Art for Institutional Change: Legitimizing Women in STEM Through Visibility

Abstract

The ADVANCE program strives to change institutional culture to promote gender equity among faculty in science, engineering, and social and behavioral sciences. This is a challenging goal, as most ADVANCE teams have experienced. We found that one powerful way to approach changing individuals’ perspectives and institutions’ cultures is through art. Our ADVANCE team at the University of Virginia built three exhibits—two physical exhibits on campus and one online exhibit—to portray and celebrate our women faculty through photographic portraits and oral history narratives of their experiences. Our aim was to make women visible in spaces in which they were historically barred or overlooked, such as in particular disciplines as well as at UVA itself, which only admitted women students in the 1970s. This paper documents how and why we used art to challenge assumptions about women scholars and how we evaluated the exhibits’ impact on the UVA community.