Chapter 11: Setting up the Office of Women Faculty Programs

Chapter 11: Setting up the Office of Women Faculty Programs

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Description

In this Chapter, Dr. Travis describes how she went about setting up an office that could create rapid results for women at MD Anderson. She first hired a data person, because “it’s all about the data.” She explains data is fundamental to all of the Office’s work, decisions about priorities, and role in debunking myths. She describes how her skills in presenting issues and responding to naysayers evolved as she set up the office. Next she explains the elements of the Office’s mission: to increase the visibility of women within the institution and beyond and to have an impact on policy. As an example of the latter role, she describes how the Office was instrumental in changing the policy on tenure clock extension for faculty with a new child. She also talks about the Office’s role in getting people to look at their unconscious biases: she does a lot of teaching about this issue, using a test developed at Harvard University for unconscious bias. She also discusses mentoring. Faculty Development runs the institution’s formal mentoring programs, however Women Faculty Programs addresses issues that this program misses, such as why women don’t like to promote themselves and the skills they lack in self-promotion. She quotes Walt Whitman: “Ya done it, you’re not bragging.” She also talks about training she does for men to help them understand that they must ask women questions.

Next Dr. Travis talks about the concept of “sponsorship.” She has published a paper on sponsorship and defines it in contrast to mentoring, explaining that it’s a business model that she is adapting to a medical/scientific concept. She intends to put together a sponsorship workshop at MD Anderson and will also develop a Women’s Leadership Network spanning all fifteen units of the University of Texas System, further breaking down barriers between faculty and administrative women.

Dr. Travis speaks about one project she has not yet been able to push through: Cultural competency training focused on gender for Department chairs. She explains the need and notes that this is on the calendar for August 2014. She intends this as a pilot program to see how it works.

Dr. Travis talks about the issues that cultural competency training would cover and stresses that she sees her role as helping department chairs develop the best of the best.

Identifier

TravisEL_02_20140325_C11

Publication Date

3-25-2014

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional UnitThe Administrator Professional Path Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Religion Diversity Issues Professional Practice Diversity at MD Anderson Leadership Mentoring Women and Minorities at Work

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I wanted to shift gears just a little bit, and we’re kind of backtracking a little, but I did want to get more of a sense of how you intentionally went about setting up this office, you know, at this big leadership position, big opportunity to make big impact on the institution. So what was your thinking, your strategic plan, as you went about building this office?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

The first, beside an EA, the next person I hired—and I had a part-time project director. My first hire for the office was somebody, a data person. And I think, again, that comes from my background, you know, of being in science and it’s all about the data. It’s still all about the data. So the first initiative was always about understanding what data we needed, understanding what questions need to be answered, who do we benchmark against, how do we know we’re doing better, and then setting up the systems and the processes to identify those data, monitor those data, track those data, look for trends, and analyze them every year, because data not only—they inform you, but they also tell you where you need to put your efforts, because this office, there wasn’t any. There was nothing. So it’s like where do you start? Well, you start by looking at what’s there and then try to identify where the points of intervention need to be. It’s the same thing as like in award nominations. Is it because there are not enough women being nominated or because they’re not getting them? If it’s because they’re not being nominated, that’s easy. You get more nominated, you know. And that’s been one of our approaches, one of the interventions, make sure there are women nominated every year for our internal Faculty Achievement Awards and make sure there are enough of them. This year we made a major push to do that and succeeded in having a lot of our women nominated for Faculty Achievement Awards. So that’s one way. The other way is Are they not being chosen. Okay. So then you say, “Well, why aren’t they? Are there women on the selection committees?” And if there aren’t, then you add women on the selection committees, and then you continue to monitor. Then if they still aren’t being chosen, you have to ask the question I always ask. We nominate people, both male and female faculty, for big external awards when we’re considering candidates, and I have a committee that does this. The question I always say, “Here’s the bar; i.e., here’s who’s received this award over the past three to five years. Does this individual we’re thinking about meet that bar?” If they meet the bar, we nominate them. If they don’t, we don’t. So I think you have to be very tactical about it as well, but if you know that your individuals are meeting the bar and they’re still not getting chosen, then you have to perhaps get in front of the committees and say—I don’t know. This is one of skill sets I learned as instead of saying, “Why aren’t you,” say, “I don’t understand this, and please can you help me understand what it is that we’re not doing to make these candidates as attractive to you as we possibly can.” So that’s a skill set. Took a long time to learn that one, but I’ve learned how to do that.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

That’s sort of a reframing thing.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Yes, it’s a reframing.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

And, you know, instead of saying, “You aren’t doing,” whatever. “Why aren’t you doing—you’re not choosing women,” instead of blaming, you know, it’s saying, “Help me understand. And what can I do better? What are we not doing that we need to do?” So data was, and continues to [ ] drive this office, and also then reporting out the data, because there are a lot of myths, if you will, out there, urban myths about there aren’t women here and there aren’t women being nominated for this and there aren’t this, and if the data say that’s correct, then I say, “Yes, that’s correct, and this is what we’re doing about it.” But if the data say, “No, that’s not correct,” then here are the data.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

For example, myths that are debunked?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Well, myths that women aren’t on the search committees for leadership positions. They are. They are. I mean, the average is about 35, 40 percent. For me, the benchmark is we have 36 percent of—37 percent faculty are women. But you have to be really careful what your benchmark is. So when you’re looking, for example, at the Endowed Positions Committee, that committee has to be tenured professors, so your denominator, if you will, is the number of tenured female professors and tenured male professors, not the number of women on the faculty. So we’re very careful about our analyses and make sure that we’re using the right benchmark, if you will.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And I’m sure being clear about those processes to the institutions helped build the credibility, enormous credibility of the office.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Yes, I think that was—you know, that absolutely helped build the credibility of this office. It was—if you’re going to—women and gender equity has been a hot-button issue for a very long time, and one of the ways to reduce it from being such a hot-button issue is to present data, because you can’t argue with data. You can argue with the interpretation, you can argue with what you’re going to do about it, but the data are what the data are. And then when you can actually do things, that you start to see trends over time of things changing, that is a big—that also builds credibility, and also to know when to sunset things that aren’t working, you know. This isn’t working, we’re not doing that anymore, or else we’ll approach it differently. Maybe our approach is wrong. So I think that was the one big—for me, data. Make sure we get our duck—as I say, always have our ducks in a row, never be caught flatfooted without the data and the correct data. And that is a philosophy of this office. I have one person who does that.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow. So what were the pieces set around data?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Well, then when you have the data, it is about increasing the visibility of women and ways of doing that, not only increasing the visibility of internal women, but external woman; in other words, making sure that our internal women were on committees, were being nominated for our Faculty Achievement Awards, were going out to give talks places, taking them out to schools. We have an outreach. We do a little bit of outreach from the office, too, to try and—I take panels of our women faculty out, diverse panels of women faculty, to, again, role-model for these young women, these young students in middle school and high school. “You, too, can do this and listen to these stories.” But, you know, so you have data so you can then identify where you need to put the efforts, raise the visibility, nominating them for the awards. That was one thing. Raising the visibility of—again, bringing in women who are role models who speak to—without saying it, but speak to other faculty here, that, “You, too, can do this.” There’s another picture up there of we have—Funmi Olopade. Funmi is a professor at University of Chicago, she’s African American, originally from Nigeria. And I brought her in. I tried to bring in—always focus on the diversity of our mission area, our four mission areas, and the diversity of our faculty, and see—I want them to see people who look like them, and I don’t want to be accused of doing the same thing the men do, which is always choosing only white men for things. (laughs) So we brought Funmi in and had her meet with our African American faculty, and she had lunch with them, and, you know, it was specifically—she gave an institutional-wide address because you want everybody to see her and everybody to see that there are women who are doing this great work in breast cancer, for example, for Funmi, you know, who don’t look like you. So I think that was a big thing that we did, and so we had what we called our “Women Leading the Way” lectures. We had Renu Khator when she was first appointed chancellor of University of Houston, she was one of our “Women Leading the Way,” and she is a—have you ever heard her speak?

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Nuh-uh.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Her story is absolutely—she’s a dynamo. You can tell because in, what, five short years, it’s become a research or tier-one university—

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

—which speaks volumes for her. So we did that. Also, so you look at, okay, so there aren’t—we’re not bringing in women leaders. What does our leadership search policy look like? Who’s on the search committees? Where do we need to put in place some policies, if you will, that increase the probability or at least increase the chances that we will attract or be able to bring women in as leaders? So just looking at the infrastructure, looking at what supports all these committees that make these decisions, and saying, “There are no women on these committees,” you know. And that doesn’t guarantee they’re going to choose women. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about making sure you get the qualified women to be reviewed by the committees and seen as candidates. That was one thing. The other thing was, again, back to family-friendly, if you will, because it is an issue. We looked at—so when I chaired with the Faculty Classification Committee, we put in place a policy, a long time ago now, that allowed an extension of a tenure clock for kind of life events that happen. In other words, things happen in all of our lives, and, you know, our tenure is not life, it’s not lifetime. It has to be renewed every seven years. Well, things happen to everybody, you know, family members are ill, the Gulf War, etc. So we put in place a policy that was an extension of the tenure clock for family reasons, etc., but you had to ask permission. By the way, the first person to take advantage of it was a man who went to the Gulf War. He was called to duty. So these things work. These are gender-neutral policies. So one of the things the office did, we looked at that policy again, and we changed two things about it. One was to make sure it was gender-neutral and men knew they were entitled to this time off too. Secondly, we made it for new child in family by birth, adoption, or foster care, so any new child in family. We allowed people to take this up to six months after they had a child, because we all think we can do it all. Then you get into it sometimes, and you just don’t know. You just don’t know, but you think, “Oh, yeah, I can do everything.” Then you find out, oh, maybe not. So up to six months. After six months, they can’t have this. And the other thing that really changed, you used to have to ask for somebody’s permission to do this. Well, I said, “You know, we’re all adults here, and we all know that if you take a couple years’ extension of your tenure clock, that means your promotions may be delayed, etc., but we need to make our own decisions about what’s best for us in our lives.” So now you don’t ask permission. You just inform both the chair and the provost that you are taking a year, this year extension of tenure clock. And the good news is that sometimes you take it and you think, “Oh, I really didn’t need that,” so you’re ready for promotion at the appropriate time, at the regularly scheduled time, you can go forward. So there’s like no downside to it for anybody. So, again, it was, you know, looking at where we might make some changes that could help men and women, and men and women both have taken advantage of that policy. Then looking at trying to get people to look at their own biases, what’s called unconscious biases, which, like I said, we all think we’re fair, but we all have them, and try to get the people teaching—and Harry and I teach together in a course for the Faculty Leadership Academy in the Heart of Leadership where we talk about these implicit biases, how they play out in academic medicine, and how they—actually, you make decisions based on these biases that you don’t think you have, but you have, and they actually determine what decisions you make, and to be just be aware. Make yourself aware. There’s a test you can take to identify these biases that you have, and we all have them, and then just be aware of that. Am I saying no to this individual because of this, or is it really because of their qualifications? Be willing to ask yourself, “Am I really being as neutral on this as I need to be or not?” and then act accordingly.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

You mentioned Harry. That’s your teacher?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

[No.] Harry Gibbs.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Harry Gibbs. Now, where did that test come from? Is that—

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

It’s from Harvard.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

From Harvard.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

It’s a well-known test. Then the other thing is it was about educating, you know, educating our women, what we were talking about earlier, you know, making sure that they are aware that there are opportunities to be educated, so that they’re aware, and then talking to them about preparing themselves for a leadership position. “I see you as a rising star. I see you as a potential chair. What do you think?” “Oh, I don’t know.” “Yeah, you do know.” (laughs) “This is what you need to do to get ready for that.” And then they go about doing it. So that’s, again, it’s a way of bringing others up.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Now, did this office start any kind of formal mentoring program? Do women come to you if they—how does that all work?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

So we didn’t start it—we do have a formal mentoring program that’s run out of what used to be Faculty Development, and they’ve changed their name, and I can’t remember their new name because they changed it again. But whatever it is, they run a formal mentoring—they run a formal—the institution has a formal mentoring program, I’m on that committee, that we just started, let’s see, five or six—about five years ago.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh, really? That’s that recently?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Right. So what we do is I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I don’t want to do what somebody else is doing. I don’t want to do what’s already available. What I always wanted to do was to say, “What are we missing?” Particularly when it comes to women, what are they missing in their leadership development courses or in just their mentoring women, that we can enhance?

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And what did you discover?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Well, they just weren’t focusing on things like, you know, women understanding why they don’t like to promote themselves, and then finding ways to do that that’s comfortable for them. I mean, again, like I’m going a couple places next week, and some of the groups are talking to women exactly about this. I did a webinar for the group—it’s a leadership group for the Gastrointestinal Society, American Society of Gastro—ASGE, Gastroenterology—and it was all about advancing themselves. It was on promotion, promoting yourself, how to do it, making them understand here’s what women, not all, but generally, do, we know, and here’s how you can overcome that. Then you can do this. You can always have an elevator speech ready so that when you get on the elevator—so this was good. I have a PowerPoint that says you need an escalator, an elevator, and a stairway speech. (laughs) And it’s true, because you never know. And I tell them it always has to be up to date, and so when you get on the elevator with the president or the provost or your division head you haven’t seen for a while, and they say, “So, what have you been up to? What’s going on? What are you doing?” instead of saying, “Oh, you know, everything’s going fine,” that you be ready to share. “We just got this paper out,” or, “We just got this grant,” or, “We’re working on this clinical protocol. Here’s some exciting data we have.” Whatever it is, be ready. I did a session here not long ago for some of our women faculty, and one of them emailed me a couple days after, because that’s what I talked about was elevator speeches. She said, “I got on the elevator,” and there was her division head, who said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I was all ready to say the usual, nothing, and I said, ‘Oh, we just had this paper go out,’ etc., ‘and we’re getting ready to send another one out.’” And a few days later, I think he either emailed her or saw her, but said, “Well, what happened with your paper?” And that’s what you want to have happen.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

—and that’s why you have an elevator speech. So it’s not—so Walt Whitman said—women never want to use the “I” word, they never want to brag, they were taught not to. We’re taught it’s not nice, etc. Walt Whitman said, “If ya done it, it ain’t braggin’,” and that’s what I tell them. “If ya done it, it ain’t braggin’.” We’re always, “my team” or, “I was lucky,” and I say, “Throw the word ‘luck’ out the window. Yes, your team is important, but if you did it, you did it.” It’s that simple.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

There was another talk I gave at a place here in the State of Texas, and at the end of—this talk was about women in leadership and some of these issues around not only women understanding them, but men understanding, too, that women are not going to be the ones with their hand up in the air, “Look at me,” you know, make them realize that you have to ask questions and you have to go to the woman or the minority and say, “What do you think about this?” So I gave this talk, and at the end of it, at the question-and-answer, a woman said, “Well, you know, I don’t like to do that. Women are uncomfortable,” etc. She said, “What do you suggest?” And, you know, I spoke to her and I said, “Just get over it.” (laughs) And the dean, who was there, got up and he said, “Two take-home messages.” He thought it was great. He said, “Two take-home messages that you just got. One you just got is ‘Get over it,’ and the second is ‘elevator speech.’ Those are the take-home messages.” He said, “Just get over it.” So I think you just have to—but you have to know how to get over it.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, and you have to practice.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

And you have to practice.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, yeah, because it’s not just, “Oh, now I have a new skill. I get to do it.” You know, when you’re socialized in a certain way, it brings up all of these very uncomfortable emotions you’ve got to push aside.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Right. Yeah, and you have to practice.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And retrain yourself.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Right. And somebody said, you know, “You get in front—,” like if you’re going in to ask for a raise or a promotion, “You get in front of that mirror and you practice, practice, practice, and you go in there.” So you’re an actress, but that’s okay. Or an actor, if you will.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Uh-huh, yeah, because men deal with these issues, too, with performance anxiety—

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Sure.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

—and sometimes lack of confidence.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

I don’t see too much of that. (laughs)

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Really?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Maybe we can strike that from the record. (laughs)

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Maybe not here.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Maybe we can strike that from the record.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I’ve seen it at other places. Maybe not here. (laughter) Interesting, interesting.

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

And I think the other thing the office you’re asking about, the data, then what we did was the issue of getting a grant, contributing to the body of knowledge. Part of it is by giving these talks, part of it is by publishing papers. I finally found time to write a paper on sponsorship. It was published in Academic Medicine in October 2013, which is a—it’s a model that’s used in the corporate world for promoting women and minorities into leadership, and my suggestion is we try and adapt it to the academic world.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Now, when you use the word “sponsorship,” what does that mean, in contrast to mentoring?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Yes, it’s really very different. Mentoring is pretty much a—it’s behind the scenes. The mentor doesn’t have to stick their neck out. A mentor can be at any place in the organization. There’s peer-to-peer mentoring. It could be an assistant professor mentors students, graduate students and postdocs. A sponsor has to be somebody with power and influence, who publicly sticks their necks out and vouches for someone who others may not know very well and say, “You know, I think this person would be really good for—,” you name it. The big difference is it’s a public statement and there’s risk. You know, there’s risk involved with being a sponsor. There’s not risk involved with being a mentor. Mentoring is around usually—I mean, there are many things you get mentored for, but frequently it’s how to develop your professional career, writing grants, writing papers. Sponsorship is, specifically in the business world, about putting women and minorities in leadership positions.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And it almost seems as though it’s adding the caché of that powerful person—

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

It is. Right.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

—to a certain degree, whoever is being advanced, that, you know, “If you don’t have 100 percent, you’re not a 100 percent known quantity right now, I will lend you a little bit of my glow so that people [inaudible].”

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

And also help you as well. There is an individual who was the president of Princeton, Hal Shapiro is his name, who sponsored a number of women to be university professors. So it can be done in academia. I mean, Shirley Tillman [phonetic], Amy Gutman [phonetic]. I mean, there are five or six women that he sponsored. Again, a sponsor only opens a door. A protégé has to walk through that door and perform. I always give the example—I always start these talks with examples of mentors and sponsors—or not mentors—sponsors and protégés. One of the mentor-protégé or sponsor-protégé relationships that I have there is John McCain. I’ll have Sarah Palin’s picture, and I’ll say, “Who was her sponsor?” Sometimes people, they don’t know. And I say, “It’s John McCain.” Then at the end of the talk, I’ll circle back and I’ll say, “This is a failed relationship, sponsor-protégé relationship, not because they lost the election; because she didn’t know her stuff. The Katie Couric interview. She wasn’t knowledgeable. She was not loyal. She did not have his back. And that’s what a protégé needs to do. You have give 110 percent. You have to be loyal.” And sponsors benefit as well. You have someone who’s a little lower in the organization, you hear different things, you know. You hear things you may not hear otherwise. It gives them an opportunity to leave a legacy of developing future leaders and putting leaders in place. I think it’s a very—I’m doing a lot of talking on that around the country now, trying to put together—here we’re going to put together a sponsorship workshop, but we’re always—we started an initiative two years ago—it’ll be two years. Two years? Yes. Across all fifteen components of the University of Texas System, a Women’s Leadership Network, Dr. Patty Hurn, who is the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at UT, and I. So we have all the components. We have women from all the components involved, both administrators and faculty. So we really want to cross—we want to bridge the gulf between the faculty and the administrative side of the house. And next we’re trying to do a workshop on sponsorship. We’re going to do it, if not in the fall, in January for sure. That’s an exciting initiative, because our goal is to position more women in leadership positions across the University of Texas, across the components.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

. Yeah, yeah. What—I mean, as you look back, you’ve talked a lot about the programs that you feel have been successful and achieved. Has there been something that you wanted to set in place that for some reason you couldn’t push it through?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

So I’m still hoping to do it, so I wanted to do cultural competency training for particularly the leadership, for the chairs, and it’s always been on the agenda, it’s never been—I have to take the responsibility for it, for whatever reason it just hasn’t come up to as high a priority as it needs to be, but it is on the calendar right now for August. I’m doing it with our leadership consultants who work here, the EDG group, Executive Development Group. I’m doing it with one of the individuals from there, and he’s all gung-ho to go, and I’ve been the one who has delayed this, so it all falls on me on this one. And it’s a function of saying yes to too many things, and this now has to be a priority. I’ve got talks and some things to do now, and that’s my next priority, because I am committed to getting this done. We want to do a pilot program and see how it runs. We want to bring new ideas and new theories and try to get the leadership to think about this a little differently.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Why is this—what would be under the umbrella of cultural competency from the perspective of this office?

Elizabeth Travis, PhD:

Well, it would be about—everything about gender, everything about gender. It would be about what is stereotype threat and how does that play, you know. Some of the things we’re already doing, the unconscious bias, the data, because everybody here has a job to do, and this is not their job. This is my job, and my job is make them aware of places where these issues might play out that you’re not even aware of it and to alert them to that so that they become more culturally competent about these issues, that they are aware that women and, most likely, a lot of minorities, too, particularly the intersection of underrepresented minority women or underrepresented women faculty, don’t perhaps ask for what they want and don’t stick their hand in the air. So making them aware of the differences, the cultural differences, that we all think we know, but probably we’re not as aware of them as we need to be. I think it can only be helpful to them, at least I hope so, in doing their job, and their job is to develop the best of the best, retain the best of the best, and position for leadership the best of the best. So whatever ways I can increase their knowledge, improve their skill set in doing that, it’s part of the charge of this office, quite frankly, to do that. It’s not only to educate the women; it’s to educate everybody.

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Chapter 11: Setting up the Office of Women Faculty Programs

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