2nd Meeting of the IWISE Working Group – February 2015

Mar. 5, 2015 News

This meeting was supported by a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Goal: Develop an institutional report card for gender equality

At the second meeting, NYSCF brought together an expanded and diversified group to develop an institutional report card for gender equality, which was one of the recommendations that came out of the inaugural meeting. The report card will be used to evaluate institutions’ commitment to promoting gender equality and recognize those deemed to exhibit exceptional gender equality practices.

At the meeting, the IWISE Work Group brainstormed and discussed potential criteria for inclusion in the report card. Following the small working group sessions, each group presented its report card to the full working group. After much deliberation, the group decided that they should roll out the report card in two phases. They also discussed potential partnerships to help move forward implementation including with companies and groups like Google, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

In Phase 1, the report card should be used specifically by grant-making organizations, like NYSCF, to assess institutions in their grant application processes. The group intentionally created a simple, short report card so that department chairs could easily complete it on behalf of investigators applying to grant awards as part of the application process (see Phase 1 report card below).

In Phase 2, an expanded report card targeted at institutions versus departments would be implemented on a wider scale and in a larger, collaborative effort between biomedical research funders, government organizations, and institutions. The IWISE Working Group began outlining the content of the Phase 2 Report Card at the February 2015 meeting and plans to release the results once finalized.

Table 1 – Proposed Phase 1 Institutional Report Card for Gender Equality

The proposed report card would ask the NYSCF applicant’s department chair to answer the following questions:

What proportion of your department’s undergraduates is female?

What proportion of your department’s postgraduate students is female?

What proportion of your department’s faculty (assistant, associate, full professor) is female?

In the last five years, what proportion of your department’s tenured faculty members that were recruited from outside your institution was female?

In the last five years, what proportion of your department’s first time tenure track faculty members that were recruited from outside your institution was female?

What is your institutional policy regarding paid family leave and pausing the tenure clock? Is there additional support available on top of the recruitment account to fund this?

What is your institutional policy regarding female representation on internal committees? What is the current percentage of female representation on appointments, promotions, finance, awards, and strategy committees?

In the past 12 months, what proportion of the speakers on your department’s external seminar program was female?