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With four components – distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational – organizational fairness provides a framework for examining institutional processes, including those that relate to pay. 

Ground rules reflect what is important to team members about how they interact and can promote inclusion within the team 

This series of questions can prepare you to learn more about your institution’s compensation system and illuminate potential areas for improvement. 

Communication is essential to teamwork and requires attention to be successful. By incorporating approaches that meet the needs of your deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) colleagues, you can improve access to communication for all. 

Fairness traps represent opportunities to fortify fairness by identifying guiding principles, raising awareness about assumptions being made, and inserting fairness checks into the process. 

Understand the collective mix of salary, other pay, benefits, and non-pay considerations for faculty in higher ed. 

There have recently been calls to consider the development of student empathy within engineering coursework. We argue that this goal may be reached by infusing more traditional engineering coursework with humanities. Our Humanities-Driven Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (HDSTEM) curriculum uses a humanities format as a context to discuss science and engineering advancement. The foundation of an HDSTEM curriculum is that it would reassert the importance of humans and human impact in science and engineering, while recognizing the social, political, and cultural catalysts and outcomes of technological innovation. Therefore, we hypothesize that through an HDSTEM curriculum, students will not only develop technically accurate solutions to problems posed in an engineering curriculum but will also question their ideas' impact on society. For this project, we draw on the case of an HDSTEM course, “World War II and Technology,” taught at Texas Tech University (TTU) and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Specifically, we will present the analysis of linking specific problem-solving exercises and assignments that embed empathy with the delivery of the courses following an HDSTEM instruction modality. The problem-solving exercises and assignments incorporate the traditional Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, implement, and control (DMAIC) process. In these assignments, students were asked to reverse engineer technical, scientific, and logistical problems seen during World War II. In a more straightforward means to elicit empathy, students were assigned an additional empathize step with the DMAIC (EDMAIC) during two of these assignments. The empathize step was generic, asking students to take the perspective of the creators, users, and others affected by the problem and consider the societal needs and constraints of the time. Students completed four of these assignments (2 DMAICs bookending 2 (EDMAICs) throughout the course. Combining HDSTEM instruction modality and empathy problem-solving assignments, preliminary discourse analysis of assignments, which looks deeply at the language students used to create empathetic dispositions/identities within their work, revealed that students integrated empathy into technology design at various levels at both TTU and RIT. These disposition levels in empathy were observed and subjectively quantified using common rubrics. These outcomes result even from delivery at pre- and post-pandemic timeframes and at two institutions (i.e., the course was offered at TTU in the fall of 2019 and at RIT in the fall of 2022). In this consideration, the HDSTEM curriculum and empathy-embedded assignments have shown a cultivation of empathetic disposition among students. Further, based on these differing implementations, we will also present and comment on the experience of implementing the TTU course treatment at a new institution, RIT, to serve as a protocol in the future. These courses will be offered again in the fall of 2023 year to offer a comprehensive comparison between first-time (or one-off) in contrast to a sustained delivery of an HDSTEM curriculum. 

Institutional structures and systems of power influence salary outcomes and pay practices, which in turn are closely related to the quality of work life, informing our knowledge of what (and who) is important to the organization. This paper reports on a newly awarded NSF ADVANCE Partnership project that aims to significantly expand knowledge of best practices for faculty compensation to a broader community in higher education and provide critical insights to guide compensation practices. The project’s objective is to improve institutional understanding and influence actions regarding pay equity through broader comprehension of compensation structures. Even when controlling for a wide range of demographic and background variables, women earn less than men, and women of color experience an even wider wage gap. In post-secondary education wage gaps persist among faculty, particularly at institutions with the highest levels of research. Project activities have three aims: First, engage administrative units (Human Resources, Institutional Research, Diversity/Inclusion, Legal, and Academic Affairs) in a collaborative relationship supported by university leadership. Second, enhance pay decision-makers’ understanding of and basis for pay decisions, and their ability to communicate to individuals how their pay is determined. Third, increase faculty knowledge of institutional pay practices while emphasizing the importance of inclusion and institutional values. Expected outcomes from this work include improvements in institutional policies and practices, faculty perceptions of pay equity, leadership skills of pay decision-makers, and institutional engagement beyond the project partners. The project involves collaborations with three university partners, two national associations, and two NSF INCLUDES projects.