ADVANCE Partnership: Ensuring Fair Access to Career-enhancing Opportunities on Medical School Faculties

Women are underrepresented at every level of academic medicine, with even greater underrepresentation of women of color. This lack of diversity significantly compromises both the quality of medical research and medicine’s ability to serve the diverse US population. One key reason why women, and women of color in particular, leave the STEMM pipeline is that they are unable to access the opportunities that lead to promotion.

Prior work by this team and others has documented that women of all races do dramatically more low-profile “office housework” than men. Similarly, women, and particularly women of color, report dramatically less access to career-enhancing opportunities (“glamour work”) that lead to retention and advancement. A prior experiment outside of medicine found that the 90-minute Individual Bias Interrupters (IBI) workshop equalized the distribution of the office housework.

This project aims to combine the IBI workshop with an intervention to equalize access to career-enhancing “glamour” work. The proposed Interrupting Bias in Medicine Intervention (IBIM) includes: 1) a version of the IBI, which addresses bias based on race, gender, and social class, adapted for the medical school environment; 2) a new Access-to-Opportunities (ATO) workshop presenting the research on how bias affects access to opportunities in medical schools; and 3) a Tasking Tool to enable division chiefs to track access to opportunities in just 5-10 minutes a month.

Prior research has shown the importance of addressing the “office housework” and the “glamour work” simultaneously to reduce the likelihood of women and especially women of color simply doing more work (e.g., adding glamour work to their already heavy load of office housework). The end result of the project aims to be a cost-effective, evidence-based, readily-scalable program designed for medical schools, which could be readily adapted to other university departments.

This project has 3 main goals: 1) Adapt the IBI workshop for leaders in academic medicine, 2) Develop and launch an Access-to-Opportunities workshop and Tasking Tool, and 3) Assess intervention efficacy. The assessment of efficacy will be done using six months of pre- and post-data from the Tasking Tool, as well as the Workplace Experiences Survey, a 10-minute survey that pinpoints how bias is playing out in a specific workplace.

This intervention aims to enhance full participation of women of color in STEM, both inside and outside of medical schools, by directly addressing the lack of access to opportunities that lead to promotion. The project findings and strategies for systemic change will be disseminated through the medical community in academic journals, national/regional conference presentations, and in the popular media.

The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in policies, processes, practices, and the organizational culture and climate.

ADVANCE "Partnership" awards provide support for the adaptation and adoption of evidence-based strategies to academic, non-profit institutions of higher education and non-academic, non-profit organizations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.