6. Create an Institutional Report Card for Gender Equality

In what would require significant collaboration and partnership, the IWISE Working Group recommends that a task force be convened to develop a set of quantifiable criteria, which, when taken and analyzed together, will form an Institutional Report Card for Gender Equality to evaluate institutions on these practices. Based on the institutions’ scores in each of the established criteria, they will be assigned a gender equality grade. Institutions will be reevaluated on an annual basis.

With the support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, NYSCF reconvened an expanded IWISE Working Group, which included men, in February 2015 to develop an institutional report card for gender equality. The group decided that it should be rolled out in two phases. The Phase 1 report card should be used specifically by grant-making organizations, like NYSCF, to assess institutions in grant application processes. The group intentionally created a simple, short report card so that department chairs could easily complete it on behalf of investigators applying to grant awards as part of the application process. Table 1 shows the proposed Phase 1 report card.

Table 1 Proposed Phase 1 Institutional Report Card for Gender Equality The proposed Report Card would ask the NYSCF applicant’s department chair to answer the following questions: • What proportion of your department’s undergraduates is female? • What proportion of your department’s postgraduate students is female? • What proportion of your department’s faculty (assistant, associate, full professor) is female? • In the last five years, what proportion of your department’s tenured faculty members that were recruited from outside your institution was female? • In the last five years, what proportion of your department’s first time tenure track faculty members that were recruited from outside your institution was female? • What is your institutional policy regarding paid family leave and pausing the tenure clock? Is there additional support available on top of the recruitment account to fund this? • What is your institutional policy regarding female representation on internal committees? What is the current percentage of female representation on appointments, promotions, finance, award, and strategy committees? • In the past 12 months, what proportion of the speakers on your department’s external seminar program was female?

To increase the impact of the report card, the IWISE Working Group recommends that grant-making organizations join together with NYSCF to use the card. Initially, the group envisions a data-gathering exercise. However, as grant-making organizations accumulate completed cards, they would require institutions to maintain a certain grade or to actively be making progress toward achieving that grade in order for the institutions’ researchers to be eligible to apply for funding. The IWISE Working Group believes that institutions will be incentivized to take gender equality seriously once significant funding is attached to their report card grades.

In addition to potentially withholding funding opportunities for poorly performing institutions, the report card will serve as a way to recognize institutions determined to exhibit excellence in gender equality. Highly graded institutions will be awarded “stars” and encouraged to educate other institutions and share best practices.

In Phase 2, an expanded report card targeted at institutions versus departments would be implemented on a wider scale and in a larger, collaborative effort between biomedical research funders, government organizations, and institutions. The IWISE Working Group began outlining the content of the Phase 2 Report Card at the February 2015 meeting and plans to release the results once finalized.

In both phases of the report card, it will be necessary to obtain relevant benchmarking data in order to assess institutions’ gender equality practices, which will be challenging due to the international scope of the report card. It is also important to acknowledge differences in clinical versus non-clinical career paths in the Report Cards and evaluation metrics will need to be adjusted accordingly.

The Athena SWAN award in the United Kingdom (UK) serves as an ambitious model ( http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charter-marks/athena-swan/ ) to develop a report card. These awards recognize and celebrate good practices in recruiting, retaining, and promoting women in scientific fields. Institutions that sign up to the Athena Swan Charter can apply for Bronze, Silver, and Gold Awards. They must achieve a number of well-defined goals and metrics to demonstrate that they are promoting best practices for creating women-friendly working environments. For example, institutions that schedule meetings during core working hours to ensure parents can drop off and pick up their children from school are demonstrating best practices.

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Nevill M. Advancing Women’s Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine: Evaluating the Effectiveness and Impact of the Athena SWAN Charter. The Athena SWAN awards have become increasingly influential in the UK as more data become available on the effectiveness and impact of the award and the evaluations are tied more closely to funding (). Beginning in 2016, the UK’s National Institute for Health Research, a major funder of clinical research, does not plan to shortlist any applications from Biomedical Research Centers or Units for funding unless the academic partner institution has achieved at least the Silver Award ( http://www.nihr.ac.uk/infrastructure/Pages/infrastructure_biomedical_research_units.asp ). This standard provides a strong incentive for institutions to work toward achieving Silver status, and it is helping to raise the profile of women in science in the UK.

It is ironic and concerning, though perhaps not surprising, that there are anecdotal reports that much of the burden for preparing Athena SWAN submissions falls on female faculty. As Phase 1 of the NYSCF report card is rolled out, institutions must avoid the same pitfall.