Mathematics Colloquium: White Male Allies in STEM Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Service

Speaker:  Joanna Jauchen, George Mason University

Title:  White Male Allies in STEM Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Service

Abstract :  Many STEM faculty seek ways to encourage and retain historically excluded students through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) service. Previously, Padilla (1994) highlighted the fact that DEI service can be a burden for faculty.  He called DEI service a form of “cultural taxation” (p. 26): a fee that faculty of color pay to the university without receiving benefit from their work. Benjamin Baez (2000) questioned the idea that DEI service is always a burden, arguing that faculty of color engage in DEI service as a way of creating a more equitable university. In DEI service, faculty enact a “critical agency which uses service to redefine institutional structures, and in this regard, service is important and valuable when it furthers social justice” (Baez, 2000, p. 364).

There is some recent research to suggest that DEI service is being predominantly performed by faculty who themselves are underrepresented in their departments: women of all races and men of color (Jimenez et al., 2019; National Science Foundation, 2019b). According to this research, white men are not involved in significant numbers in DEI service (Anicha et al., 2015, 2020). This disproportionate engagement silos DEI initiatives, prevents critical mass from forming, and stifles progress in STEM departments where white men still compose a majority of tenure-line faculty (Jauchen, 2023). White men could contribute to equity progress in STEM fields and relieve some of the burden of DEI service that men of color and women currently bear. My goal in the dissertation has been to understand how institutional structures and individual agency impact white male engagement in DEI service.

In this talk, I will introduce two foundational frameworks for understanding how structure and agency manifest in DEI faculty service (The DEI Institutional Activism Framework and Structuration Theory). After that, I will present one major theme of the dissertation which explores structure and agency in relational networks influencing DEI service (see figure).  First, regarding structures, I will describe the weak-tie network structuring of DEI faculty service.  Second, I will describe the ways that weak-tie structuring guided participants to seek support for DEI service from personal relational networks. Third, I describe two structural outcomes of this dynamic: (1) the overtaxation of relational networks and (2) the impact of limited networks on network knowledge.  I conclude with some reflections for us as individuals and for our department as a whole.    

Time:  Friday, April 12, 3:30pm – 4:30pm

Place:  Exploratory Hall, room 4106

Zoom and In-person