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Policy

Achieving Recognition Equity

by Eric Bigham and Vicki Grassian CoChairs, ACS Awards Action Group
November 1, 2010 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 88, Issue 44

Eric Bigham
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Credit: Courtesy of Eric Bigham
CoChair, ACS Awards Action Group
Credit: Courtesy of Eric Bigham
CoChair, ACS Awards Action Group

Professional awards continue to be important contributors to career advancement for scientists, especially those in academic institutions. In 2009, the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a new project entitled Advancing Ways of Awarding Recognition in Disciplinary Societies (AWARDS). AWARDS is designed to create a sustainable framework for ensuring progress toward more equitable awards and recognition for women and members of underrepresented groups in a wide range of scientific communities.

Vicki Grassian
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Credit: U of Iowa Creative Services Group
CoChair, ACS Awards Action Group
Credit: U of Iowa Creative Services Group
CoChair, ACS Awards Action Group

AWIS recruited a team of disciplinary societies as partners in this project, including the RAISE Project (Recognition of the Achievements of Women in Science, Medicine & Engineering), the American Geophysical Union, the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, the Society for Neuroscience, the Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics, and the American Chemical Society. These partner societies have a combined membership of 329,000 and sponsor nearly 400 awards. The goal of the project is to identify and promote award nomination and selection processes that promote an equitable distribution of awards and recognition.

ACS is a key partner in the AWARDS project because it is the largest scientific society and manages a portfolio of 64 national awards. To support the AWARDS project, the society has formed an action group composed of governance and scientific leadership and chaired by the two of us. ACS has a lot to offer and a lot to learn. Despite our continual efforts to promote diversity in the chemical sciences, ACS has too many awards with few or no women or underrepresented minority recipients or nominees, and we have too many others for which the percentage of women recipients is lower than that of the nomination pool. This situation is especially true of our technical awards.

ACS's goal in the AWARDS project is to examine the society's nomination and selection processes to see what contributes to equity and what doesn't. The action group began with an analysis of the nomination and selection statistics for ACS national awards. Next, the group plans to analyze the documentation (award descriptions, nomination forms, and instructions for selection committees) to ensure that they are clear so all candidates are fairly evaluated. The project team will study how selection committees interpret award descriptions and what criteria they use to make decisions. This information on interpretation and criteria should also become part of the documentation for an award so that decision making will be consistent as membership on selection committees evolves.

The project will ultimately produce a webinar, best practices document, and other information to help canvassing and selection team members identify, remove, and minimize any potential for bias in evaluation. Several social science studies have shown that implicit biases and nonconscious hypotheses and stereotypes, often about competence, include words and processes that unintentionally discourage diversity in nomination and selection activities.

The output of the study will be to provide better guidance to both nominators on how to prepare nomination packages and selection committees on how to evaluate nominees according to defined award criteria. And ACS needs to recast awards with defined age criteria so that time since terminal degree or time in the workforce is appropriately evaluated, in recognition of the more diversified career paths (including family leave, job changes, and career changes) that young scientists adopt today. Chemists of significantly different ages could be at the same point in their careers, and "new" and "young" are no longer synonymous.

Ultimately, ACS needs to take a strategic look at the composition of its national awards portfolio. The society continues to support older and narrowly focused awards while newer, multidisciplinary areas such as nanoscience, in which many younger chemists are now working, go unrecognized. Strategic changes in the ACS awards program will never be easy. Although all ACS awards have an avid constituency, we need to ask whether the current awards actually capture the best and most exciting research that is being done today.

Please support the ACS AWARDS action group as it refines our national awards program so that it recognizes all those who are working to improve peoples' lives through the transforming power of chemistry. Send your input to the action group by writing an e-mail to awards@acs.org.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ACS.

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