LGBTQ+ Guide Poster Presentation

INTERVIEWS AND FOCUS GROUPS

• 45-60 minute semi-structured individual interviews with 16 faculty and 2 staff, and convened 3 focus groups with 11 graduate students and 7 undergraduate students.
• Individual interviews were conducted via Zoom. Interviewees represented the diversity of our community in race and ethnicity, academic discipline, seniority, and gender identity / expression. Interviews were recorded, and the transcripts remained confidential.
• Focus groups represented students across disciplines.

TRANSCRIPT REVIEW/GUIDE ORGANIZATION

• The research team reviewed the transcripts, distilling key themes and concerns, which provided a structure for the guide. We organized the document into chapters for Terminology, LGBTQ+ Life: Then and Now, Hubs of LGBTQ+ Scholarship, Law and Policy, Climate and Well-Being, Faculty Recruitment and Retention, and Advancement, and Intersectionality and Social Justice.

REVIEW PROCESS

• Once the draft was complete, we sent it to colleagues for internal review.
• Working with our design team, we produced an initial PDF and circulated it to all faculty and key staff with a six-month window for comments and feedback.
• Final revisions were submitted to creative team in July 2021, and printed and digital guides are being distributed, concurrent with a (virtual) faculty panel launch event, in mid-October.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the guide, we will continue to track website views, requests for copies of the printed guide, requests from units for LGBTQ+ Ally trainings, and, perhaps most importantly, formal and informal feedback received by our office from members of our LGBTQ+ community and from others. We will track attendance of our October launch event and page views of the event recording on our website.

From this project’s inception, we sought to include the voices of LGBTQ+ members of our community - we could not have developed this guide without their input, their feedback, their wisdom, and their generosity in sharing their experiences. As we publish the printed version, we will continue to solicit feedback for incorporation into our website and future editions of the printed guide.

We envision the following next steps:

• Ramping up competency training
• Consolidating additional resources as they become available
• Creating a Campus-wide Faculty Out List
• Connecting with Peer Institutions and Professional Organizations to share the Guide and discuss best practices for LGBTQ+ inclusion.

• This was a project of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and the Provost’s Advisory Council on the Enhancement of Faculty Diversity, which is chaired by Dennis A. Mitchell, DDS, MPH, Executive Vice President for University Life, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, and Professor of Dental Medicine at CUMC.
• Walter Bockting, PhD, Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry and Nursing), Director of the Program for the Study of LGBT Health, and Member of the Provost’s Advisory Council for the Enhancement of Faculty Diversity, was the faculty lead
• Adina Berrios Brooks, Associate Provost for Inclusive Faculty Pathways and Jennifer Leach, Associate Director for Faculty Advancement, represented the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and provided project management, design and editorial guidance, and research support.

Along with the initial PDF, we also developed a consolidated LGBTQ+ Resources website, which contains a map of gender-neutral restrooms, pronoun use information, healthcare resources, trans-specific resources, recommended readings, links for workplace and legal concerns, a listing of national organizations, and downloadable Zoom backgrounds.