Activities 2002

Leadership Education for Advancement and Promotion
University of Colorado, Boulder ADVANCE Program

Activities 2002

The LEAP team at the University of Colorado, Boulder has focused this year ’s activities on

• Developing curricula for leadership and coaching workshops, recruiting participants, and piloting leadership and coaching workshops.
• Forging connections to other university programs, learning about related activities, and determining how best to work with those programs toward mutual goals.
• Understanding and benchmarking the current status of women at the university.
• Working with the evaluation team to develop instruments to study the LEAP programs effects and to clarify some of the issues affecting women’s participation in science, math, engineering, and technology (SMET) disciplines.

We believe that we have laid a secure foundation for our future work. While doing so we have learned a lot, about the depth of support for the program’s goals, about how to work within the system, and about the issues that we need to address.

The workshop organization has primarily been the responsibility of Mary Ann Shea and Patricia Rankin. LEAP's first Leadership Institute week was held in June 2003. The ten participants were a mixed group of assistant professors to full professors. The week consisted largely of sessions in time and stress management, education about leadership models, role-playing in conflict management and negotiation, and information about balancing career planning with building relationships. The University of Colorado President, Elizabeth Hoffman, led one of the most popular sessions. She talked about her career path and goals for the university and then took questions from the participants.
 
All the leadership workshop sessions were well received. The evaluation made clear the importance of having a selection process for participants and of paying a stipend. These measures removed the potential stigma for women faculty of attending a skill-building workshop. The evaluation of the week allowed us a glimpse into how to fine-tune the offerings for the January 2003 workshop. This next workshop will be faster paced, include more readings, and be based more on case studies. We have also restricted it to junior faculty (in first four years of appointment) and will run a separate workshop in June 2003 for senior faculty (such as those considering becoming chairs or program administrators). The feedback given has encouraged us to offer conflict management and negotiation as afternoon workshops in spring 2003. We have also been accumulating a small library of books to loan out to course participants on leadership and management, guidance for new faculty, coaching and mentorship, and background materials.
 
The coaching program took somewhat longer to get off the ground. We learned that senior faculty make plans for their summers well ahead of when we advertised the coaching workshops (we are recruiting earlier for future workshops). As a result, we decided to hold the coaching workshop in several three-hour sessions during the fall semester. We solicited advice from deans and chairs and recruited ten senior faculty members who had demonstrated excellence in research, teaching, and service/outreach. The series began with a session designed to introduce various models of coaching.  These models were based largely in and designed for the private sector, and the response of the academic audience to the presentation was largely negative. Rather than continue with the original plans, we reformulated the sessions, and following negotiations with the participants, held a second session with a facilitator who assisted us in designing the ensuing Friday sessions more in accord with higher education and the needs perceived by the coaches.  The revised plan was based around case studies we developed to encourage discussion of how to coach faculty concerning their teaching, their research, and their interpersonal relationships. This group will meet again in early spring 2003 to continue discussions and consider logistical issues, such as how to best assign advisees and how to provide a support network for the coaches themselves.
 
We learned several things from the pilot workshops that impacted what we chose to focus on for the latter part of the year. Most important was the need to build up the pool to draw from to recruit faculty into the programs, especially male faculty. We also realized that the best recruiters to the program were former participants.  Instead of broadening out the offerings too rapidly and risking badly attended sessions and poorly received programs, we decided to concentrate on the week- long sessions and on “getting the word out” more efficiently.  We believe we have succeeded and can now proceed more effectively with the remainder of our plans.  First, President Hoffman hosted a reception for women faculty to allow us to introduce LEAP to them directly. President Hoffman has been a strong supporter of LEAP and will again be a presenter at the January workshop. Second, Chancellor Bynny highlighted LEAP at both his state of the campus presentation and at a meeting to discuss the annual report of the Campus Committee on Women (CCW).  Third, Patricia gave a presentation to a wide cross section of the university community on LEAP at a campus “24 club” meeting, and she attended meetings of the campus diversity committee and women’s groups. Fourth, following feedback from male colleagues that indicated  they did not realize that the programs were open to male and female faculty, we revamped the web site design and informational literature on the program so that while it stresses NSF support it does not begin with the program goals. We also experimented with a much wider range of ways of contacting faculty members about the program, including direct phone calls from the coaches we had recruited, personal letters, and personal emails. It appears that targeted emails are most effective – we have recruited 15 participants for the January workshop, seven of whom are male. We have also already begun to fill the advanced leadership workshop and the next coaching workshop.
 
We had a lot of interest expressed in the program from instructors who were looking for ways to gain skills to enable them to play a bigger role in their departments and to help advance their careers.  This year we allowed a couple of instructors to participate in the workshops on a space available basis. We are currently looking at the possibility of specific offerings tailored to this audience – it is an important group given the predominance of women instructors in the scientific disciplines. We will look to the “Pathways” study described below to help us decide how to address the needs of this group. 
 
We had also planned as a part of the coaching activities to use a 360° feedback system with the advisees to help them assess their strengths and weaknesses.  Somewhat surprisingly, several of the coaches were reticent try this for themselves and expressed reluctance at asking their advisees to submit to it. This reluctance seems to stem from a feeling that faculty members are assessed too frequently already, as well as concerns that hearing negative feedback would damage people’s confidence, even though the results would be confidential. We plan to address these concerns by taking several members of the initial leadership-training group through the process and then having them relate their experiences to the coaches. It is our belief that the 360° process is actually a positive experience and can build confidence.
 
Discussions at the workshops and at the evaluation sessions made it clear that while participants are glad to be learning skills at our workshops, the workshops are also providing a valued opportunity for faculty to get to know their colleagues better and to learn that others share their concerns.  The need for more opportunities for faculty to mix socially has been noted and brought to the attention of the LEAP advisory board. We will pay special attention to the need for social interaction and how that impacts the effectiveness of moving workshop modules to the web as we proceed.
 
Last, workshop discussions brought out what we consider to be the core issue for this initiative. Several women faculty members at the leadership workshop commented that they “knew the rules of the game” for getting tenure and promotion; however, they had sacrificed some of their ideals to play the game (for example, choosing to concentrate on research, not service). Not only is it now more evident that many people feel similarly about this issue, but LEAP is clearly succeeding in facilitating discussions about the status quo and what the ideal academy would be like.  The senior faculty we trained as coaches wanted to know if LEAP wanted to teach people how to better play the game or to change the rules of the game.  Since the goal of LEAP is institutional transformation, the response was that while we want to help people succeed within the current system, we are also working to change that system from within. Chancellor Bynny indicated openness to discussions about the barriers to the fullest participation of women at his speech to the campus on the status of women, noting that despite a pool of talented women on campus there is reluctance to take on high-level administrative positions. We plan to begin to explore ways to open up discussions to wider campus participation – possibly through the university-wide “Visions 2010” program. We look forward to what will happen as the impact of LEAP begins to be felt more widely.
 
Another way we hope to encourage discussion about the current system is by having Virginia Valian visit and give a public lecture. LEAP and the CU School of Business will jointly sponsor this lecture, in early March 2003. The Business School has recently been the recipient of a large bequest, one of the conditions of which is that they double the number of their female faculty. We have held several joint discussions with members of the Business School about how we may best work together.
 
Looking back over the year we feel that our strategy is paying off. We have succeeded in introducing LEAP to the campus at large. We have formed a cadre of LEAP participants who are enthusiastic about the program and ready to help further its goals. We are now poised to build upon our successes.  The plan for 2003 is to repeat and further refine the workshops we have already offered, as well as broaden the offerings by running workshops during the semester and  adding specific workshops for post-doctoral students.
 
As part of our work we have also begun to investigate a range of issues, including the possibility that female faculty, especially in SMET disciplines, have different experiences in the classroom. The CCW is particularly concerned about the current student evaluations of faculty teaching. There is much anecdotal evidence that the comments on these forms (which are anonymous) are often inappropriate and are a source of significant stress for women faculty. A graduate student (Sherie McClam), supervised by Patricia Rankin and Margaret Eisenhart of the School of Education, has started to look at the following issues:

• How female faculty members interact with students;
• How faculty are selected to teach particular classes;
• The correlation between class size and teaching evaluations;
• Differential loads associated with classes at different levels and different populations;
• Whether or not female faculty are more likely to teach large introductory classes; and
• Whether or not there is gender bias in student evaluations.

Since this effort began in August, much has been focused on gaining an understanding of what the literature has to say about the teaching environment for female faculty in the academy.  The bulk of the literature reviewed dealt with the question of whether gender bias exists in student evaluations.  In addition, Sherie has been reviewing the “Chilly Climate” literature for research on differences between the teaching experiences of men and women faculty in higher education.  As the literature review progresses, findings are compiled and summarized, ready for posting on the LEAP web site. In addition, Sherie has begun a quantitative analysis on course history data for a sample of male and female faculty in SMET departments. She has searched for differences in teaching loads, between men and women faculty, and differences in evaluations.
 
The literature is complex and the review has not resulted in definitive answers to questions about differential treatment and evaluation of male and female faculty in college and university classrooms.  All of the quantitative analyses of student evaluation data conclude that on the aggregate, or looking at mean ratings, there is no statistically significant difference between the way students rate men and women faculty.  Concerned that looking at the aggregate masks subtle but important differences, many researchers have sought to do more complex analyses of student evaluation data.  These analyses have shown important, statistically significant interactions between variables like gender of the evaluator, gender of the instructor, and the discipline in which the course was taught (humanities, natural sciences, and social science).  These findings paint a complex picture of the environment in which male and female faculties operate.
 
Preliminary findings from an analysis of specific SMET faculty course history data at Colorado have agreed with the literature, in that on the aggregate, contrary to expectations, there is no statistically significant difference between mean instructor ratings for male and female faculty.  Additionally, it seems that male faculty teach slightly larger classes that female faculty, and there is no significant correlation between class size and student evaluation.  
 
This analysis will continue in 2003 with continued quantitative data analysis of the SMET assistant professor course history data.  This will involve more complex analyses, looking for patterns and interactions that may illuminate more subtle differences.  Sherie will look for patterns in the quantitative data that will direct further (quantitative and qualitative) research and analysis.  This may include developing survey instruments, as well as interview and observation protocols.  We will work with the Faculty Teaching Excellence Program, the Campus Committee for Women, and university officials to develop a more sensitive teaching evaluation instrument that can be given to students in a sample of SMET courses.  This instrument will be used to gain a clearer picture of how students evaluate male and female faculty.  Finally, we will work with the Evaluation and Ethnographic Research (E&ER) evaluation team to modify or add questions to existing interview protocols developed for LEAP to allow us to gain a better understanding of faculty perceptions of the teaching environment.
 
Another key component of the research activities under the LEAP umbrella is the “Pathways” study. The E&ER evaluation team is undertaking this survey. An initial sample frame for the first group of Pathways interviews, with research associates and research professors, has been constructed.  The protocol has been enhanced, based on information coming out of the “Change” study to date (the protocol is available upon request).
The research associates group within the Pathways interview sample frame was constructed as follows:

1. Sampling criteria were identified in order of importance: department/research institute; gender (a ratio of 2 women to 1 man was decided upon); age and career stage (the intention is to interview both post-doctorates as well as those beyond this career phase, concentrating on the latter group, and focusing more on people mid-career than those anticipating retirement—no one over 60 years of age will be interviewed); and citizenship status (foreign research associates are not included in this sample).
2. A list of all research associates was obtained from Lou McClellan’s office (CU administrative data). The list was used to provide information about gender, department/research group, age, date of hire at CU, and job title.
3. A sample was chosen based on the criteria listed above, taking care to include women from all the science departments/research organizations.  Once the evaluation team have interviewed 36 women they will draw a sample of 18 men to match, as closely as possible, the actual interviews conducted.  This allows the evaluation team to adjust if, as anticipated, there are some refusals and problems contacting some of the people chosen for the initial sample.

Another part of the LEAP activities centers around “pipeline strengthening.” We are working with the Campus Outreach coordinator (Wynn Martens) to maximize the effect of the LEAP pipeline strengthening activities, and worked with the Campus Outreach committee to decide what activities would have most impact on the program goals. A meeting in early summer led to a decision to target some of the initial graduate student funding on a “best practices” study. Margaret Eisenhart is supervising a graduate student, Kristy Martinez, whose research focuses on two components of women’s experience within the sciences, primarily physics. The plan is to research (1) best practices in teaching science, as evidenced by research-based studies in science and science education; and specifically, (2) best practices for teaching girls and women as evidenced by research-based studies in science and science education.  Later, the plan is to examine the interaction (or lack thereof) of the two.  Special attention will be given to developments in science and science education during the past decade.  Kristy began by compiling evidence on best teaching practices in college physics.  Next she will examine best practices in high school physics before looking at the best practices for teaching girls and women in high school and college.  For each compilation, studies will be distinguished by research design (e.g., quasi-experimental, survey, ethnographic), and an evaluation made of the quality of the evidence. Finally the results will be synthesized and disseminated via the LEAP web site.   We expect that these results will create a conceptual framework for building a bridge between secondary school practices and higher education as it relates to women’s experiences in physics.  
 
Other activities supported from 2002 project funds are the development of a multi-disciplinary course on the effects of aerosols, the training of graduate students and post-docs who will mentor undergraduates in laboratory research, the development of mathematics modules to be used in local high schools, and support for the development of a course to train an “engineering corps,” which will then go into the K-12 system to introduce students to engineering. While funds for these activities have been committed the activities will mostly begin in 2003, and since charges will be made directly against the LEAP grant (funds cannot be directly transferred to the researchers accounts) they will not show up as expenses until 2003 – but they have been obligated.
 
A major activity this year has been setting up the benchmarking against which to measure our progress.  Associate Dean Joyce Nielsen and Robyn Marshke, a graduate student, have been responsible for most of the accumulation and analysis of the institutional data. While accumulation of the raw data is relatively straightforward in many cases, the interpretation of the data is not, and significant time has gone into understanding and cleaning the data.  As the data is studied, we are finding many more questions raised than answered as yet.  We are also finding a significant overlap between the data required for LEAP and data that the Campus Committee for Women has been requesting.  The availability of funding for a graduate student to work with this data is having a major impact. We plan to supplement this activity by adding an additional part-time graduate student to this work (diverting funding from consultant fees, which were under-spent in 2002) in 2003. 
 
Robyn and Joyce have provided LEAP with preliminary quantitative analyses of CU data on the  gender gap in salaries.  One of the major issues here is exactly what choice of regression formula to apply to take out effects such as the different age distribution of male and female faculty and the differences between disciplines. One clear finding is that the average salary of a discipline falls as the percentage of women in that discipline rises. Robyn and Joyce have been reviewing the extensive literature on the gender gap in earnings in both non-academic and academic settings.  They have identified the following sub-themes for their research:

• Theoretical approaches over time (1970-2000) and how they’ve changed (discourse);
• How academic pay gap is related to other pay gaps (in general or in certain industries);
• Methodological issues such as data-cleaning, how best to measure independent variables in a composite way;
• Differences between quantitative and qualitative studies and their results; and
• Literature on policies related to gender gap and their effectiveness.

They are planning to continue work on the topic of the gender gap in earnings in academia.  They plan a “discourse” project because the review of literature so far indicates that various explanations of the gender gap have come and gone over the last 30 years (since about 1970 when attention to issue was first raised).  They hypothesize that these various approaches are related to the larger political climate; that there seems to be minimal “progress” regarding the power of these explanations—that is, the research is not cumulative but ebbs and flows. They are considering treating CU as a case study.  Joyce has an outline of policy and administrative efforts at CU since about 1970, which show a variety of strategies that have been tried to deal with the disparity. One possible aspect of the study is to do a cohort analysis of women who came to CU at the heightof or right after the Women’s Movement. Is it possible that their political activity, as it increased and decreased over the years, has directly influenced official CU policies?  Or has CU been following national trends and pretty much doing what other universities do? The goal for 2003 is to try to answer the question of how effective different strategies have been.  It does appear that, on first glance, there has been some gain. This will probably become a thesis topic for Robyn.
 
Robyn has also begun an attrition study to answer the question “Who Leaves CU and Why?” Some quantitative analysis has been done but is complicated by the fact that changing job titles can cause an individual to appear as if they left. So more qualitative “detective” work is needed, especially on tenure track and instructor categories. This will be based on exit data for these two categories for the 1990s. Finally, Robyn is providing input to the Pathways study, and has started to work on providing a factual and content analysis of A&S instructor files.
 
Evaluation is an important component of our activities. The internal evaluation is being worked on by a team headed by Elaine Seymour of the E&ER group at CU, and including Sandra Laursen, Liane Gallegos-Pedersen, Doug Weise (all staff researchers), and Kris DeWelde (a graduate student).  This group is focused on the Pathways study that has been discussed earlier, and on the “Change” study that most directly looks at theimpact of LEAP and how it is impacting/changing the campus. The evaluation of the leadership and coaching workshops associated with LEAP as agents of change was facilitated by the evaluation instruments (which Kelli Gilbert initially designed) being refined by Kris for each workshop, in consultation with the E&ER staff.  These forms were designed to assess the effectiveness of the material presented with the goal of improving future workshops. The evaluation group has also developed a confidential, password protected web site that facilitates exchange of information among E&ER researchers such as interview protocols and sample-related information and materials.  This site maintains all key E&ER documents, meeting information, notes between researchers, and various other informational documents.  Kris will continue to manage the information and web site as the Change and the Pathways process studies generate momentum and the sampling becomes more complex.
 
Formative evaluation for the Leadership Training workshop in June 2002 included observations, a focus group with participants, and follow-up surveys.  The evaluation team included follow-up questions on the workshop itself in the individual interviews conducted in the fall of 2002 as part of the longitudinal interview study.  Formative evaluation for the Coaching workshop series in fall 2002 has included observations of all workshop meetings, brief written surveys after the first five sessions, and a focus group with participants at the final session.  Using all these methods, the team provided rapid formative feedback to the workshop facilitators, which was used to make mid-course corrections.  The participants reported positively to the evaluators on these helpful adjustments and particularly valued the responsiveness of the facilitators.  Suggestions about the evaluation procedures themselves have also been helpful in planning future evaluation strategies.  A much more detailed report is available upon request.
 
As the evaluators conducted these interviews, they found confidentiality and anonymity loomed larger as concerns in this project than in their previous projects.  Indeed, some of the interviewees raised a concern over the confidentiality of their responses themselves.  In part this is due to the sensitive nature of the material (career paths, work climate, career plans), but it is enhanced in this project by its location on campus, where the information might be meaningful to someone accidentally hearing it.  Because the people being interviewed are faculty members with whom the evaluation team’s student workers may well have contact in their everyday lives, they are concerned that it will be too easy for student transcribers to identify the faculty and to unintentionally share confidential information in conversation on campus. This is not the case when students deal with interviews of people from outside institutions since the information is less likely to be sufficiently "interesting" to be shared.
 
The evaluation team has already taken some steps beyond their standard procedures to address this issue.  For example, the amount of demographic information used to label interview tapes has been reduced to make participants less identifiable.  Student workers will sign a confidentiality agreement to help emphasize to them the importance of confidentiality.  Most significantly, they have decided to hire an outside, non-student transcriber to transcribe these sensitive interviews and do the data entry for them.  This will have an impact on the cost of transcription (which will require some internal adjustment of the evaluation budget), but the evaluators believe that it is essential to be able to assure interviewees that they can be candid in their conversations and to protect the integrity of the project.
 
Their LEAP work and discussions with the LEAP core group and other Advance program evaluators has led the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTTS) to plan a study of the tenure process that will by synergistic with their LEAP work. They plan to submit a proposal for funding of this work in February 2003. This proposal will address the lack of research concerning how the tenure and promotion process operates at higher levels of decision-making in academe.
 
During 2002 we have held several meetings with our advisory board (which includes VC Carol Lynch,  Chancellor Georgie Lesh-Laurie [CU Denver], Dean Todd Gleeson, AVC Bobby Schnabel, Joey White [Chancellor Bynny’s chief of staff], Dean Davis of engineering, AVC Susan Kent [Faculty Affairs], Zaneta Johns [Director of Human Resources, CU Boulder]  Pat Heim [a consultant to industry on women in leadership], Barbara McLane [IBM], Joann Joselyn [Secretary General of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, IAGA], and David Bachrach [a consultant to medical schools on bringing women into leadership positions in academic medicine]). The advisory board has proved a useful conduit for relaying findings and concerns to the highest levels of the university administration and a reservoir of good advice. On at least one occasion Carol Lynch saved the PI’s sanity by promptly responding to her call for help! One concern raised at the most recent meeting was that having improved our recruiting of male faculty members as participants in the Leadership workshop, we could see a different dynamic take place during the workshop. We will request that the evaluation team pay special attention to this possibility. We will consider how to respond to this issue if necessary – we are hoping that having experienced facilitators will help us avoid problems. We discussed possible ways to intervene if necessary – such as having the male participants listen to female participants without responding themselves or timing how long individuals speak. Moreover, since we want male and female faculty to learn how to interact more effectively we cannot avoid this issue. In fact, we hope that effective leadership of the workshop sessions will help model desirable behaviors in balancing the views of a disparate group. However, we are not ruling out developing and presenting some gender-specific workshops if needed.
 
One of the most important things we have learned this year is the difference between what people think is going on and what is actually going on. For example, much if not all of the salary differential between female and male faculty is related to the choice of discipline, not to bias at a department level. Women do not appear to be carrying a higher burden of introductory courses. We plan to continue to look closely at the data. Our goal is to produce a “Myths” paper early in 2003 (and a “Myths” quiz on our web site) to challenge people’s pre-conceptions. We want to include a discussion of the assumptions people make when selecting a career path – for example, do post-docs have a clear idea about life as a faculty member? Are people balancing less stress at the early stages of their career with less freedom later?
 
While we haven’t done everything we wanted to this year, we believe we made the correct strategic decisions for achieving the overall goals of the project. Reflecting on 2002, we have done a lot and we have learned a lot, and we have folded the lessons learned into our planning for 2003. We are ready to continue and to grow.

Budget Comments

Our experience this year is leading us to adjust somewhat our budget planning for 2003. Our on-campus budget office has told us that since these changes are minor we are not required to submit a revised budget to NSF, although we will do so upon request. (The budget office has an agreement with NSF not to resubmit budgets unless there is more than a 30% change.) We are not planning any decrease in support for program participants – in fact, we plan to decrease the funding allocated for consultant support and transfer it to participant support and graduate student support. The graduate student support will help us to address the requirements for accurate benchmarking, and given the importance placed on participant support by the evaluation team, we will use the increase to help us raise the number of participants. We estimate, based on current planning, that about $35K of funding will be re-allocated.