Gender Values Institutional Self-Assessment Tool for Family Friendliness

Posted by Association of American Colleges and Universities on March 27, 2017

Gender Values: Meeting the Challenge for STEM Gender Diversity

The Association of American Colleges & Universities and Project Kaleidoscope are pleased to announce the new Gender Values Institutional Self-Assessment Tool for Family Friendliness. This project, generously funded by the National Science Foundation, offers a powerful, dynamic instrument designed to assist US colleges and universities in tailoring best practices and resources to meet their own unique institutional goals for diversifying STEM faculty.

As higher education institutes across the nation strive to establish family-friendly workplace environments that are conducive to career-life balance, the Gender Values project seeks to facilitate this process by providing an online platform for examining the integrity of family-responsive policies, programs, and practices against an evidence-based framework.

http://www.aacu.org/gendervalues

Patrice McDermott, vice provost for faculty affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), is among the pilot group of faculty and administrators working with the Gender Values Institutional Self-Assessment Tool for Family Friendliness to examine policies at their institutions.

McDermott said of the resource, “Career-life balance issues for faculty and staff have been central to the work of UMBC for a number of years and, through those efforts, we had earned a national reputation as a family-friendly campus. The evidence-based Gender Values self-assessment instrument helped us understand the strengths and weaknesses of our work in ways that enabled us to deepen our efforts to achieve even greater impact. Because the instrument is purely an internal diagnostic, we were able to have the difficult and candid conversations that are required to achieve institutional change. The inclusiveness dimension of the instrument helped us identify our blind spots….This cross-unit work led to a campus-wide UMBC Career Life Balance Initiative, (funded in part by an NSF grant), targeting faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. The cultural dimension of the instrument also pushed us to engage the campus community more fully in these efforts. We intend to utilize the Gender Values instrument as a periodic assessment tool as we move forward with these efforts.”

As part of our commitment to STEM faculty diversity, AAC&U and Project Kaleidoscope invite all institutions of higher education to join us in this important work by self-assessing campus capacity for family-friendliness as a function of institutionalization, inclusivity, and culture.