Workforce diversifies slowly, surely at MSU

Daina Briedis isn’t alone.

Briedis, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science, said women don’t make up a majority of the department’s faculty, but they’re gaining ground.

“I’ve seen increases in the number of women in the college and they’ve been in different roles,” she said. “The most important thing is there are women that students can interact with, so there are role models for students.”

Provost Kim Wilcox said MSU’s workforce diversity lags behind its student population, but strengthening it remains a priority.

“I don’t think our faculty cohort adequately reflects the diversity of the state and of the nation,” Wilcox said.

“We’re just as committed to recruiting a diverse faculty as we are a diverse student body.”

The percentages of tenure system women teaching in the College of Engineering increased about 4 percent since the 1994-95 academic year, according to the Office of Planning and Budgets.

At the university level, the percentages of tenure system minority faculty increased by about 5 percent in the same span of time and the representation of women tenure system faculty increased by about 8 percent.

In the early 1990s, institutions nationwide began to address a lack of diversity among its faculty.

Around this time, MSU developed its own variation on how to increase campus diversity by focusing on recruitment and retention, said Paulette Granberry Russell, director of the Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives.

“MSU did at one point develop a strategic initiative in support of diversity on our campus and what we have done is just continued to build on our early initiative under that plan,” Granberry Russell said.

MSU has focused on implementing several initiatives on the topic of diversity in the past few years, but officials don’t measure success in numbers, Wilcox said.

“We’ve never had quotas per se,” he said.

“There’s no special quotas for numbers, but we wanted to be as representative of the state and the nation as we can be.”