From Commitment to Action: Assessing the Impact of New Mentorship Programs to Promote Equity in the Society for Music Perception and Cognition

In designing our programs, we aimed to plug holes in academia’s “leaky pipeline” (Miranda, 2021). That is, our programs aimed to support scholars at points in their careers that often serve as bottlenecks, and where inequity in access to resources—whether financial or social resources—can have an outsized impact on individuals from under-resourced backgrounds. To this end, we explicitly aimed to provide both financial and social resources (e.g., mentorship and career connections) in the following ways.

First, we aimed to promote inclusion by decreasing financial barriers to attending and presenting at the SMPC conference. Trainees who cannot attend conferences are disadvantaged: They miss opportunities to publicize their findings, to hear about latest work from other attendees/presenters, and to network with current and future collaborators, mentors, and supporters of their work.

Across all of our initiatives, we worked to decrease the financial burden of attendance (for example, recipients of any of the newly created SMPC awards, described below, had the cost of conference registration waived). Notably, the Mentorship Committee expanded the conference’s Travel Grant Program, focusing on three key issues. 1) We aimed to recognize the unequal cost of attendance. In previous years, all recipients had received the same amount, leaving awardees who needed to travel further to the conference or who had lesser additional grant funding with a relatively larger personal cost. We modified the travel grant to fund an equal proportion of the total cost of attendance for each awardee, by requiring a budget as part of the application. 2) We aimed to support inclusion of researchers with caregiving responsibilities. During the years surrounding crucial career bottlenecks (e.g., the faculty job market), many researchers are primary caregivers of young children, with this burden falling disproportionally on women (Morgan et al., 2021). Travel by primary caregivers often incurs dramatic costs (childcare; costly pumping supplies for nursing parents; Rosenberg, 2022). We expanded the travel grant to cover caregiving costs, renaming it the Travel and Childcare Grant to call attention to this change. 3) We aimed to dispense funds as quickly as possible. Asking trainees to pay up-front for conference travel and receive reimbursement later creates a significant burden, causing trainees to go into costly debt (Malloy, 2020; Rosado, 2019). We therefore distributed funds electronically two months before the conference, rather than at the conference itself.

Second, we aimed to promote inclusion by providing trainees with professional connections. Trainees who are first-generation or from underrepresented groups often have fewer personal connections to senior PhD-level scholars who have experienced the “next steps” of the many possible career paths post-PhD. This and other uneven knowledge of the ‘hidden curriculum’ of academia leads to obstacles for scholars from underrepresented groups both during their PhD, as well as while navigating the search for rewarding careers post-PhD (e.g., Calarco, 2020). To ameliorate this problem, the Mentorship Committee sought to provide opportunities for open conversations and mentorship about career paths, for both academic careers and relevant paths in industry.

To connect with relevant industry professionals, the Mentorship Committee formed a new collaboration between SMPC and the Erdős Institute for PhD Professional Development (with thanks to our collaborators Lindsay Warrenburg, Roman Holowinsky, and Emily Nothnagle), and created a new speaker series on industry career opportunities post-PhD for scholars of auditory and music cognition. In this series, the committee recruited and hosted talks by industry professionals, who spoke about their career paths post-PhD and how to best prepare for these paths. These talks were hosted over Zoom to maximize access.

To facilitate open conversations on the academic career path and help demystify the hidden curriculum, the Mentorship Committee expanded the existing career panel program at the SMPC conference, with the goal of recognizing and addressing the need for mentorship at every early career stage. This led to three separate career panels at the 2022 conference: One for undergraduate students interested in PhD programs; one for current PhD students; and one for post-doctoral scholars and early career faculty. Each panel featured a moderator, and a set of panelists selected to represent a diversity of perspectives at the relevant career stage—e.g., for the faculty panel, multiple institution types (R1; R2, Small Liberal Arts College) and fields (music, psychology) were represented. These career panels were supplemented by the previously successful mentor-mentee lunch, allowing for further conversations between faculty and trainees. In ongoing work, the Mentorship Committee is also building an online networking database, which will facilitate opportunities for career development, mentorship, and collaboration.

Third, we aimed to promote inclusion by creating and implementing new awards. In doing so, we aimed to broaden the scope of work that is supported, rewarded, and publicly recognized. First, we aimed to publicly recognize scholars who are excellent mentors, and who work to promote diversity and inclusion through their mentorship. In implementing this award, we aimed to not only recognize senior scholars, but to recognize mentors at earlier career stages as well. We reasoned that at earlier career stages, recognition via mentorship awards had the potential to positively impact the hiring and promotion of excellent mentors, who would then be more able to continue to provide strong mentorship in coming decades, improving the field. Moreover, we reasoned that over time, the list of mentorship awardees could become a resource for trainees looking for PhD and postdoc positions, providing an indication of faculty known to provide strong mentorship. For these reasons, we decided to give separate mentorship awards for individuals at each of three career stages—early career, mid-career and senior scholars.

The Mentorship Committee also created new awards to recognize trainees and early career scholars. Our goal with these awards was to provide a way for early career excellence in our field to be directly reflected, in a publicly recognizable way, on trainees’ CVs. We noted that several other similarly sized societies give multiple conference awards to trainees (e.g., Society for Philosophy and Psychology; Cognitive Science Society). We reasoned that providing similar recognition of excellent trainee work in music cognition would make it more equitable for strong early career scholars in our field to compete with applicants from these other subfields, by removing differences in award opportunities across subfields. Thus, we established two additional new awards. Student Research Awards recognize the contributions of students/trainees (undergraduate, graduate, or postbaccalaureate researchers) at SMPC meetings. To allow a greater number of students’ work to be recognized, we used a two-phase review process, first naming a larger set of finalists (ten students, all of whom would have a line to add to their CVs), and then solicited short, recorded talks to identify three awardees from this set. We also established Early Career Research Awards, to recognize early career scholars with excellent and impactful research programs, who also took action to promote diversity in their research. As with the mentorship award, the Early Career Research Award aimed to recognize and support individuals at each career stage—and thus gave two separate early career research awards, one recognizing a postdoctoral scholar, and one recognizing a tenure-track faculty member.

Lastly, we aimed to expand opportunities for research into understudied topics in music cognition, especially by trainees from groups underrepresented in our field by providing funding for such projects. The field of music cognition has a historical bias toward the study of Western art music, over the study of non-Western musical traditions (Baker et al., 2020). The Mentorship Committee collaborated with the Anti-Racism and Equity Committee to establish a new Research Grant Pilot Program. This program (currently active) funds research projects that consider musical cultures other than Western art music, and are led by trainees, particularly those from communities underrepresented in society. Crucially the grant program also provides two important opportunities beyond funding: All applicants were given the opportunity to be matched with and receive feedback from more senior scholars in the field, and grant finalists have been invited to present their research at a special session during the 2024 SMPC conference.

The 2022 Travel and Childcare Grant program attracted 45 applications (out of the 294 talks and posters at SMPC 2022). Of these 45, 12 trainees received travel grants with award amounts scaled to their personal cost of attendance. Selected trainees were affiliated with a variety of academic institutions, including research-intensive universities, small liberal arts colleges, and special interest colleges (e.g., private music schools), and included three early career trainees from the Global South (India; Nigeria). For many of the recipients, the travel grants were essential for their ability to attend SMPC.

We expanded SMPC’s long standing Mentor-Mentee lunch program, providing direct networking connections between 27 mentors (a 59% increase from the previous conference) and 66 trainees at the 2022 conference. The expanded career panels at the conference were well-attended and provided guidance and discussion for individuals across career training stages (those applying to graduate programs, current graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, early career faculty). For the first time, these programs included discussions relevant to postdocs and early career faculty and attracted a large group of those at this career phase (e.g., the faculty job market; balancing teaching and research; starting a lab as tenure-track faculty). In addition, by dividing the undergraduate and graduate panels, these conversations were able to focus more directly on issues of relevance to each group (e.g., PhD program applications vs. advisor-advisee relationships in graduate school). Panelists included trainees, early career, and mid- and senior career faculty providing a variety of perspectives. Panelists and mentors reflected SMPC’s interdisciplinary interests, and included experts across the fields of music theory, computational musicology, psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics. In post-conference surveys, the mentoring/trainee-oriented panels and mentor-mentee lunches were endorsed by a plurality of respondents as their favorite parts of the conference.

The partnership with Erdős Institute was extremely fruitful for increasing exposure to non-academic career paths, a growing area of interest for SMPC trainees. Together we hosted five talks over two years on topics such as data science/machine learning, user research, and audio marketing and entrepreneurship, reaching over 500 trainees. This initiative provided opportunities for SMPC members to connect with industry professionals and gain knowledge about industry-related career paths, and also introduced SMPC and the field of music perception and cognition to the broader Erdős Institute community of trainees.

The new awards initiatives, which recognized excellence across career stages, kicked off the SMPC 2022 conference on a celebratory and community-oriented note with announcements at the Opening Ceremony, and the presentation of award plaques. These awards publicly demonstrated SMPC’s commitment to the value of effective, justice-oriented mentorship for SMPC members throughout their careers. Mentorship award recipients continue to exemplify these values through their service to SMPC, for example, by serving as panelists for career events and contributing to the Mentorship Committee and its working groups. Student Research Awards increased recognition of the high-quality and innovative work conducted by SMPC students, and drew attention to the presentations of these awardees during the SMPC conference.

The Research Grant Pilot Program broadened access to participation in our field by soliciting applications from many trainees who were applying for grants for the first time, for projects for which there are few appropriate sources of funding. The first cycle of awards attracted 15 initial letters of interest, from which seven teams were invited to submit full applications. Grants of $5,000 were awarded to two research teams. The first, led by Jay Marchand-Knight (Concordia University), examines the relationship between pitch, timbre, and visual bias in Faching (categorizing voices), with a long-term goal of applying information about gender perception in voices to gender-affirming voice training methods for transgender people. The second, led by Alex Rossi and Simbarashe Nyatsanga (University of California, Davis), combines qualitative field work and experimental approaches, and uses motion-capture technology to create three-dimensional simulations of capoeira practice. All seven teams who were invited to submit full applications to the Research Grant Pilot Program have been invited to present at a special session during SMPC’s 2024 conference, expanding the scope of work at the conference to be more inclusive of non-Western musical traditions and of the work of underrepresented scholars.

In line with our longer-term goal of improving the visibility of research on underrepresented topics from diverse scholars, we have also designed a pilot initiative in collaboration with the journals Music Perception and Auditory Perception & Cognition. This initiative will provide professional resources to early career scholars, particularly those shortlisted for the SMPC Research Grant, ensuring that their research does not get trapped in the bottleneck of the publishing process. Members of the editorial boards at both journals have committed to supporting SMPC’s goals of broadening equity and have offered to provide a welcome forum for reviews and feedback on how to successfully publish articles/short reports with them. Developing such ties with journals (in the field of music science and beyond) and getting their buy-in on justice-related initiatives will be imperative to improving equity in a meaningful way going forward.

The central challenge of this work comes from resource constraints: SMPC is a relatively small academic community (537 active members, as of January 22, 2024), with a correspondingly modest budget (over the last few years, revenue from membership has averaged about $6,000/year in non-conference years and about $11,000 in conference years; this, combined with savings of about $80K as of 2024, allows us to carry out our programming goals. (In addition to those goals described here, this includes upfront costs for biannual conference organization, most of which is projected to be recouped from conference registration fees.)

Our small community means that our programs are drawing on a limited labor pool which is relatively early career (as of 2024, membership of the ARE and Mentorship committees has significant trainee and untenured faculty representation, and very few full professors), which makes efficiency of time and effort very important. This stark resource constraint stands in tension with the fact that effective mentorship is often labor-intensive. For example, the Research Grant Pilot Program had two phases of proposal review. Participants who were selected to submit full proposals after the first review were provided with one-on-one discussions with the grant committee to provide feedback and guidance for the development of their proposals. Participants who were not selected to proceed were provided with specific written feedback and also given the option to be connected with further mentorship to develop their proposed project. Given our limited (and volunteer) membership, providing all of this programming in a timely manner was very difficult. If it is to continue, the research grant program will have to grapple with balancing the amount of labor required to deliver an impactful mentorship experience to participants while also protecting committee members from burnout and thus ensuring the long-term sustainability of the program itself. Additionally, the development of long-term mentorship infrastructure (i.e., through the development of a mentorship database, currently in-progress) will be key in supporting the efficient formation of professional connections among SMPC members, both for the programs detailed here, but also in more informal contexts.

Given our limited financial resources, it will be very important to identify the most effective scope for our programs as we move forward. For example, our conference travel grants program received many more applications than could be supported. We were able to provide funding to only 12 (26%) of our 45 applicants, indicating a high level of need. In addition, although the application information stated explicitly that childcare costs were eligible to be included in the budget, we received no budget requests for coverage of child care costs. This might be evidence that issues surrounding child care are not a barrier to conference attendance. More likely, however, it indicates that the resources we made available did not make a meaningful impact on trainees with child care-related barriers to conference participation, whether this be because conference child care is much more expensive than could be covered by the grant, or because the non-financial complexities of finding effective and trusted child care were not solved by the financial contribution of the travel grant. Although we believe caregiving responsibilities remain a hurdle for many researchers, the current scope of our budget likely cannot address or fill the extent of this complex need for caregivers in the field.

Outside of resource constraints, a second challenge that arose across multiple initiatives was the tension between merit and need in adjudicating applications for our programs. In particular, participants from underserved populations and geographical regions within SMPC tended to submit applications with a higher level of economic need. It is not a coincidence that these applications tended to come from individuals affiliated with institutions with less research-active mentorship and fewer resources, and therefore tended to receive lower scores on the typical metrics of academic merit we used, making them less likely to be funded.

It is our goal not to simply judge and reward merit, but to provide equitable resources to promote excellent research from a diversity of institutions and locations. These programs have thus fallen short of our intended aims, which instead require intervention earlier in the research process by providing substantive resources, including mentorship around scientific writing for grants and articles, research design training, and access to materials and participants. Achieving this goal will require long-term planning, larger-scale mobilization of our existing membership, and cooperation with organizations beyond our usual geographic scope.

As noted above, the goal of this editorial is to transparently communicate the initiatives SMPC has developed in response to our previous charge (Baker et al., 2000) and to evaluate the success of these initiatives. This allows us (and the broader music cognition community) a chance to adapt, change, and hopefully continue to improve our society’s promotion of anti-racist practices and of diversity and inclusion in our field. This is, of course, an active process: Effective stewardship of the programming discussed here requires more than simply repeating what we have done before. Instead, we must continue to assess the effectiveness of our programs and change (or eliminate/replace) programming that is not accomplishing its goals. This is particularly important given that the long-term sustainability of these kinds of initiatives (both financially and in terms of time commitment) can be a significant challenge, especially for a relatively small society like SMPC.

It seems clear that an important goal going forward will be to find novel ways to increase our resources, both to effectively sustain current programs and to allow the flexibility to innovate new initiatives. Because the goals described here are closely aligned with priorities at funding agencies (e.g., both the NSF and NSERC strategic plans include expanding diversity and inclusion among their key values/pillars), it may be fruitful to apply for supporting funds from these and other granting organizations. This, too, involves a labor cost, but it may be feasible to bolster our labor resources (e.g., by expanding committee membership) and to streamline and optimize the workload of many of these initiatives. More generally, it will be important to first consider sustainability of current programs before expanding and developing new programs so that the significant investment from the members of our society has a chance to impact justice in our community not just now but also in the future.

In 2020, SMPC made a series of important commitments to anti-racism and equity in the field of music cognition. We invested a large amount of resources in support of these commitments, and launched several impactful new programs to improve mentorship, equity, and robust participation in our society. We are confident that these initiatives reflect a big step in the right direction; but they also serve to underscore a number of systemic issues that our community will need to tackle in order to continue to sustain improvements in equity for our members over time. As a small society, resource constraints (with respect to both finances as well as human capital) are a real concern, particularly during the labor-intensive initial phase of developing new initiatives and building long-term infrastructure enhancements. There is also a clear need for interventions earlier in the research process to ensure that scholars from disadvantaged groups are equipped with the resources needed to produce high-quality research and can eventually compete with other scholars on the basis of merit. As a field, it will be essential for us to be creative about solutions to these issues, and proactive about implementing them.

Overall, the programs described here show that a small organization with relatively modest resources can still take significant steps to actively support equity-oriented change. Indeed, what purpose should our resources serve if not to invest in our society? We believe that continuing this work, along with the kind of transparent accountability we offer here, will allow us to keep these efforts sustainable and hopefully lead to real positive long-lasting change in our society.

We welcome feedback on any of the topics above (contact information for the executive board and committees of SMPC can be found on the SMPC website), and would be particularly interested in hearing your suggestions for how to tackle the challenges outlined in this review.

We would like to empower scholars at all stages of their career to join us in shaping the society’s programs going forward, including as future members of the Executive Board, the Anti-Racism and Equity Committee, or the Mentorship Committee.

Authors are listed in alphabetical order. All authors contributed substantially to the creation and implementation of the programs discussed in this text. All authors wrote descriptions of their respective programs, as well as notes on the successes and challenges of their work. AS, LRS, ML, TA, and DTV integrated the combined notes into an outline. AS drafted the Introduction and Program Goals. ML drafted the Successes. DTV drafted the Challenges. LRS drafted the Conclusion. All authors edited the final text. TA and DTV revised the text based on comments from the editor, and TA created the summary table.