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Advancing Women Faculty through Collaborative Research Networks
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Steffen-Fluhr, Nancy |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | The absence of women faculty in the science and technology classroom creates a negative feedback loop that resists change. Few women want to go to places where few women are. This paper describes a solution to the conundrum of small numbers. The strategy builds on Sue Rosser’s observation that women researchers often respond to a chilly university climate by creating “a small, empowering environment in their own labs” (Rosser 2004). That is, they achieve in microcosm what they are not able to achieve in macrocosm: functional critical mass. Social network theory can be applied to achieve functional critical mass. Specifically, universities can generate strategic power for fundamental climate change by enabling and funding a network of interdisciplinary research collaborations among their current women faculty and a few of the women’s male peers. By positioning these female-majority research communities in the interstices between disciplinary departments--the “structural holes” in the organizational map--this strategy exploits what sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973, 1983) has called “the strength of weak ties”--that is, information and control advantages of being a broker in relations between people otherwise disconnected in the social structure (Burt 1998). Introduction With its metaphor of interconnection, the theme of the 2006 WEPAN National Conference, “Building Bridges,” speaks directly to the central issue that faces women faculty in STEM fields: isolation. Despite decades of taskforce recommendations, women scientists and engineers still too often find themselves positioned on islands, disconnected from the mainland of academic life. A five-year self-study published recently by my home institution, the New Jersey Institute of Technology (2005), concluded that being “out of the loop” has a devastating effect on female faculty retention--a conclusion mirrored in dozens of similar studies at universities across the country (A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT 1999). Although nearly 90% of the women interviewed in the NJIT study expressed considerable satisfaction with their lives and careers overall, most of them indicated that they had achieved success in spite of the institutional culture rather than because of it. For a number of these women, the lack of opportunity for intellectual partnership with their colleagues was especially daunting. Those women who survived often did so by finding collaborators in other departments or at other universities with whom they could do satisfying teamwork. In this paper, I describe the theoretical research that has led NJIT’s Murray Center for Women in Technology to propose a new solution to the problem of female faculty isolation--a proposal embodied in the university’s 2005 application for an NSF ADVANCE grant. In the first section below, I discuss how social network theory can be applied to achieve “functional critical mass.” I go on to discuss how various networking strategies, including the deployment of pervasive |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://journals.psu.edu/wepan/article/download/58448/58136 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
