Resumen de Changing the Chairs: Impact of Workshop Activities in Assisting Chemistry Department Chairs in Achieving Racial and Ethnic Diversity
Jessica Greene, Priscilla Lewis, Geraldine L. Richmond, Jean Stockard
To address the low levels of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in top-ranked chemistry departments, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health jointly sponsored a workshop for academic chemistry leaders in September 2007. The goal of the two-and-a-half-day workshop was to create an informed and committed community of chemistry leaders who will develop and promote programs and strategies to advance racial and ethnic equity in both the faculty and student body with the goal of increasing the number of U.S. citizens who are URM scientists. This paper reports the impact of this workshop on the attitudes of the department chair faculty members who attended the workshop. On the basis of surveys of the department chair faculty perceptions before and after the workshop, the results indicate that participants in the carefully planned intervention workshop changed their attitudes regarding reasons underlying the underrepresentation and barriers that minority faculty face in the field. These department chair faculty members also increasingly viewed the solution to diversifying chemistry departments as one in which they, their departments, and universities could play a role.
