Fall 2025 Colloquium Series

During crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, equity initiatives in higher education are often the first to lose momentum as institutions shift focus away from structural change. In this talk, I'll share my findings from a study of the NSF ADVANCE program, a national effort to promote gender equity in academic STEM, and how its Community of Practice (CoP) persisted and adapted during the pandemic. Drawing on interview data with ADVANCE leaders, we show how the formal, national CoP gave rise to a range of sub-communities that played distinct roles at different points of the crisis. Early on, peer-led, informal groups provided vital emotional and practical support when institutions were immobilized. Over time, more formal, institutionalized groups helped transform those short-term strategies into lasting organizational change. By tracing these dynamics, we argue that sustaining equity work requires flexible CoP ecosystems that can meet emotional, social, and cognitive needs across time. I'll conclude by reflecting on what these findings reveal about building durable infrastructures of support for equity-focused change, and on how overlapping, mutually reinforcing CoPs contribute to both theory and practice on sustaining organizational equity work.

 

Jessica Gold, Ph.D., is the Consulting Scientist on the Panel on AI and Economic Inclusion at the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and a Senior Research Scientist at the WZB Social Science Center Berlin for the SCRIPTS Excellence Cluster. She is a mixed methods sociologist, pursuing research at the intersection of work, organizations, and inequality. Her work brings together large-scale computational analysis, qualitative insights, and network approaches to understand how systems shape opportunities for equity and inclusion.