The importance of sustained professional development for diversifying leadership

Abstract

As longtime professional development providers and program evaluators, we share what we have learned about individual and institutional gender equity impacts of faculty development programs over 20 years, through the lens of current departmental leaders. We’ll describe our lessons learned from 18 interviews of 2020 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics chairs connected to the ADVANCE program at the University of Washington (UW), where we helped grow the number of women STEM department chairs from one to nine over the last 20 years.