Keeping Current: An Update on the Structure and Evaluation of a Program for Graduate Women Interested in Engineering Academia

According to data from ASEE, women were awarded 23.1% of doctoral degrees and held 15.7% of tenured/tenuretrack faculty faculty positions in 2015 versus 21.3% and 12.7% in 2009, respectively [1, 2]. While promising, the leaky pipeline remains a persistent problem in the recruitment of underrepresented people into tenure track positions. To help overcome this barrier, engineering graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created the Illinois Female Engineers in Academia Training (iFEAT) program to improve the competitiveness of underrepresented applicants in the tenure-track faculty recruitment process. The program is two-fold. First, seminars and panel discussions lead by faculty representing different engineering disciplines cover a variety of topics related to the job search process. Secondly, peer review sessions over the course of several months allow students to develop their own application materials. Since its founding in 2014, the program has been evaluated by considering four elements: content, format, pace, and climate. The evaluations in the first two years were based on conducting pre-, mid-, and post-surveys as well as voluntary one-on-one exit interviews. For the programs third year, we made significant changes based past participant feedback. Specific topics were expanded to increase understanding and improve familiarity with the application process. The evaluation structure was revised to increase the amount of immediate feedback. In this paper, we discuss how the program has evolved over the three years as well as how our methods for program monitoring have been revised. By incorporating these changes, we hope to continue to prepare high quality female faculty candidates, thereby diminishing the gender gap in engineering academia. Introduction The STEM fields have demonstrated a persistent gender gap at all education levels and faculty positions. This well-known gap has also lead to continuous discussion on how to address and overcome it [3–6]. Most recent data shows that women were awarded 23.1% of doctoral degrees and held 15.7% of tenured/tenuretrack faculty faculty positions in 2015 versus 21.3% and 12.7% in 2009, respectively [1, 2]. However, the data presents a complex yet slightly bleaker picture for ethnic minorities such as African-Americans and Hispanics over the same period. The percentage of PhDs awarded to African-Americans declined from 3.8% to 3.2%, whereas the percentage of Hispanic PhDs increased nationally from 3.8% to 6.1%. In 2015, African-Americans and Hispanics comprise 2.5% and 3.9% of all tenured/tenure-track faculty positions, respectively [1]. The common theme across these groups is the noticeable decline in representation of these populations among faculty ranks. Universities have begun to develop their own initiatives to address the lack of diversity amongst faculty. Broadly speaking, these initiatives can be grouped into two classifications: pipeline or climate-focused [7]. On our campus, we have created a program that addresses the pipeline problem by considering lack of preparedness and familiarity as the two dominant issues that can prohibit women in engineering from considering faculty positions upon graduation [8, 9]. Surveys have been consistently used throughout our program to track participant development at the initial, midpoint, and ends. In our first two years, our understanding of how participants felt in terms of knowledge gains as well as material preparedness was limited to these three surveys. When we began planning for our third year, we felt that we needed more data to better understand how participants were reacting to our programming, especially when taking into account the significant changes we were proposing. More specifically, our prior survey framework was limiting our understanding of whether or not we were truly helping participants improve their familiarity and preparedness to become competitive in the faculty job market. In other words, we wondered if individual sessions were beneficial to participants in terms of enhancing their preparation of faculty materials and contributed to their overall familiarity. In this paper, we expand our program evaluation significantly in the third year by administering surveys at every session. This enables us to address the following questions: (1) How does increased surveying aid in understanding participant development? (2) How can survey data be incorporated to update programming? (3) How does faculty self-selection of session participation affect interaction with participants? Figure 1: Comparison of iFEAT programming by year. Year 3 saw an increase in programming such that it encompassed nearly the duration of an entire Fall and Spring semester. Prior program structure The Illinois Female Engineers in Academia Training (iFEAT) program began in Fall 2014 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with eight female graduate students in engineering. The program was designed to cover the major components of the faculty job application with the tangible goal of each participant having a peer-reviewed application packet at the program’s conclusion. The 2014-2015 program consisted of six seminar topics, four peer review sessions, and three assessments (see Figure 1). The program started shortly after the midpoint of the Fall semester and carried over for two sessions into the Spring semester. The cohort was equally divided into peer review groups. Participants were given approximately two weeks to self-arrange peer review sessions of their materials. The first ever participants noted varying peer review experiences depending on the organizational level of their review group. Although participants were given two weeks to self-organize, we were told that it was difficult to find common meeting times to conduct a peer review. Thus, we decided to formally add the peer review to the program calendar and were treated as simply another session. Given the focus of our participants on searching for research positions (see Figure 2), the second program year saw the peer review opportunities for the research and teaching statements double. 214− 2015 215− 2016 216− 2017 TTRO TTTO nTTRO nTTTO 0 25 50 75 100