A message from the Director: AdvanceRIT Behind the Scenes | Fall-Winter 2021
A message from the Director of AdvanceRIT
While you may see the workshops and news stories about AdvanceRIT, there is a good deal of work the office does behind the scenes to promote faculty gender equity at RIT. AdvanceRIT is supported by the Council for the Representation & Engagement of Women Faculty (CREW). This council consists of representatives from every college who work on sub-teams that focus on Onboarding & Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement of women faculty at RIT. Last year, these groups studied various data sources and made recommendations to the leadership of Academic Affairs. For example, the Advancement sub-team analyzed the Faculty of the Future Survey conducted by the Resource & Scholarship subcommittee of Faculty Senate. They found women reporting less access to qualified graduate students and that they taught fewer graduate courses. Based on this, the Provost requested Institutional Research conduct a study of faculty course loads by gender. The graduate courses analysis is completed and an undergraduate course analysis will be run this spring. The graduate course comparison did find differences for women with graduate courses taught by tenure track women faculty. Women make up ~33% of tenure track faculty, but for courses taught by tenure track faculty, only ~24% of the graduate courses over the past four years were taught by women faculty.
The Recruitment & Onboarding group has developed resources for new faculty including launching CREW Office Hours. They also studied recruitment statistics and made recommendations to improve the Midsearch Review and search process. They are working with the Office of Faculty Diversity & Recruitment in benchmarking best practices in assisting faculty with proactive recruitment of diverse faculty. The retention team looked at the COACHE data from 2019 by gender and made recommendations related to modifications of duties and mentoring.
In addition to CREW, AdvanceRIT supports and partners with other groups on campus such as Diversity Education and The Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program. The Director of AdvanceRIT serves on the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Standing Committee of Faculty Senate, the Title IX task force, the President’s Commission on Women, and the Climate Survey working group.