Faculty Workload and Rewards Project

The Faculty Workload and Rewards Project aims to study and transform workplace structures and cultures that result in inequality between science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) men and women faculty in campus service, teaching, and mentoring workloads. The project will test whether departments that undergo a three-year intervention to address workload inequality show improvements in STEM women faculty members' sense of procedural and distributive justice, retention, satisfaction, organizational commitment, and satisfaction with time spent on teaching and service versus research. The project will also measure changes in organizational practices that result from the interventions such as dashboards and new workload and reward system policies. The outcomes of this project will have broad potential impact for other public state institutions, which are critical to improving the number of women and underrepresented racial and ethnic minority students in STEM fields. The project will create a repository of dashboard templates that can be used by other departments, colleges, and institutions to assess micro-equities in workload and establish department-based organizational practices that make campus service, teaching, and mentoring workloads fairer and more transparent. The study has the potential to make long-term shifts possible through structural change in workload assignments and accountability, and cultural changes in transparency and bias regarding those assignments.

The study includes a randomized trial of forty-two STEM and Social Science academic departments from Maryland, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. Twenty-one departments will act as controls and twenty-one departments will be experimental departments that will engage in four workload interventions over three years. These interventions include: (1) the creation of workload dashboards to enhance transparency; (2) workload and reward system adjustments to remedy inequitable workloads by gender, race, and career stage; (3) individual career training and peer support for management of workload; and (4) department-wide faculty training on how unconscious bias and department organizational practices can affect workloads and harm careers. The design allows systematic diagnosis and measurement of workload and gender and race inequality in new ways in a range of diverse departments and institutions. By engaging a stratified random assignment design and collecting both climate and workload data from each control and experimental department, the project will measure both changes in faculty perceptions of workload fairness (procedural justice) and actual workload, policies and rewards (distributive justice). This project takes an important issue and studies it systematically, with a large sample, using multiple methods and clear focus. This approach is a rigorous design for the study of faculty workload and rewards and offers an approach that can be replicated in future studies.

The NSF ADVANCE Partnerships for Learning and Adaptation Networks (PLAN) program track supports projects that promote the adaptation and implementation of previously effective ADVANCE programs in new contexts and the testing of innovative strategies to promote the participation, success, and advancement of women in STEM academic careers. PLAN projects also contribute to the knowledge base on gender equity in STEM academic careers.