The American Association of University Women (AAUW) of Colorado event keynote speech
March 19, 2022

Good morning! Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. The American Association of University Women is an incredibly important organization and I’m so thrilled to be with you all this morning.

I also want to acknowledge something as we dive into an incredibly important conversation about women’s work. At CSU and at universities and companies around the country, we’re committed to considering the intersectionality of women’s identities. We know, for example, that women of color frequently experience employment and salary disparities that exceed those of white women. And we know that trans women and many others whose gender identities are not adequately acknowledged by corporate or university cultures experience unique challenges in the workplace.

As I reflected on our conversation this morning, I realized that I have very personal awareness of why we must support women in our colleges and universities at this critical moment. Some of you may know that my leadership team at CSU is one of the most diverse in the country. Of our 18 leaders, 13 are women and 5 are women of color.

What’s relevant to our conversation today is that seven of those women—myself included—have done significant child care, elder care, and care for a seriously ill family member during the pandemic.

That’s just stunning to me. Colorado State has navigated COVID without having to change our operations or lay off any employees. These women have been instrumental in that success. And they’ve done so while also bearing the brunt of challenging, unpredictable, and often painful work in the domestic space.

Studies by McKinsey and Brookings confirm that what I’ve observed among my leadership team is true nationwide. These studies also alert us to concerning statistics about what women have experienced during the pandemic. We were primarily responsible for childcare in our homes even though a majority of McKinsey survey respondents believe that childcare responsibilities should be equally shared. We were laid off and furloughed at higher rates than men and, again, women of color were hit hardest by job loss.

And the result? One in four women in the American workplace are considering leaving the workforce entirely, particularly women in leadership roles and Black women.

That’s the answer to why we must support women in the post-pandemic university. If we don’t, we will lose them. We will lose faculty members. We will lose staff. And we will lose smart, experienced women like the members of my leadership team, who have worked incredibly hard to achieve senior roles in their fields, yet report being exhausted and burnt out.

The other question we want to discuss today is how to support women in the post-pandemic university. Like many of you, I’ve read reports and articles on this topic, and I’ve looked at the landscape of both my own university and the nation.

I believe that to support women faculty, staff, and students going forward, we must take a comprehensive approach. That means doing four things:

1. Asking our people what they need and truly listening to their answers;
2. Making fiscal and strategic decisions that prioritize our people;
3. Being creative and innovative in our approach to problems;
4. Focusing on impact as a measure of success. No program or initiative is successful, no matter how creative or expensive, if no one feels the impact of it.

I’m proud to share that you’ll see all four of these tactics exemplified in the Courageous Strategic Transformation that we just launched at CSU. I’m deeply optimistic that through this plan, we will support the women of CSU in demonstrable, sustainable ways that will positively impact their professional and personal lives.

Let me offer just a few examples of things we have done and are doing.

The first is the development of Courageous Strategic Transformation itself, as a blueprint for the future of CSU. We invited the entire university community to contribute to the creation of the plan, from the overarching language to the individual metrics we will use to measure our success. More than 6,000 people took us up on that invitation, and the result is a co-created plan that I hope some of you will look at on our website, courageous.csu.edu.

But of course, developing the plan in a collaborative way was just the beginning. Now we must do the work. One of our first steps was to elevate Human Resources to a unit that reports directly to me via a Vice President.

This Vice President is a woman, by the way! Her name is Robyn Fergus, and she is extraordinary. And with this new structure, we’re providing Robyn and her team with the resources they need to serve all of our employees. Many of these resources will address some of the biggest issues women face in the workplace.

We are looking at national comparative salary data for our administrative professional positions and our faculty. This review will highlight gender pay inequities, which we are committed to addressing.

We are re-evaluating our performance management system with a focus on retaining and nurturing employees. One of Robyn’s proposals in this area is to move away from exit interviews, which take place too late in an employee’s journey to really address any unhappiness. Instead, she’d like to move to conducting regular “stay” interviews with high-performing employees to learn what they need to keep doing well and feeling valued.

We’re also committing significant HR staff time to expand our employee wellness programs, with the clear understanding that these resources must be available virtually and free of charge if they are going to serve all of our people.

Earlier this year, we also announced an incredibly exciting university initiative that will demonstrably improve the working lives of many of our women faculty. We’ve been awarded nearly $1M from the National Science Foundation to enhance the retention of underrepresented faculty members and the promotion of gender equity in our STEM disciplines.

And while this work initially will be supported by the NSF grant, we are committed to extending our efforts university-wide, to impact faculty in all disciplines. Our long-term goal in implementing this program is to remove
barriers for women in academic roles across CSU and improve work culture for all our employees.

Finally, I’d like to share another innovative program we’ve developed, this one both implemented and funded by my office. In Fall 2020, we launched a Leadership Fellows Program open to all current CSU faculty and staff. Through this program, Fellows are paired with a Vice Presidential mentor and work on specific projects for that mentor for an academic year.

The program has already been so successful that we recruited a mid-year cohort of four Fellows who started work this January, and mentors are reviewing applications for a cohort that will start this fall.

We could not have launched Courageous Strategic Transformation without the work of the two Fellows in my office. Elsewhere, Fellows are helping us to become a Hispanic Serving Institution, to prepare for our Higher Learning Commission accreditation, and to build a more effective internal communications structure. There’s no question that this program has benefited CSU!

I’m also thrilled to share that it has benefited women faculty and staff at CSU and continues to do so. The majority of our applicants have been women, including women of color.

We’re surveying people now about why they applied for the Fellowship. But anecdotal information already suggests that many women—more so than men—have been hungry for a leadership opportunity at CSU. This program allows them to raise their hands and build those skills while respecting their need for work-life balance. To give you some evidence of this, I can share that three members of our first Fellows cohort are women with pre-school-age children—and they are all amazing!

And even more exciting, our Fellows have already benefited from the program in concrete ways. Two members of the first cohort have moved into new, permanent leadership roles, while several others have challenged their colleagues to keep engaging in professional development even after their Fellowship is over in May.

We must support women, not just at CSU but at universities across the country. I believe we really need to listen to women before we develop solutions. And I believe those solutions must be innovative, people-driven, and designed for impact.

I’ve shared a few initiatives that I’m proud of, and now I’m really interested in talking to all of you. I know we are all interested in working together to make sure that universities continue to be welcoming places for women to work, teach, research, learn and lead.