Task Force Minutes
Meeting 1 - Kick-off
Date: 6 November 2020
Present:
Chair: Dimitri Mawet (Astronomy)
Co-Chairs: Matilde Marcolli (Math), David Hsieh (Physics)
Task force graduate student representatives: Shreya Anand, Elliott Gesteau, Arian Jadbabaie, Neeraja Kulkarni, Kathryn Plant
Task force postdoc representative: Fabien Defrance
Task force PMA staff: Freddy Mora (PMA)
Ex-Officio: Nam Ung (PMA)
Absent: Evan Haze Nunez
Agenda:
1- Introductions
2- Open discussion about the detailed committee's charge
Resources:
- DEI committee proposal that students of the Grad Student Advisory Board (link)
- GPS' action items that were modeled after BSEC's Anti-Racism Petition to the Institute (link)
3- Strategy for getting inputs from our PMA community and disseminating the recommendations of the committee
4- CAMPARE - CalBridge programs
5- Timeline for creating a report
List of tasks for task force:
Go over the above links in your own time
Strategies for getting input from community:
Matilde suggests having a website with anonymous comments page.
Come up with format for website and list of prompts
Put out series of guidelines for admissions/fellowship/staffing committees:
Admissions - need a committee to have second look over under-represented candidates to make sure no one falls through cracks.
CCID, Equity & Title IX office have training for best practices. Maybe our role is to facilitate and enforce these trainings, rather than compose a set of guidelines ourselves.
Should committees submit their rubrics for comments in advance of recruiting? At least have them communicated to the DEI committee.
Committee needs to have control over financial incentives to have teeth.
Need mechanism for continual light monitoring.
Involvement with WAVE
Committee should play a role in CAMPARE and CalBridge program
Neeraja and Arian suggest to split committee roles into career stages:
Before arrival
Retention
Matilde suggested initiating contact with former Caltech students who have gone through programs like Cal-Bridge, WAVE, SURF to encourage them to apply. Neeraja suggests having a template email available. Nam says currently SFP reaches out to these students.
Should DEI committee be in charge of recruiting Caltech representatives for recruiting conferences such as SACNAS or CuWIP?
Action items:
- Dimitri to contact Cobey and Shruthi to set up website.
- Dimitri will set up a shared google doc with a layout for the committee's charge using the reference document above (+BSEC report).
- All, read linked resources and add suggestions/comments/material to the new shared doc.
Meeting 2
Date: 13 November 2020
Present:
Chair: Dimitri Mawet (Astronomy)
Co-Chairs: Matilde Marcolli (Math), David Hsieh (Physics)
Task force graduate student representatives: Shreya Anand, Elliott Gesteau, Neeraja Kulkarni, Kathryn Plant
Task force postdoc representative: Fabien Defrance
Task force PMA staff:
Ex-Officio: Nam Ung (PMA)
Absent: Evan Haze Nunez, Arian Jadbabaie, Freddy Mora
Dimitri contacted Cobey and Shruthi to create the website.
Fiona is expecting recommandations from us very soon.
Compiling demographic data for PMA:
Get the demographic data for all people in PMA (students, postdocs, staff, faculty).
We should probably get the data from HR. Dimitri will get data from HR.
Also the data from HRcomes from a form they ask people when they are hired. But this form is only optional (at least for postdocs) so the data currently owned by HR is not complete.
We should also ask about data of people who gave up.
The work of PMA should be to compile data and advertise it. Getting this data should be done by Caltech.
Following BSEC request, Caltech should in the future be better at collecting data on Caltech people and disaggregating them to better reflect the minorities.
Another action would be to better reflect the groups of people coming from other countries. Considering people coming from Europe, Middle east and north Africa as part of the same group, could lead some to not really feel recognized.
Improving STEM pipeline
David will inquire about Presidential graduate fellowship, which is dedicated to increase diversity (who is funding it, how can PMA help).
Better advertising of all the programs.
Also, for graduate student webpage, it is a bit formal, referring to the law about discrimination but is not super enthuasiatic about welcoming minorities. It could easily be phrased better.
Caltech's Institute mission statement is: "The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education. We investigate the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology in a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, while educating outstanding students to become creative members of society."
Maybe our committee should come up with a stronger mission statement that acknowledges more the diversity and work environment. But link it to the Caltech mission statement since it does not go against but reinforces it.
WAVE: Does it include Maths? Answer is yes, according to the WAVE website.
Caltech decided to double the number of WAVE fellowships.
We should make sure PMA plays a role in welcoming a fair amount of WAVE fellows and that there are enough faculties, postdocs, grad students to mentor the WAVE students.
Instating guidelines for recruitment
BSEC: Having bias training and at least 2 people to review each application to reduce potential personal biases.
We must be careful to be tactful while proposing or implementing such rules because some members of PMA can be a bit opposed to such changes and training. Let's hope these people are a small minority.
Maybe ask CCID for guidance on addressing reticences of some people towards potential biases and discriminations.
Improving diversity climate in PMA
Create a DEI webpage with reporting structure (e.g. forms): volunteers = Kathryn and Neeraja
Advertize CCID events and encourage attendance from PMA community: Maybe have all people of PMA on CCID mailing list.
Reward and recognize people who invest time for diversity, mentoring, outreach etc. eg. faculties can get additional research funding or less teaching when they invest time to promote diversity. Also make it part of the recruitment process so postdocs and students who have contributed to diversity and outreach could see their efforts recognized.
Maybe students who invest time in diversity related tasks can have fewer TA tasks for example.