—the shortcuts our brains take in deciding who is competent and trustworthy. Now, members of hiring committees are required to participate in small-group workshops, where they become alert to examples of bias, such as letters that emphasize a female candidate’s social skills more than her technical accomplishments. We encourage committee members to question one another on their perceptions of applicants. We have some evidence that these workshops are slowly changing the culture overall as our new female leaders win the support of their peers.
Ensure equal access to mentoring. Our first climate survey confirmed that men in engineering tended to have more mentors than did women. To counteract that imbalance, we formed “launch” committees of established professors who not only support first-year hires but also forge mentoring relationships that help junior faculty chart an upward path. Women have told me that a leader’s small gesture of encouraging qualified faculty to put themselves forward for open positions sends a message that they will be taken seriously. For challenges when women benefit most from advice of other women, an all-female dean’s advisory council discusses specific struggles and solutions. A similar council focuses on faculty of color.
Redefine “merit” and take inequality seriously. The women we promoted are outstanding based on conventional academic measures, such as where they earned their degrees, which journals published their work, and who invited them to speak. But those measures can be biased themselves, and as history shows, conventional measures won’t hasten change.
So in addition, we required that department chair applicants submit a diversity plan. Some critics deride these as political litmus tests. In our view, they test whether applicants can change a talent-suppressing culture into one that is inclusive.
Institutions that see diversity purely as a charitable cause miss that it’s about staying competitive. Women will uncover biases in how we teach, and may spot other flaws that men might fail to notice in engineering designs, code, systems, and policies. With outstanding female engineers leading the college, we can accelerate a cultural shift and make engineering genuinely welcoming to women.
Alec D. Gallimore is dean of engineering at the University of Michigan. His on-demand webinar is available at http://bit.ly/30y42Ub (free to ASEE members; $50 for nonmembers). This essay is adapted, with permission, from “An Engineering School With Half of Its Leadership Female? How Did That Happen?” in the May 1, 2019, Chronicle of Higher Education.