The Georgia Tech ADVANCE Program was one of the nine institutions to receive a National Science Foundation (NSF) Institutional Transformation award in the first cohort of awardees (2001-07). Now housed within the Office of the Provost, Georgia Tech’s ADVANCE Program builds and sustains an inter-college network of professors who are world-class researchers and role models to support the Georgia Tech community and the advancement of women and minorities in academia, particularly those who are tenured or on the tenure track by:
- Advocating for an equitable, transparent campus climate
- Advising campus leadership on policy and structure
- Increasing awareness and reducing the impact of implicit bias
- Making data-driven recommendations to support equity in faculty hiring, retention, advancement, and satisfaction.
As the ADVANCE professor for the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, I meet regularly with the ADVANCE professors from the other five colleges around these issues. Our group includes Annie Anton, College of Computing; Terry Blum, Scheller College of Business; Jennifer Curtis, College of Science; Martha Grover, College of Engineering; and Nancy Leigh Green, College of Design.
For the 2023-24 academic year, ADVANCE professors developed a PowerPoint presentation describing research-based best practices to systematically address bias in faculty hiring. This presentation was drawn from the work completed by an Institute-wide task force under the direction of Diley Hernandez and Dawn Banach from the Provost’s Office. The task force included ADVANCE professors Terry Blum, Martha Grover, and Jean Lynch-Stieglitz. IAC Senior Associate Dean Richard Utz was also a member of the task force. The PowerPoint presentation has been modified to represent IAC-related concerns. Feel free to contact Richard or me if you have any questions about best practices for hiring or if you wish to have one of us present this information to a search committee within an IAC unit or School.
In recent months I have reached out to several IAC faculty members to learn more about your concerns and to solicit advice around programming. One reoccurring theme is that faculty would like opportunities to connect with other faculty members across the Institute. In this spirit, ADVANCE is preparing to re-start The Demystifying Georgia Tech workshop series around topics of interest to Georgia Tech faculty. The first workshop should take place in the Spring of 2023-24. More details about the series will be forthcoming and posted on this website.
In the meantime, please feel free to contact mary.mcdonald@hsoc.gatech.edu with any questions, concerns, or suggestions you might have.
Mary McDonald, IAC ADVANCE Professor, School of History and Sociology