The University of Colorado at Boulder has received $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation to help increase the number of women serving in administration positions in science, mathematics, engineering and technology programs at the university.
CU-Boulder was one of eight universities to receive an NSF grant as part of the ADVANCE institutional transformation program. The awards, which will be distributed over five years, are part of an effort by the foundation to diversify the scientific work force.
The NSF funding, and an additional $900,000 in matching funds from CU-Boulder, will be used to support the Leadership Education for Advancement and Promotion Program, or LEAP, set to kick off in January 2002, according to Patricia Rankin, an associate professor of physics at CU-Boulder, and the grant's principal investigator.
"For whatever reason, women just haven't moved up to leadership roles in many of the sciences," Rankin said. "The goal of this program at CU-Boulder is to make sure that women have the opportunity to make it to leadership positions and to strengthen our faculty in general and women faculty in particular."
Women make up 22 percent of the science and engineering workforce in general and less than 20 percent of the science and engineering faculty in four-year colleges and universities, according to the NSF.
Rankin said many women appear to stall out on the way to leadership positions in the sciences and engineering. A major goal of the CU-Boulder project is to identify and remove the factors that lead to women getting off track.
"It's similar to climate change," she said. "You have many micro-inequities that don't seem too impressive by themselves. But when you add them together they can be dramatic."
Another goal of the CU-Boulder program is recognizing young leaders, particularly women, when they enter the university as graduate students or junior faculty, and then helping them to learn leadership and management skills, so they will be prepared to take on administrative positions.
One way to learn about leadership is through coaching, according to Mary Ann Shea, director of the Faculty Teaching Excellence Program at CU-Boulder and co-investigator on the grant.
"Colleges and universities are beginning to understand the importance of providing professional development in leadership for their faculty," Shea said. "This development takes the form of establishing opportunities to develop leadership capacities and tools to be successful administrators and managers. Not unlike good teaching, many of these skills can be learned and, thereby, provide an institution with a corps of persons ready to be administrators and leaders on one's own campus. This is the essence of LEAP."
Shea recently completed a fellowship on campus where she worked with Chancellor Richard Byyny on further developing her leadership and management skills. She also learned new skills from others on campus, including Provost Phil DiStefano, CU-Boulder vice chancellors, deans and department chairs and many professional colleagues and leaders at other institutions of higher education.
The experience, including reading, discussion and observation, helped Shea better understand the process of leadership development. Now the LEAP program will give her an opportunity not only to learn more, but also to pass the knowledge on to others on campus.
Rankin said the project also will help determine what works and what doesn't work. She said plans for the program include developing a Web site featuring useful material that will help other institutions address the problem.
"Our long-term goal is to put a program in place that will be ongoing, and that will hopefully bring more women into the sciences," Rankin said.
The other universities receiving ADVANCE grants are the Georgia Institute of Technology, New Mexico State University, the University of Washington, the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California at Irvine.