Dr. Jessica Gold, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University, had long been involved with the ARC Network, and last year’s call for applicants to the Virtual Visiting Scholars (VVS) program came at the opportune time. “I’ve gone to a lot of ARC Network workshops and meetings, and it’s a great community for research and for support. I had the flexibility to be a VVS this year and made sure to apply.”
The VVS program provides a unique opportunity for select scholars across disciplines to pursue research meta-analysis, synthesis, and big data curation on topics crucial to STEM faculty equity. Gold is appreciative of the space given to do an independent project, especially one that can lead to publications. “The program provides a strong sense of networking and community, especially at the yearly ADVANCE Equity in STEM Community Convening. I’ve attended before and always had a great time, but this past summer I presented during a lunch to the entire Convening. It was great exposure and I met a lot of people.”
Gold’s journey to the STEM equity field is an unconventional one. She spent five years between undergraduate and graduate school as an outdoor guide. The job was enjoyable, but during a furlough spent recovering from a hand injury, she began to think about shifting to a career that was both interesting and intellectually stimulating. As a result, when she started her PhD in sociology, she was broadly interested in gendered and racialized types of work. “In that industry, which is very physical in nature, bodies and the work that bodies do are an important feature. My advisor worked with data about faculty advising in the STEM fields, and as her research assistant, I began to see these questions about bodies and gendered work appearing in fields beyond sociology.”
This interest directed her choice of VVS research topic. “The questions that interest me most tend to be about who is doing what work and how that work is valued within different spaces. There’s a lot of research about problems in STEM and what’s happening to STEM workers, but not a lot of research about problem-solving. Who is implementing solutions?” During her research, Gold found many calls to action, most along the lines of “the university needs to do something,” but was interested in the unmentioned details. A university is an entity made up of individuals and departments, and these calls to actions were unclear as to which individual and/or department both could and should actually step up and do that nebulous “something.”
The biggest takeaway she sees from her project is a need for empirical data, not just on people whose jobs are based in equity work, but on any and all people who are doing equity work, no matter their job title. “We just don’t know that much about who is doing that work. Many of the articles I came across have NSF ADVANCE teams, but there are a lot of universities that don’t, or don’t have diversity officers or offices. Many faculty of color end up doing this type of work, so that as a finding means that’s where support should go.”
Gold’s current research project is examining the career data of people who have been involved with the NSF ADVANCE program over the last 20 years and following the different outcomes for people who come in at different points in their career (e.g. staff, faculty, or administrators). “This project has been helpful in thinking about equity workers,” she says. “It’s similar to the nature of ARC and the work they fund in that it isn’t just theoretical research, it’s applied and meaningful for change.”
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