Concrete Diversity Initiatives in Political Science: A Faculty Workload Intervention Program

Abstract

Recent events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice protests, and the #MeToo Movement, highlighted the various ways that systemic racism and sexism persist in academia. Underrepresentation, obstacles to career advancement, and difficult department climates persist for women and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty, despite what we know now about this “leaky pipeline” (American Political Science Association 2004). Political science is no exception. In 2020, the American Political Science Association (APSA) renewed its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) (American Political Science Association 2020). However, as discussed in Reinhardt and King’s introduction to this symposium, the political science profession remains one of the most maleand white-dominated social science fields (Mershon and Walsh 2016; Michelson and Monforti 2021). Inequities in faculty workloads are one principal source of the leaky faculty pipeline. Vital to the functioning of institutions of higher education, service and mentoring are both major elements of faculty workloads. However, these work activities have been shown to be disproportionately undertaken by women and historically marginalized groups. Although the literature currently does not offer a satisfactory explanation for these observed workload inequities, it is unambiguous about the negative consequences for a host of outcomes, ranging from department climate to retention to advancement through the ranks of the professoriate. Unfortunately, and complicatingAPSA’smission to address systemic inequity, few programs exist that attempt evidencebased interventions. To move the disciplinary conversation forward and to add a tool to the resources of political science departments, this article describes a faculty workload intervention program based on O’Meara et al.’s (2018) Faculty Workloads and Rewards Project (FWRP) that also includes the work activity area of mentoring. Here, we apply this program to a hypothetical political science department. This workload intervention program currently is being implemented at four pilot departments across the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus, with funding from theUniversity of California Office of the President’s Advancing Faculty Diversity program. THE PROBLEM