Patricia M. Lowrie

Women’s Inclusive Leadership in the STEM Disciplines
By Patricia M. Lowrie, director of the Women’s Resource Center and assistant to the dean in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University

While women as a group have made multiple advances in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), the climate in many STEM fields remains chilly, particularly for women of non-majority cultures. In order to improve STEM climates for all women and enhance women’s ability to contribute to solving today’s global challenges, STEM practitioners—both women and men—must intentionally and actively practice inclusive leadership. Inclusive leaders create (and operate within) climates that engage multiple voices, diverse perspectives, and different experiences. Such climates provide opportunities for richer dialogue and enhance each individual’s ability to influence change and discovery within complex institutional systems. Thus inclusive leadership with multicultural alliance-building at its core has a range of positive outcomes: increased potential for recruitment of women across cultures; transformed institutional climates; improved classroom pedagogies; and greater opportunity for personal, professional, and institutional success. These outcomes not only benefit the next generation of technological advancements, but also open the pipeline to science as a profession.

The Value of Diversity

In today’s global marketplace, STEM cultures assume that shared research agendas, team-based instruction, and collaborative outreach are necessary for both women and men to meet the standards of productivity expected for tenure, promotion, and leadership. Yet despite the emphasis on collaboration across different disciplines, the STEM fields have been reluctant to recognize the value of collaboration across differences of background, experience, and identity, including gender. These multicultural collaborations, like interdisciplinary partnerships, not only improve the environment for recruitment and retention of a diverse faculty, but also enhance the search for scientific solutions to global challenges.

When developing a research protocol or curriculum, scientists recognize the value of different perspectives, new forms of knowledge, and diverse approaches. But due in part to their unique cultures, including extended hours and limited regard for work-life balance issues, the STEM disciplines are reluctant to fully recognize how the subjective aspects of identity figure into the equation of success. Like many disciplines, the STEM disciplines may tend to see aspects of identity that are incongruent with their cultural norms as deficits (as when a parent stops the tenure clock for the birth or adoption of a child). But gender, race, class, age, disability, religious practice, or sexual orientation often positively influence an individual’s work in the field, laboratory, or classroom. Researchers who are able to bring all aspects of themselves into the workplace (as when an institution exercises family-friendly policies) instead of leaving parts of their identities “outside the door” are more able focus on their work. They are able to let identity provide focus for their individual lens, channeling their scientific acumen in productive and creative ways.

By failing to recognize the full influence of identity, STEM cultures tacitly accept that certain professionals must leave their experiences, cultures, and social identities at the door when they enter their academic homes. This assumption is detrimental to individual scientists, particularly women who are trying to build their careers in an unwelcoming culture. It also shortchanges the process of scientific discovery itself, which loses out on the talents and perspectives of a diverse workforce. The challenge, then, is for scientists to include in their positive views of difference not only a range of disciplines, but also a range of identities and experiences. Multicultural allies who practice inclusive leadership are essential to making this cultural shift.

Inclusive Leadership in Faculty Cultures

Inclusive leaders are invested in building alliances across cultures, and they use their “toolkits”--the behaviors, customs, and values associated with the multiple identities including class, race, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, geography, etc.—to do so. Inclusive leaders who understand their own areas of privilege and marginalization are best able to ensure that others from different backgrounds are treated equitably. Their awareness of self and others can foster work environments that provide opportunities for diverse interpretations and opinions to receive visibility.

Inclusive leadership is particularly important in relationships between faculty members, both within and across disciplines. Recent literature on mentoring recognizes the role difference plays in interpersonal relationships. This literature typically focuses on issues of “fit” and “relationship fragility”--code for the stereotypes, bias, and insufficient trust that may thwart the mentor-mentee bond and compromise relationships with colleagues. The first step toward becoming an inclusive leader is developing awareness of these biases, understanding their origin, and learning to correct them.

An inclusive leader will acknowledge how differences of identity or culture may influence decisions about a range of issues, including who serves as principal investigator, how author names are sequenced, who travels for presentations, how resources are distributed, or how graduate students are assigned. Likewise, inclusive leaders are aware of, and take steps to minimize, their own and others’ biases when making decisions related to faculty recruitment, particularly when that recruitment has potential to diversify the faculty. Inclusive leaders can use the same skills to enhance departmental policies and faculty development opportunities that benefit all faculty members. By fostering visible alliances across the broader faculty, these leaders may also assist faculty recruitment by demonstrating evidence of an institutional commitment to creating an inclusive environment.

Multicultural Work in the Classroom

Inclusive leadership has particular significance in the classroom, where the seeds for inclusiveness as well as recruitment and retention of future scientists are planted. By demonstrating inclusive leadership to undergraduate students who are just entering the STEM pipeline, faculty can enhance the learning experience for all students and stimulate those who have been historically underrepresented in the STEM disciplines to consider advancing in the sciences.

Instructors can exercise inclusive leadership in the classroom by intentionally including multiculturalism in the curriculum. The curriculum should include evidence of how people from a range of cultures have contributed to scientific fields (such as how indigenous African cultures applied mathematics, a history of discovery often ignored or attributed to others). This practice benefits students with race and gender privilege, who will have more comprehensive educational experiences when their coursework includes these examples. It is also beneficial to marginalized students in the same classroom, who see that their culture matters and that faculty recognize its importance.  

Despite the benefits of an expanded curriculum, STEM faculty frequently lament that incorporating multiculturalism into the classroom is inordinately challenging for those who have not themselves been exposed to the benefits of diversity. Yet this challenge demonstrates another benefit of multicultural, interdepartmental relationships. Allies from the non-STEM disciplines—particularly those that are attuned to issues of gender and multiculturalism, like women’s studies—can assist in expanding the curriculum. Thus multicultural allies working across disciplines can improve pedagogy as well as retention.

Conclusion

In many areas, the seeds of change for women across cultures have already been planted. Through initiatives like ADVANCE grants, the National Science Foundation has defined strategies to increase women’s representation and to provide leadership opportunities in STEM. Recipients of these grants frequently embed issues of race underrepresentation and the need to recruit women from diverse identities in both their proposed approaches and the dialogue that shapes their goals. But efforts to improve cultures for women in the sciences must do more than address inclusive leadership as an “add on”: they must position it as a core concept. To move from ideology to outcome, institutional leaders must demonstrate awareness of how inclusive climates affect recruitment and retention and benefit the scientific process at large. The benefits to both individuals and science are too great to overlook.

Patricia M. Lowrie is a member of the Campus Women Lead Project on Inclusive Excellence. Campus Women Lead believes that women can advance inclusive leadership in higher education institutions by building multicultural alliances. If you want to raise questions on your campus about how to increase engaged education using diversity as a key vehicle for expanding intellectual and practical choices, consider bringing a Campus Women Lead workshop to your campus. For more information, visit our Web site or contact Kathryn Campbell at campbell@aacu.org.