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Peer mentoring circles for women faculty are beneficial to the personal and professional development of the participants and can increase the retention of women in academia. Here, we discuss the history and evolution of faculty peer mentoring circles as part of ADVANCE at Ohio State University, Murray State University, and South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The three institutions used the same framework, and adapted their peer-mentoring programs for their local circumstances. We describe a brief history of faculty peer mentoring programs and how each institution monitored outcomes. We summarize their successes and challenges based on participant feedback, surveys, and attendance. We share lessons learned across the three institutions, including the need to pay attention to power dynamics, how to structure cohorts, topics for discussion, and the role of facilitators. This article contributes to the peer mentoring literature by sharing the perspectives of three institutions that used the same general model but differed in details of local adaptation. 

Increasing awareness of gender barriers and biases in academic institutions is an essential component of institutional change strategies to promote equity and inclusion. There is an established perception gap in recognizing gender inequities in the workplace, whereby men faculty under acknowledge the stressors, barriers, and biases faced by their women faculty colleagues. This study explored the gender gap in faculty perceptions of institutional diversity climate at a rural comprehensive regional university in the United States. In addition to gender, differences across academic discipline and time were explored using 2 (men and women) x 2 (STEM and other) x 2 (2017 and 2022) between-groups ANOVAs. Results revealed a gender gap that persisted across time and perceptions of stressors, diversity climate, student behavior, leadership, and fairness in promotion/tenure procedures, with marginalized (women) faculty consistently reporting greater barriers/concern for women faculty relative to the perceptions of their men faculty colleagues. These findings are largely consistent with the extant literature and are discussed both with regard to future research directions and recommendations for reducing the perception gap and addressing institutional barriers to gender equity.