How One University Closed the Gender Gap in STEM-Faculty Hiring
For many years, Montana State University had a gender-diversity problem that seemed intractable: Women weren’t well represented on the faculty as a whole, and in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, male professors outnumbered women roughly four to one. Yet today the number of female faculty members in STEM is approaching what some would call critical mass. Every year since 2012, the university has hired an equal number of men and women — or close to it — for tenure-track jobs in those fields. Of 72 hires, 36 have been women. How did Montana State pull off such a shift? A five-person interdisciplinary team of faculty and administrators, fueled by a $3.4-million grant from the National Science Foundation, made some purposeful tweaks in the search process.