Over the last year, faculty members have experienced enormous disruptions to their work and lives. Report after report documents the challenges the pandemic has brought, as well as the uneven impacts of the crisis on women, caregivers, early-career scholars and faculty of color. One recent report details the particular challenges that women caregivers confront. Another report, issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, warns that without appropriate intervention, women’s gains in STEMM may soon be rolled back.

As members of the National Science Foundation-funded UMass ADVANCE team, which focuses on long-term gender and racial equity in STEM, we believe that colleges and universities must adopt a number of measures to avoid an unnecessary loss of talented and hardworking faculty members. We have previously described our TREE model, which emphasizes how institutions can think ahead, provide needed resources, recalibrate evaluations and focus on equity. As we argue, cultivating the ground in the right ways can help ensure that faculty members grow through the pandemic rather than experience blighted careers.

Here, we lay out four concrete steps to best implement that model, including the most important ones that institutional leaders can take to create equitable systems for supporting faculty.