Stage
Professionals in STEM
Key Obstacle
Culture of Exclusion
Goals
Create identity-safe interactions to foster a sense of inclusion
ProjectRISE
Realizing identity-safe environments
Our Approach and Goals
Women leave engineering at a much higher rate than men, often citing an unwelcoming workplace culture as a factor in their decision. Our prior research with engineers suggests that fostering inclusion, respect, and allyship between men and women can improve women’s feelings of identity safety. Additionally, improving awareness, understanding, and effort to reduce bias can help to create an organizational culture of inclusion. Workplace trainings are a key strategy for educating people about bias and strategies for inclusion, yet little is understood about their measured effectiveness.
How can we educate professionals about implicit bias in a way that fosters mutual respect, motivates allyship behavior, and creates a more inclusive culture in the workplace? Project RISE harnesses our understanding of implicit bias, intergroup contact, and social identity threat to create a more “identity safe” workplace culture.
Project RISE: Inclusive Innovation tests new methods for enhancing inclusion at organizations using evidence-based strategies. Project RISE aims to create positive cultural change for professionals working in science and engineering by delivering workshops that:
- Educate participants about implicit bias
- Apply techniques to increase openness and understanding of the consequences of bias
- Provide participants with a clear understanding for how to engage in effective allyship behavior
- Foster supportive and respectful interactions between men and women in the organization
Research Spotlight
Workplace Culture Survey
The 2018 RISE Workplace Culture Survey assessed the culture experienced by women and men scientists and engineers across nine Canadian organizations. Our goal was to understand organizational culture at three distinct, but interconnected, levels:
- Institutional policies and practices,
- Interpersonal relationships among colleagues, and
- Individual beliefs and biases of men and women in the workplace.
Our research identified gender-inclusive policies, allyship, and implicit gender biases as key predictors of women’s fit and identity threat in the workplace.
Read more about our findings from the workplace culture survey
Cultivating Collaborative Cultures
Project RISE: Cultivating Collaborative Cultures is a research partnership among social scientists, STEM experts, and organizational partners committed to fostering gender diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). These in-person workshops employed a randomized control trial design, the gold standard in research, to assess effects of an in-person, interactive half-day workshop on Inclusive Innovation compared with a parallel workshop on Influential Leaders.
Relative to the Leadership workshop, our in-person Inclusive Innovation workshop increases (1) participants’ ability to recognize instances of implicit gender bias, (2) awareness of their own gender stereotypes (especially among men) , (3) the belief that gender bias in STEM is a problem, especially among those most skeptical at baseline, and (4) the belief that men can be particularly effective at fostering inclusion through allyship.
Read more about our findings from the in-person workshops
Inclusive Innovation
Building on our in-person workshops, our Inclusive Innovation workshop is testing the effectiveness of delivering the RISE workshop in a 3.5-hour highly interactive virtual dyadic workshop with key outcomes measured before and after the workshop. Learn more about becoming a partner here.
Photo Credit: UBC Public Affairs
RISE WORKSHOP TOOLKIT
Why these workshops?
The Inclusive Innovation workshop was designed as part of a research project with Project RISE called Cultivating Collaborative Cultures. The key aim of the Cultivating Collaborative Cultures project was to develop and test the effectiveness of an evidence-based Inclusive Innovation workshop in a real world, controlled study with direct comparison to those from the same organization who have not participated in the same workshop. This kind of randomized control group research design is the gold standard for best practices in research but is very rare in field-based studies.
To achieve this aim, the Project RISE team developed two empirically-grounded workshops: The Inclusive Innovation workshop was designed as an intervention to foster greater inclusion for women in STEM organizations by educating people about implicit gender bias and social identity threat and encouraging them to create individualized action plans for everyday allyship behaviors. The Influential Leaders workshop was designed to be a matched control condition that included research on the effectiveness of different leadership styles and encouraged participants to developed individualized action plans for everyday leadership behaviors. This toolkit provides detailed information about how to run these workshops using the materials created by Project RISE. The workshops are designed to be done in person as a fully interactive half-day session. A shorter virtual version of the Inclusion workshop has also been developed and full detailed will be available at a later date.
Explore Our Findings
Publications
- Hall, W. M., Schmader, T., Aday, A., and Croft, E. (2019). Decoding the dynamics of social identity threat in the workplace: A within-person analysis of women’s and men’s interactions in STEM.
- Hall, W., Schmader, T., Aday, A., Inness, M., & Croft, E. (2018). Climate control: Cultural predictors of social identity threat for women in engineering.
- Hall, W., Schmader, T., Inness, M., & Croft, E. (2021). Climate change: Improving norms for inclusion predicts greater fit for women in STEM.
- Aday, A., & Schmader, T. (2019). Seeking authenticity in diverse contexts: How identities and environments constrain “free” choice.
- Bergsieker, H.B., Wilmot, M. O., Cyr, E.N., & Grey, C. B. (2021). A threat in the network: STEM women in less powerful network positions avoid integrating stereotypically feminine peers.
- Cyr, E. N., Bergsieker, H. B., Dennehy, T.C., & Schmader, T. (2021). Mapping social exclusion in STEM to men’s implicit bias and women’s career costs.
- Block, K., Croft, A., & Schmader, T. (2018). Worth less? Why men (and women) devalue care-oriented careers.
- He, J.C., & Kang, S. K. (2021). Covering in Cover Letters: Gender and Self- Presentation in Job Applications.
- Block, K., Croft, A., De Souza, L., & Schmader, T. (2019). Do people care if men don’t care? The asymmetry in support for changing gender roles.
- Croft, A., Schmader, T., & Block, K. (2019) Life in the balance: Are women’s career goals constrained by men’s domestic involvement?
- Croft, A., Schmader, T., Beall, A., & Schaller, M. (2020). Breadwinner seeks bottle warmer: How women’s future goals predict their mate preferences.
- Régner, I., Thinus-Blanc, C., Netter, A., Schmader, T., & Huguet, P. (2019). Implicit bias predicts promoting fewer women in science when evaluators deny discrimination.
- He, J.C., Kang, S.K., Tse, K., & Toh, S.M. (2019). Stereotypes at work: Occupational stereotypes predict race and gender segregation in the workforce.
- Schmader, T., Bareket-Shavit, C., & Baron, A.S. (2022). Beyond awareness: The many forms of implicit bias and its implications.
- Schmader, T., Dennehy, T., & Baron, A. (2022). Why antibias interventions (need not) fail. Perspectives in Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/17456916211057565www.psychologicalscience.org/PPS, https://psyarxiv.com/5rxk8/
- Croft, E. A. & Loughran, J. (2018) ‘Highlighting the “ E ” in STEM : Why engineering should be taught in our schools.’
- De Souza, L., & Schmader, T. (2021). The misjudgment of men: Does pluralistic ignorance inhibit allyship?
- He, J.C., Agarwal, G., & Kang, S.K. (2022). Applying behavioral insights to cultivate diversity and inclusion.
- Kang, S.K., & Kaplan, S. (2019). Working toward gender diversity and inclusion in medicine: Myths and solutions.
- Fang, D., Kang, S. K., & Kaplan, S. (2022). We need to make sure telecommuting does not exacerbate gender disparity.
- Schmader, T. (2022). Gender disparities and inclusion in STEM.
- Hall, W., Schmader, T., Cyr, E.N., & Bergsieker, H.B., (2022). Collectively constructing inclusive organizational cultures in STEM.
- Schmader, T., Bergsieker, H.B., & Hall, W.M. (2019). Cracking the culture code: A tri-level model for cultivating inclusion in organizations.
Allyship Simulator
As part of our research, our team has created an allyship simulation that allows users to see the tangible differences that allyship can make on workplace experiences of gender discrimination and feelings of inclusion/exclusion.
Please use the below link to access the simulation –
Team Leaders
The Team
The Project RISE team combines expertise in the science of implicit gender bias, bias reduction, intergroup contact, diversity, and STEM outreach.
Lucy De Souza MA
Graduate Student, University of British Columbialdesouza@psych.ubc.caFollow them on Twitter
Joyce He PhD
Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations, UCLA Andersonjoyce.he@anderson.ucla.eduRead Bio
Sonia Kang PhD
Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Department of Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and Special Advisor on Anti-Racism and Equity, University of Toronto Mississauga Read Bio
Lesley Shannon PhD
NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (BC/Yukon); Professor, School of Engineering Sciences, Simon Fraser University Read Bio
Project Partners
Project RISE proudly partners with the University of British Columbia, University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, Canadian Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology (WinSETT), City of New Westminster, City of Port Moody, City of Vancouver, CloudArmy, District of West Vancouver, General Motors Canada, Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE), McElhanney, Metro Vancouver, the National Research Council (NRC), Magnitude Simba Technologies, Teck Resources, Canada’s particle accelerator centre (TRIUMF), Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia, Engineers Canada, the Engineering Change Lab, Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR), the National Network of NSERC Chairs for Women in Science and Engineering, the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST), and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO (CCUNESCO).
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