The UCR Women's Faculty Association

The UCR Women's Faculty Association has been an important institutional presence on our campus since the mid-2000s. Started by Professor Betty Lord and later shepherded by Professor Nancy Beckage, the Women's Faculty Association fostered community and provided a voluntary mentoring service connecting junior faculty with more senior mentors outside their department. It held quarterly meetings and events tailored to building community amongst the women-identified members and provided advising in professional career development.  As the driving forces behind the Women's Faculty Association transitioned to retirement, the organization became less formally active.

In 2011, an NSF-supported FORWARD grant program provided the impetus to reinvigorate the UCR Women's Faculty Association, providing a mechanism to sustain the programming developed through our ADVANCE program beyond the grant period. The Women's Faculty Association is open to all ladder rank faculty and beyond. Many of our activities are also open to lecturers and research professionals who do not have formal academic appointments, for example agriculture extension specialists.  Through the original NSF ADVANCE grant, the Women's Faculty Association sponsored a series of lunch meetings that provided opportunities for women to share in a lecture/discussion of general interest, meet informally, and develop a support community outside of their departments. During the 2011-2012 academic year, luncheon topics included a discussion of the promotion and tenure process at UCR, strategies for effective mentoring, women's health and well-being, the extraordinary differences between males and females in the animal kingdom, and how the myth that women faculty can 'Just Say No' to service obscures and promotes gender inequities. Although UCR is well-recognized for the diversity of our student body, the diversity of our faculty does not yet mirror that of our campus. The participation of women, especially women of color, in many fields within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines is lower than would be predicted by Ph.D. graduation rates. Women of color (WOC) faculty in STEM fields can face special barriers and because they are so few in number it is difficult to reach the critical mass required for a support network on any given campus.

Through the Women's Faculty Association, we organized informative programming and informal networking opportunities organized through regular lunch meetings and an annual retreat for four consecutive years. In addition, with support of the NSF and the UCR administration, data mining and analysis was performed to evaluate the recruitment, retention and professional success of women faculty in the STEM fields.  There have been many varied attempts to re-establish the Women's Faculty Association mentoring network, inviting women faculty at all levels to participate as a mentor and/or mentee. Mentees can be paired with a faculty mentor from their college, but outside of their department. In addition to the individual meetings of mentor/mentee pairs, informal coffee meetings focused on assistant or associate professors and their mentors bring together faculty with common questions and challenges for small group discussions of problems and strategies.

From 2011-2018 and long after the life of the NSF Forward Advance grant, the EVC/Provost provided additional funds for the UCR Women’s Faculty Association to include faculty from across all academic colleges far beyond the sciences.  From 2018 onward, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has continued to provide funding and administrative support to the leadership and programming of the Women’s Faculty Association.

NSF FORWARD ADVANCE Grant

Faculty Organization foR Women's Advancement, Recognition and Development

The University of California – Riverside (UCR) ADVANCE program was initiated in 2011 with funding from an NSF PAID (Partnerships for Adaptation, Implementation, and Dissemination) grant. The FORWARD program was a comprehensive and sustainable effort to support the professional advancement of women faculty in the STEM fields at UCR and across other institutions in the state of California. The program aims were to:

• Conduct extensive analysis and data mining at UCR to evaluate the recruitment, retention, and professional success of women faculty in the STEM fields
• Establish programming for women in STEM to foster success, leadership, and community-building
• Build a statewide network of women of color (WOC) faculty in the STEM fields at institutions throughout California from which women of color can garner personal and professional support.

Through the support of the Office of the Provost and working through partner organizations with common goals, such as the revitalized UCR Women Faculty Association and AWIS (the Association for Women in Science), we established ongoing programming and resources that foster success in STEM fields at UCR.

                                                                                      UC Riverside's ADVANCE Program was sponsored by NSF Grant #1107245