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Women, Work and the Academy > Conference Description
Conference Description
WOMEN, WORK & THE ACADEMY: RESPONDING TO "POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA GENDER DISCRIMINATION"
Barnard College
December 9-10, 2004
Organizers: Alison Wylie and Janet Jakobsen
Sponsors: Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the
Gildersleeve Foundation, with assistance from the ADVANCE Program at the
Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Workshop Rationale
Advocates for gender equity within academia have been working to
effect institutional change for thirty years and while much has changed,
altogether too much remains the same. There have been dramatic increases
in the representation of women among PhDs and the graduates of
professional training programs, and yet the distribution of women in
academia still largely conforms to the inverted pyramid structure noted
in the 1960s and 1970s; women continue to be under-represented at senior
levels despite persistent efforts to recruit and retain them. At the
2002 NCRW/BCRW conference, "Balancing the Equation for Women and Girls
in Science, Engineering, and Technology," this point was made repeatedly
with respect to the sciences and engineering, but gender disparities
remain a pressing issue much more widely, even in fields that have been
supportive of women. The aim of this conference is to take stock of what
we now understand about gender discrimination in academia and to
consider what must be done to realize institutional change.
In organizing this conference we take as our point of departure an
appreciation that the focus of attention has shifted, in the last twenty
years, from formal inequities - policies that explicitly discriminate
against women - to the more subtle and persistent effects of small-scale
differences in treatment, support, integration and recognition that can
put women at a significant disadvantage in the workplace. As described
in the 1999 MIT Report on the Status of Women, substantial differences
in outcome persist - "compared to their male peers, the women were getting
less money, office space, and access to research resources and positions
carrying greater responsibility" - but these inequalities often arise from
"a pattern of powerful but unrecognized attitudes and assumptions that
work systematically against women despite good will" (1999: 11).
Although these patterns do not conform to a conventional model of overt
and intentional discrimination, the authors of the MIT report insist
that "what happened to [the women scientists at MIT] is what
discrimination is in the post-civil rights era" (1999: 10).
The MIT report marks a significant turn in thinking about gender
inequity; it affirms insights central to an expansive literature on
workplace environment issues for women in the academy and the
professions that has taken shape since the early 1980s. These include
the pamphlet publications on "the chilly climate" for women in academia
published by the Association of American Colleges between 1982 and 1986
(Hall and Sandler 1982, 1984; Sandler 1986); Widnall's discussion, in
her influential AAAS Presidential address, of the mechanisms that
deflect women from advanced training and careers in science (1988);
innumerable grey literature reports on the status and experience of
women such as were collected together by the Chilly Collective (1995),
and Aisenberg and Harrington's 1988 account of the experience of women
in academia. Since the early 1990s the emphasis has shifted to more
broadly systematic studies designed to theorize the complexity of these
processes and to document how they unfold in diverse contexts. These
include the "kick-response" model proposed by Cole and Singer (1991) and
its elaboration by Sonnert and Holton in their longitudinal study,
"Project Access" (1995, 1996); the detailed reassessment of large scale
patterns in career paths and outcomes for women in the sciences recently
published by Xie and Shauman (2003); and various analyses of the
social-psychological mechanisms that underpin differential patterns of
uptake and response as they operate, not just along gender lines, but
also through race/ethnicity and a range of other dimensions on which
systemic inequality is constituted (e.g, Steele 1998; Valian 1999).
These studies reinforce concern that we must substantially rethink our
strategies of research and intervention if we are to change the
conditions that continue to limit the effective participation of highly
trained women in the academy. As important as it has been to challenge
intentional forms of discrimination and to provide compensatory support
for women so they are better fitted to succeed in academia, it will be
crucial to consider how best to counteract subtle and pervasive
institutional barriers and the mechanisms that underlie them, the
innumerable small-scale, often unintended and unrecognized, differences
in recognition and support that generate large-scale differences in
outcome for academic women.
The BCRW Gildersleeve conference that was held on December 9-10, 2004
brought together a number of scholar/activists who have done
path-breaking work on equity issues for women in academia in a wide
range of contexts. The purpose of this meeting was to assess what we now
understand about gender discrimination and to consider the implications
of this understanding for policy and practice aimed at effecting
institutional change in academic contexts. The conference began with a
public panel discussion on Thursday evening, December 9, with Nancy
Hopkins, Claude Steele, and Virginia Valian, followed by closed working
sessions on Friday, December 10; for the workshop program, see below.
Each presenting participant pre-circulated an executive summary of the
research or intervention strategies they have been involved in
developing on which they will elaborate at the workshop. These summaries
are now available on-line (see the conference website), and a digital
video of the public panel is available online through the BCRW website.
A practice-oriented report on the proceedings will be published in the
BCRW report series, "New Feminist Solutions"; check the BCRW website for
details in September.
References cited
Aisenberg, Nadya and Mona Harrington, Women of Academe: Outsiders
in the Sacred Grove. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988.
The Chilly Collective (eds). Breaking Anonymity: The Chilly
Climate for Women Faculty. Waterloo ON, Wilfrid Laurier University
Press, 1995.
Cole, J. R. and B. Singer. "A Theory of Limited Differences:
Explaining the Productivity Puzzle in Science." In H. Zuckerman, J. R.
Cole, and J. T. Bruer, The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific
Community. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991, pp. 277-310.
Hall , Roberta M. and Bernice R. Sandler, The Classroom Climate: A
Chilly One for Women? Project on the Status and Education of Women
(Washington D.C.: Association of American Colleges, 1982);
Hall, Roberta M. and Bernice R. Sandler, Out of the Classroom: A
Chilly Campus Climate for Women?, Project on the Status and Education of
Women. Washington: Association of American Colleges, 1984.
Sandler, Bernice R.. The Campus Climate Revisited: Chilly for
Women Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students. Washington,
D.C.: Project on the Status and Education of Women, Association of
American Colleges, 1986.
Sonnert, Gerhard, with the assistance of Gerald Holton. Who Succeeds
in Science? The Gender Dimension. New Brunswick NJ, Rutgers
University Press, 1995.
Sonnert, Gerhard and Gerald Holton. "Career Patterns of Women and Men
in the Sciences." American Scientist 84 (January-February 1996):
63-71).
Sonnert, Gerhard "You've Come a Long Way, Maybe." Scientific
American April 27, 1998.
Steele, Claude M. "Stereotyping and Its Threat are Real." American
Psychologist 53(1998): 680-681.
Valian, Virginia. Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Widnall, Sheila. "Voices from the Pipeline." Science 241 (30
September 1988): 1740-1745.
Xie, Yu, and Kimberlee A. Shauman, Women in Science: Career
Processes and Outcomes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2003.
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