Recruit and ADVANCE

Beginning in 2001, the National Science Foundation launched the ADVANCE Initiative, which has now awarded more than \$70 million to some thirty institutions for transformations to advance women. Results of studies on how to attract and retain women students and faculty underpinned our ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant funded by the NSF for \$3.7 million for five years, beginning in 2001. As co-principal investigator on this grant, I insured that this research informed the five major threads of the grant: \newline \newline 1) Four termed ADVANCE professors to mentor junior women faculty in each college; \newline 2) Collection of MIT-Report-like data indicators to assess whether advancement of women really occurs during and after the institutional transformation undertaken through ADVANCE; \newline 3) Family-friendly policies and practices to stop the tenure clock and provide active service, modified duties, lactation stations and day care; \newline 4) Mini-retreats to facilitate access for tenure-track women faculty to male decision-makers and administrators for informal conversations and discussion on topics important to women faculty; \newline 5) Removal of subtle gender, racial, and other biases in promotion and tenure. \newline \newline The dynamic changes resulting from the grant in quality of mentoring, new understanding of promotion and tenure, numbers of women retained and given endowed chairs, and emergence of new family friendly policies gave me hope for genuine diversification of leadership in science and technology. As the grant funding ends, the absence of NSF prestige and monitoring, coupled with a change in academic leadership at the top, provide new challenges for institutionalization, recruitment, and advancement of women into leadership positions in science and engineering.