Center For Equity in Faculty Advancement: Identifying and Eliminating Systemic Barriers in Promotion and Tenure Processes

Faculty of color are vastly underrepresented in senior STEM faculty positions, raising questions about equity in faculty advancement processes. The project team’s prior work (NSF #1409928 and #2100034), through a consortium study of ten universities, has found that for underrepresented minority (URM) faculty, promotion and tenure (P&T) processes function as a de facto gatekeeping mechanism preventing the equitable career progression of URM faculty.

Specifically, URM faculty receive, on average, 7% more negative votes and are 44% less likely to receive a unanimous vote at the college-level, even when accounting for institution, discipline, scholarly output, and more. This grant aims to examine how, when, and why promotion and tenure decision-making processes disadvantage URM faculty and to create interventions to address systemic inequities that currently impact promotion and tenure decision-making for URM faculty.

The current project intends to work, through a diverse PI team and through partnerships with URM faculty, to identify mechanisms driving systemic biases in academia. Ultimately this project, grounded in quantitative social science research, plans to 1) identify the mechanisms of bias in current decision-making processes within P&T committees that result in racial inequity, and 2) develop evidence-based interventions and policy recommendations that ultimately form resources for advancing racial equity in promotion and tenure decision making.

Using a consortium approach - led by three Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs, also designated as Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions [AANAPISI]) and one historically Black college or university (HBCU) - the Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement (CEFA) aims to address systemic bias and racial inequity in the P&T process. The intention is to accomplish aims through two phases.

First, CEFA plans to determine the theoretical mechanisms leading to the higher likelihood of negative P&T outcomes for URM faculty in STEM disciplines, particularly URM women. Within this phase, the team intends to collect P&T data from five institutions, including voting outcomes, external review letter (ERL) data, and demographic make-up of P&T committees.

Supplementing the P&T data, the team plans to distill other metrics related to scholarly output (e.g., citation and paper counts) from online repositories. Research questions include examining the role of diversity of P&T committees and departments, choice architecture, informal/formal P&T policies, P&T portfolios, COVID tenure clock extensions, and ERLs.

The design is for the second phase to be guided by (a) insights from the first phase on the mechanisms perpetuating structural biases and (b) authentic partnerships - including collaborative workshops - with URM faculty within the consortium universities and national networks of URM faculty. Specifically, phase two of the project aims to develop evidence-based interventions, including trainings and policy recommendations for each of the four key groups in the P&T process: 1) P&T Candidates, 2) P&T Committee Members, 3) External Review Letter Writers, and 4) University Policy Makers.

Nationally available toolkits for targeting the full breadth of P&T stakeholders to reduce and eliminate structural biases and advance equity in P&T processes are anticipated project outputs.

This collaborative project is funded by the EDU Racial Equity in STEM Education activity, which is supported by the Directorate for STEM Education (EDU). This activity supports research and practice projects that investigate how considerations of racial equity factor into the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and workforce.

Awarded projects seek to center the voices, knowledge, and experiences of the individuals, communities, and institutions most impacted by systemic inequities within the STEM enterprise. Programs across EDU contribute funds to the Racial Equity activity in recognition of the alignment of its projects with the collective research and development thrusts of the four divisions of the directorate.

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.