A complex systems approach to studying the outcomes of initiatives supporting women engineering faculty.

The national need to broaden participation in STEM is persistent. Significant resources have been invested into initiatives to expand the successful participation of women and ethnic minorities in STEM, yet the plethora of factors influencing their success and the challenges they face complicate the grasping of their real impact. The use of complex systems methods, informed by theoretical foundations, has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of the aspects that make broadening participation initiatives effective as well as to identify persistent barriers to their successes. This requires exploration of complex systems tools and methods and consideration of the theories explaining the systems where these problems are located. This full research paper describes the ongoing data collection stage of a larger project evaluating the effectiveness of the NSF-ADVANCE program as an exemplary broadening participation initiative. As the ADVANCE program has now supported more than one-hundred US institution with the goal of expanding women representation in STEM careers, it offers a unique opportunity to explore the intricacies of enacting positive change for gender equity within existing complex systems. Framed theoretically under Acker’s Inequality Regimes that acknowledges a variety of dimensions embedded in organizational inequality, we collect qualitative data that is later transformed into quantitative measures to be modeled through Qualitative Comparative Analysis. In this paper we describe the data collection stage, with the decision making required to transform qualitative data into quantitative measures. We offer a reflection of the challenges faced while collecting high level organizational data from publicly available data for the execution of complex system modeling.