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Improving Institutional Commitment for the Success of Academic Women of Color Through Focused Conferences

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Conference

2018 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference

Location

Crystal City, Virginia

Publication Date

April 29, 2018

Start Date

April 29, 2018

End Date

May 2, 2018

Conference Session

Faculty Track - Technical Session II

Tagged Topic

Faculty

Page Count

17

DOI

10.18260/1-2--29545

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/29545

Download Count

306

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Paper Authors

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Nicole N. Aljoe Northeastern University

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Nicole N. Aljoe, is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She holds a Ph.D. from Tufts University, M.A. from the University Vermont, and B.A. in art history from Vassar College. She is co-director of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive at NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, and editor of Caribbeana: The Journal of the Early Caribbean Society. Her research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literature with a specialization on the slave narrative. She teaches in these areas as well as offers courses on the 18th- century British Novel and Contemporary Postcolonial Literature. She has published essays and chapters in the Journal of Early American Literature, African American Review, Anthurium, the Oxford Companion to African American Slave Narratives, and Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. She is the author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press, 11/2014) and A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Spring, 2018 forthcoming). Currently, she is at work on two new projects: one that examines the relationships between narratives of black lives and the rise of the novel in Europe in the 18th century, and another project examining
the aesthetic translations of the neo-slave narrative genre within contemporary Caribbean cultural production.

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Stacy Blake-Beard Simmons College

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Stacy Blake-Beard is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor of Women and Leadership at Simmons College’s School of Business, where she teaches organizational behavior. She is also Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons. Prior to joining Simmons, Dr. Blake-Beard was a faculty member at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Dr. Blake-Beard has also served as Visiting Faculty at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India, for eight years and is currently Visiting Faculty with the Vedica Scholars Programme for Women in Delhi, India. She has worked in sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble and in the corporate human resources department at Xerox. Dr. Blake-Beard holds a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Blake-Beard’s research focuses on the challenges and opportunities offered by mentoring relationships, with a focus on how these relationships may be changing as a result of increasing workforce diversity. She is particularly interested in the issues women face as they develop mentoring relationships. She also studies the dynamics of formal mentoring programs in both corporate and educational settings. Dr. Blake-Beard’s knowledge and expertise on mentoring can be seen in her TEDx talk on mentoring (The Power of Mentoring as a Transformational Process
- TEDxUrsulineCollege) and in her collaboration with Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender (Mentoring: Creating Mutually Empowering Relationships).

Dr. Blake-Beard has published research on gender, diversity, and mentoring in several publications, including the Journal of Career Development, the Academy of Management Executive, the Psychology of Women Quarterly, Journal of Management Development, the Journal of Business Ethics, Human Resource Management Journal, and The Diversity Factor. Dr. Blake-Beard is co-editor of a volume focused on women’s careers (Handbook of Research on Promoting Women’s Careers) and a 2017 volume on mentoring (Mentoring Diverse Leaders: Changing People, Processes and Paradigms). She received a 2010-2011 Fulbright Award to support her project entitled “Systems of Sustenance and Support: Exploring the Impact of Mentoring on the Career Experiences of Indian Women,” in partnership with the Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India.

The recipient of numerous grants, Dr. Blake-Beard has been affiliated with the advisory board of a number of organizations, including MentorNet, Teen Voices, the Harvard Project on Tenure, and the Harvard Medical School Center for the Study of Diversity in Science.

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Michele C. Deramo Virginia Tech

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Michele Deramo is Assistant Provost for Diversity Education in the Office for Inclusion and Diversity. She coordinates the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy conference held annually in Blacksburg, Va. She has over 25 years experience in higher education administration in the areas of civic engagement, diversity development, and inclusive pedagogy. Dr. Deramo is an autoethnographer whose work focuses on narrative identity in diaspora.

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Barbara J. Guthrie Northeastern University

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Dr. Guthrie received her B.S. in nursing from Boston University, her M.S. in Nursing in Family Health from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and her Ph.D. from the New York University School of Nursing. Prior to arriving at Northeastern University, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Nursing and Women Studies and Program Director for Undergraduate Nursing Education at the University of Michigan. She left University of Michigan to take the position of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Yale University School of Nursing (YSN) and the Independence Foundation Professor for Nursing. Currently, she is a tenured Professor of Nursing and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Northeastern University’s Bouve College of Health Sciences.

Dr. Guthrie’s long history of collaborative research efforts with ethnically diverse adolescent females within and outside of the juvenile justice system has led to her receiving funding from The National Institute of Drug Abuse, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and National Institute for Nursing Research. She has been the Co-PI for a T32 grant, titled “NIH Women’s Health Disparities: Interdisciplinary Training.” She has completed a three-year summer program funded by the Josiah Macy foundation for the Josiah Macy Yale-Howard undergraduate interdisciplinary research-intensive summer program. These students participated in academic enrichment seminars, shadowed primary care nurse practitioners, psychologists, and physicians, and actively engaged in health equity-related research with Yale investigators. During the tenure of this grant, 25 undergraduates from Howard University successfully completed this program, and 21 of those students continued their education to complete master’s degrees. Dr. Guthrie has received over $1.3 million from NIMH to implement an R25 interdisciplinary HIV/AIDS postdoctoral and junior faculty summer program. This grant provided her the ability to become the primary mentor for over 15 mentees and secondary mentor for 9 mentees from underrepresented populations. The REIDS program has been refunded for another five years. In addition, she is currently the PI for a National Institute of Nursing-funded P20 grant, which focuses on increasing the number of nurse scientists who focus on a community-based, participatory approach to understanding self-management among urban populations of ethnically diverse elders. The interweaving theme across Dr. Guthrie’s research, teaching, and scholarship is her efforts to increase diversity and to promote health equity within underserved and disparate populations. She has consistently utilized an interdisciplinary perspective, which is most evident by her being PI/Co-PI on several research and educational research endeavors that focus on promoting health equity for all, irrespective of race, gender, age, educational attainment, social position, and/or history of incarceration. Dr. Guthrie’s past research efforts coupled with her current projects enable her to continue to address the health disparities that communities of color experience generally and women and girls experience more specifically.

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Kathleen Kenney Northeastern University

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Kathleen holds a master of public administration degree from the Northeastern University School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Boston College. Kathleen worked for five years as the assistant director of Northeastern’s ADVANCE Office of Faculty Development and now serves as the manager of human resources and faculty affairs in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. Kathleen is pursuing a doctorate in education, concentrating in organizational leadership studies and focuses her research on career development.

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Carol B. Muller Stanford University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-9939-4198

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Carol B. Muller is the Executive Director of WISE Ventures, an internal initiative at Stanford, designed to communicate, build networks, and help seed new and needed ventures across the Stanford campus to advance gender equity in science and engineering. She also directs Stanford’s Faculty Women’s Forum. A longtime university administrator, educator, and social entrepreneur, her past experience includes service as Associate Dean for the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, where she co-founded the campus-wide Women in Science Project. She founded and was chief executive of MentorNet, a large-scale online nonprofit global mentoring network advancing diversity in engineering and science (1996-2008). At Stanford, she was consulting associate professor of mechanical engineering between 1998 and 2002, collaborating with faculty and staff to create “New Century Scholars: Teaching, Learning, and Your Academic Career,” a summer workshop designed for new engineering faculty members. A Fellow of the Association for Women in Science, Dr. Muller and her work have been recognized with other national awards, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, and the Anita Borg Social Impact Award. She has authored and presented numerous papers, presentations, and workshops. She earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in philosophy, master's and Ph.D. degrees in education administration and policy analysis from Stanford, and continues to build upon research in the design and implementation of programs.

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Jan Rinehart Northeastern University

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Jan Rinehart is Executive Director of the Northeastern ADVANCE Office of Faculty Development. She has over 20 years in higher education, with most of her work focused on diversity in STEM fields. She previously served as Executive Director of the Rice University ADVANCE and Director of Engineering Student Programs at Texas A&M University. While at Texas A&M, she was co-PI on NSF RET, S-STEM, STEP grants, and senior personnel on the NSF Coalition and LSAMP grant. She sits on several ADVANCE External Advisory Boards.

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Rania Sanford Stanford University

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Rania Sanford is Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Stanford University. She has been responsible for launching Stanford's portfolio of professional and leadership development programs for junior and mid-career faculty since 2013. In her role, she also advises search committees on recruitment, and acts as advocate and coach for faculty, deans, and chairs. She has been working closely with postdocs, faculty, and students at Stanford for more than two decades and is a recipient of the Stanford University Postdoctoral Association Recognition Award (2013). Her research collaboration with Amy Kinch at the University of Montana explores the future of faculty needs and demands within a competency framework across institutions in the United States - work that she published and presented at the PODNetwork and at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She is a founding member of the Northern California Chapter of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, and the Stanford Markaz: Resource Center for Engagement with the Cultures and Peoples of the Muslim World. She has a B.A. in journalism and M.A. in communication, with emphasis on intercultural communication, an Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership, and is an MBTI Certified Practitioner®.

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Shawna Vican University of Delaware

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Shawna Vican is the Director of the UD ADVANCE Institute and holds a secondary appointment as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University. An organizational sociologist, Dr. Vican investigates the adoption and implementation of new employment practices and corporate social behaviors. Across her research, Dr. Vican explores how organizational policies and practices, managerial behavior, and workplace culture shape individual career outcomes as well as broader patterns of labor market inequality. Her current research includes a qualitative study of corporate diversity management strategies and a series of mixed-methods projects on diversity in the academic workforce.

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Abstract

The underrepresentation of women of color in faculty positions in the U.S has presented a longstanding challenge for most universities desiring the benefits of faculty diversity for equity and excellence, student learning, and ongoing knowledge and technology development. Lower status and fewer opportunities for women who are also members of a racial/ethnic minority group lead to their experiencing a “double bind,” with increased consequences for the survival and success of women of color in the academic profession [1], [2]. Women of color in the disciplines of science, mathematics, and engineering are even more scarce and isolated than those in many humanities and social science fields [3].

To improve this situation, some universities have recently developed, implemented, hosted, and learned from professional development conferences or workshops engaging academic women of color, and focused on understanding and responding to their needs. This paper describes four such programs, challenges in conceptualizing and implementing their strategies, and frames a discussion about how and why such initiatives offer important elements in the development, advancement, and success of faculty of color and institutional excellence.

Aljoe, N. N., & Blake-Beard, S., & Deramo, M. C., & Guthrie, B. J., & Kenney, K., & Muller, C. B., & Rinehart, J., & Sanford, R., & Vican, S. (2018, April), Improving Institutional Commitment for the Success of Academic Women of Color Through Focused Conferences Paper presented at 2018 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference, Crystal City, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--29545

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2018 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015