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INITIATIVES

As originally envisioned by WISEST founder Claudia Morrissey, The WISEST specific project Strategies are to warm the climate and decrease the isolation of women STEM faculty, attract and recruit women faculty, transform departments, promote STEM women’s scholarship and teaching, track and report on gender equity in STEM, and finally to advocate and collaborate across UIC and nationally to increase the presence and influence of STEM women. The means by which these strategies could be implemented are by launching several Initiatives. The initiatives are developed and implemented by a group of research-active senior STEM faculty called Facilitators, one from each of the eleven core STEM departments, who are the primary agents of change in the departments and in the institution. The initiatives: networking lunches and faculty support and development teams, and the Visiting Scholar program (to warm the climate, decrease the isolation and promote the scholarship and teaching of STEM faculty); the SUCCEED team (to provide faculty search committee training workshops helps to attract and recruit women into STEM faculty), and the Post-doc Program in particular helps to attract and recruit minority women. Through the SUCCEED team, leadership seminars, and the departmental action plan program, the Facilitators educate and transform the STEM departments to become more aware of gender schemas and how unconscious bias leads to undervaluing the abilities and accomplishments of women and overvaluing those of men. Facilitators help departments from within to discover ways to counteract the effects of these biases, and they also exert influence from without as a cohesive and committed group of senior STEM faculty. The WISEST Staff and PI track and report on gender equity in STEM through the various internal surveys: faculty work climate survey, salary equity studies, faculty exit surveys, STEM women faculty interviews. The Facilitators have prepared this current website to help disseminate the tools and approaches they have developed while implementing these initiatives, so that others at UIC and at other institutions may adopt the most effective of these tools and approaches.


Copyright © 2009 Cynthia Jameson