EDGE Initiative GOAL: To reduce barriers to effective recruitment, retention, and advancement of U.S. historically underrepresented and white (i.e., “diverse”) women engineering faculty.
EDGE Initiative TARGET AUDIENCE: The EDGE Initiative is geared toward academic engineering deans, and seeks to specifically engage the 215 (as of December 2019) out of 328 (i.e., 64%) signatories of the ASEE Deans Diversity Pledge who, along with other actions, pledged to develop and implement “…proactive strategies to increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in our faculty.” Given that deans do not operate in isolation, this work also targets institutional leaders, engineering chairs/heads, and faculty who serve to motivate and support academic deans.
CHALLENGES to engineering deans’ faculty gender diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) change efforts (ASEE, 2015) include a(n):
- Lack of centralized, evidence-based, organizational-change resources and tools
- Limited engineering-specific research-to-practice translation strategies and models,
- Inadequate pipeline of diverse women academic engineering leaders, and
- Lack of national benchmarks
OBJECTIVES,
aimed to address each challenge above, include the:
1. EDGE Change Toolkit: to provide deans with a set of centralized, evidence-based organizational-change resources, including the:
- EDGE Change Model
- EDGE College-Self-Assessment Tool
- EDGE Guidebook for College Self-Assessment of Successes and Challenges in Faculty Gender Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
- EDGE Change Process: Questions & Evidence-Based Solutions
- EDGE Action Checklist
2. EDGE Action Strategies & Models: to provide deans with engineering-specific research-to-practice translation strategies and models, including the:
- EDGE Action Steps Workshops: to increase deans’ awareness and adoption of evidence-based gender DEI strategies
- EDGE Deans’ Showcase Webinar Series: to help deans translate research-to-practice, and showcase examples of engineering deans engaged in promising gender DEI actions.
3. EDGE-ELATES Fellows & Travel Grants: to promote leadership professional development opportunities for diverse women engineering faculty
4. ASEE’s National Gender Equity Indicators: to provide deans with national college benchmarks to promote recruitment, retention, and advancement of diverse women faculty.
Additionally, the EDGE Initiative will:
5. Conduct Research to determine impact of the ASEE EDGE Initiative activities.
*NOTE: The EDGE Model, and EDGE College Self-Assessment Tool are adapted specific to college-level engineering faculty gender DEI efforts from “A Guidebook for Campus Self-Assessment of Successes and Challenges in STEM Faculty Diversity and Inclusion—Draft” by APLU, K.A. Griffin, A. Mabe, and APLU INCLUDES Faculty Taskforce, 2018. CC BY-NC-SA.