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Reducing Inequality in Higher Education: The Link between Faculty Empowerment and Climate and Retention

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Abstract

Since 2001 the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program has distributed over $130 million in grants to improve work climate, enhance professional success, and increase recruitment and retention of female faculty in STEM fields. The process by which each institution designs and implements these interventions is seldom studied, however. Using climate surveys, administrative records, and a difference-in-differences regression approach, we assessed whether exposure to the design and implementation process helps explain improvements in climate and retention during the early years of ADVANCE implementation. We found that departments wherein at least one faculty member participated in ADVANCE committee work experienced significant improvements in job satisfaction among female faculty members and significant reduction in turnover among female full professors, suggesting that the ADVANCE design process was itself an intervention.

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Notes

  1. http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id = 5383

  2. http://nsf.gov/crssprgm/advance/index.jsp

  3. The Dean of Faculties office developed and administered the 2009 survey. Faculty members affiliated with ADVANCE refined and administered the survey in 2013.

  4. A copy of the individual questions is available upon request to the corresponding author.

  5. Although the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences contains a number of departments that are not STEM and therefore not eligible for NSF ADVANCE funding, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences provided supplemental funding so that all of its departments were targeted.

  6. Note that faculty rank is a year-specific variable in the data panel, so an individual could have been an assistant professor in 2004-2005 and an associate professor in 2005-2006. This person would have been in the assistant professor subsample in 2004-2005 and in the associate professor subsample in 2005-2006.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grants HRD-1008385. Any opinions, findings, and the conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation. The authors thank Kimberly Reeves, Rose Barlow, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors for their helpful feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Lori L. Taylor, Joanna N. Lahey & Jeffrey E. Froyd

  2. Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    Molly I. Beck

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  1. Lori L. Taylor
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  2. Molly I. Beck
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  3. Joanna N. Lahey
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  4. Jeffrey E. Froyd
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Correspondence to Lori L. Taylor.

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Taylor, L.L., Beck, M.I., Lahey, J.N. et al. Reducing Inequality in Higher Education: The Link between Faculty Empowerment and Climate and Retention. Innov High Educ 42, 391–405 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-017-9391-1

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