Sometimes I wonder if we focus on STEM recruitment instead of retention because recruitment lets us talk about how exciting and impactful our field is, whereas retention requires us to look at our own culpability in creating and maintaining environments where people don’t thrive.

One is a lot more work than the other, one requires institutional transformation and culture change, one is more expensive, and only one works to truly increase representation.

💯

Yeah, actually talking to some scientist folks, it seems all the "diversity in STEM" stops at the recruitment, because actually creating environments that allow for non-cis-white-men to thrive would mean changing the power structures, and we can't have THAT.

I would say cynically that recruitment makes money selling courses and offering unpaid internships and retention loses money in the form of salaries

I wonder how much of this is a STEM specific problem vs. a feature of academia. Does siloing our concerns about STEM limit us from learning how other displaced might approach the retention problem?

There is more work to be done, but in my 5 years as Director of Graduate Studies I was encouraged by the increasing interest in mentoring and retention: cimerproject.orgfaculty-inclusive-mentoring.cornell.eduparitymovement.orgwww.agu.org/learn-and-de...

In our discussions the other day faculty-track careers continued to be viewed as the "traditional" track, but I wonder if they even have the numbers (of opportunities) to continue to be considered as such. Certainly those opportunities haven't *grown* much with respect to other fields, have they?

Some brief notes on the meeting, to organize my thoughts on “beyond recruitment” and what we mean when we say that we want our students to thrive: (1/3)

People are leaving for industrial jobs because the pay sucks in academia.

This is exactly why we focus on recruitment.