Beyond Binders Full of Women: NSF ADVANCE and Initiatives for Institutional Transformation

To address issues of gender inequity in STEM fields and academia more broadly, in 2001, the National Science Foundation (NSF) began the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) program. This research draws on concepts of gendered organizations and findings of universities as special cases of gendered bureaucracy to analyze initiatives developed by ADVANCE institutions for the purpose of creating a more equitable academy. Through an empirical analysis of the initiatives at four cohorts of ADVANCE schools, we examine ADVANCE as an equity program that seeks organizational and cultural change (i.e., institutional transformation), but conceptualizes equity in terms of the aggregate number of women in STEM fields (i.e., representation). We conclude by discussing the unevenness of institutional change that requires addressing gendering processes at both surface and "deep" levels, the importance of transparency and accountability at all incongruous levels of academic bureaucracy, and how feminist goals may be constrained by institutional contexts. Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge Tina Deshotels, Ruth Chananie, and three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and astute suggestions. We also thank Sharon Bird and Laura Kramer for insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Notes 1In addition to specific institutional Web sites, Virginia Tech operates ADVANCE portal (http://www.portal.advance.vt.edu/) listing all ADVANCE grantees and describing select ADVANCE initiatives. 2We collected and examined 28 out 37 NSF ADVANCE proposals. Since we had proposals from the majority of schools representing all four cohorts, we believe these proposals provide an accurate snapshot of the initiatives planned by each cohort. 3Several schools seek to address racial inequity in STEM fields through their ADVANCE grants, although this is not the primary focus of the program. Please see Hunt et al. (Citation2012) for a further discussion of this issue. 4This is except in the case where such initiatives could be coded as accountability for the ADVANCE project.