How One University Closed the Gender Gap in STEM-Faculty Hiring

Chatanika Stoop

For many years, Montana State University had a gender-diversity problem that seemed intractable: Women weren’t well represented on the faculty as a whole, and in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, male professors outnumbered women roughly four to one. Yet today the number of female faculty members in STEM is approaching what some would call critical mass. Every year since 2012, the university has hired an equal number of men and women — or close to it — for tenure-track jobs in those fields. Of 72 hires, 36 have been women.

How did Montana State pull off such a shift? A five-person interdisciplinary team of faculty and administrators, fueled by a $3.4-million grant from the National Science Foundation, made some purposeful tweaks in the search process.

They developed and carried out an intervention that included training faculty to recognize implicit bias, sharing tips on how to recruit diverse candidates, and making sure finalists could have a confidential conversation about Montana State’s work-life policies with a “family advocate” unaffiliated with the search.

“The most common question I hear is, If I could do one thing to achieve gender diversity on the faculty, what would it be?” says Jessi L. Smith, a professor of psychology at Montana State and the principal investigator on the NSF grant. “But it’s a process. It takes very careful, strategic planning.”

In the male-dominated STEM fields, the gender gap has been particularly stubborn. More women are earning Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields — about 17,000 in 2014, roughly double the number in 1994 — and they now represent 42 percent of those new doctorates. But the faculties in some STEM fields don’t reflect their presence. In engineering, for instance, women made up about 15 percent of the faculty in 2013, the latest year with available data. And about 20 percent of computer-science professors are women.

The dearth of female faculty members means that many young women don’t see role models up in front of their classes. Some research has suggested that women who have completed graduate school show disproportionately low interest in pursuing an academic career at a research university. When women do become academic scientists, they often face discrimination in the department or the lab. Some find it tricky to balance life with work and start a family. And science loses out on the problem-solving skills of an inclusive faculty.

“When we started, we had multiple departments that had one woman or even no women at all,” says Ms. Smith, who has been at Montana State since 2006 and was the first woman in the psychology department to earn tenure and, later, a promotion to full professor. “We’ve made great strides since then.”

Shortlists and Offers

Montana State has recognized the reality that faculty members aren’t usually trained to recruit and screen job candidates. That’s particularly apparent when it comes to attracting a diverse slate of applicants.

Casting the intervention as a form of support for faculty with search-committee duties was important, Ms. Smith says. The group that led the effort didn’t want it to be seen as a mandate for diversity. Still, some faculty members questioned whether a focus on gender diversity would result in lower standards for women.

MSU photo by Kelly Gorham

The first year, 2012-13, brought 23 searches for STEM faculty. In 14 of them, the search committees were randomly selected to participate in voluntary training (all accepted). Researchers collected data to document the process and outcomes.

The search committees with the training produced shortlists that were about 41 percent female, compared with about 14 percent for the other committees. And the trained committees were about six times as likely to offer a woman the job.

And candidates themselves responded positively: Women were six times as likely to accept an offer from a committee that conducted an intervention search. The limited rollout resulted in 10 women and seven men hired in 2012-13 (as often happens with academic searches, some didn’t pan out in that cycle). The following year, when the intervention was applied to all STEM searches, 10 men and 10 women were hired into tenure-track jobs.

“At first glance I was disappointed because I thought that the majority of hires would be women,” Ms. Smith says. “But in retrospect I’ll say that if we’d had 80- or 90-percent women hires, then somehow those old stereotypes of lowering the bar would have taken over.”

Before the intervention, the computer-science faculty at Montana State was all male. John Paxton, director of what recently became the Gianforte School of Computing, had been committed to adding women to the ranks, but four searches failed to yield a female hire despite an offer to at least one. He followed the new approach, and last fall, computer science hired two female tenure-track faculty members.

“We had good intentions, but we just didn’t have the right knowledge,” Mr. Paxton says of earlier efforts. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. Then it’s obvious.”

Rather than just posting job openings and waiting for people to apply, the computer-science department reached out to potential candidates personally. Search committees also learned how to word job ads “in such a way that a broader set of people can see themselves in the position,” Mr. Paxton says.

This month the computing school will again be an academic sponsor of an annual international conference for women in computing and an exhibitor at the event’s career fair. That gives Mr. Paxton and his colleagues access to a database of attendees, a key recruiting tool to help fill at least two current openings.

Montana State’s booth at the conference two years ago attracted Brittany T. Fasy, who is now on the faculty. The university wasn’t on her radar at the time, but Ms. Fasy ultimately applied, and so did her husband. The department hired them both as assistant professors. Such hires could help smooth the way for more women there.

“If you looked at the composition of our faculty before,” Mr. Paxton says, “we were saying one thing, but our faculty was illustrating something different.”

Work-Life Balance

Recruiting female faculty members to Montana State has hurdles beyond the gender gap. The institution has seen some gender-discrimination battles, in the past and more recently. Some professors believe the institution’s small-town location in a sprawling, rural state is an automatic drawback for men and women alike. One obstacle the intervention process is designed to combat is concern about work-life balance.

Jia Hu, who started at Montana State in June 2013, recalls her visit to the university. “I wasn’t even sure if talking about kids was something I could do,” she says. “I was hesitant to ask people about it.” Now such discussions, between all candidates and a family advocate who doesn’t weigh in on the hiring decision, are a given. “That’s great,” says Ms. Hu, an assistant professor of ecology and mother of two. “It just shows that Montana State understands that people have families.”

The share of tenure-track women in STEM at Montana State has jumped from 18 percent in 2012-13 to to 28 percent in 2015-16. But the grant money that supported the university’s efforts will run out in August. The challenge now is to secure the resources needed to keep the momentum going. Discussions about the program’s future are underway.

“One way to change a culture is to put new people in it, but if all we’re doing is hiring new, vulnerable, junior women faculty, that cannot be where the process stops,” says Ms. Smith, the principal investigator on the grant. “If we can create a culture where both men and women in a department feel committed to equity and diversity, that’s what we want.”

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.