Women's Career Pathways in Academia: From Leaky Pipeline to Rube Goldberg Machine

In 2016, Aileen Fyfe, Ineke De Moortel and Sharon Ashbrook of St. Andrew's College in Scotland wrote Academic Women Now: experiences of mid-career academic women in Scotland.

In this and more recently in an opinion article for Times Higher Education magazine, author Fyfe addresses her and her colleague's recent efforts to understand women's careers in academia. They argue that the leaky pipeline - understood as a metaphor to describe the dwindling proportion of women in higher levels of seniority - is an incomplete analogy to understand these women's experiences.

Their population included women with children as well as child-free women; some are in long-term relationships, and some are not; some are maintaining long-distance relationships, and some have suffered the breakdown of their relationships; some are in their thirties and others are nearing retirement; some have had serious health problems; some have had careers outside academia; and a significant minority are currently working part time (in a surprising variety of ways).

The authors found that these women's [c]areers [did] not all flow along a single pipeline, or at the same pace. Women (and men) do not drift along, transported automatically from point A to point B by some force outside themselves: they work, they struggle, they get creative, and they improvise. And far from a single pipeline, there are clearly many different paths through academia.

As for the kinds of challenges that feature in their participants lives, the authors identified caring responsibilities, about impostor syndrome, about work-life balance and about promotion. We also noticed that “balancing” is not just a matter of “work” and “life”: our women refer to the challenges of dealing with the competing aspects of academic life, and with increasing responsibilities as the nature of the job changes over time and with seniority. 

In light of Fyfe's findings, perhaps the Rube Goldberg Machine is a better analogy to understand women's experiences within academia than those pipelines of the past.

Add it to the dictionary! Changing language, changing culture

This short article about Merriam-Webster's addition of 'genderqueer' to their dictionary is really useful for thinking about how language changes over time to describe our changing cultural worlds. According to the Hufftington Post, the dictionary's

commitment to adding new queer terms and language to the dictionary, and discussing them on social media, follows the evolution of culture.
“The set of terms relating to gender and sexuality that we’ve added in recent years is like any other; as established members of the language ― we have evidence of these terms in published, edited text from a variety of sources and over an extended period of time ― they meet our criteria for entry,” Emily Brewster, Merriam-Webster Associate Editor, told The Huffington Post. “We would be remiss not to define them.”

What does the emergence of new words tell us about our changing cultural world -- in this case about how we understand and express our gender and sexuality?

Quick links and further reading:

• Merriam-Webster Has Become A Hilarious, Shade-Throwing LGBTQ Ally 
• Other related posts on changing language and culture:
• The mutability of language (LOL!) (9 March 2016)
• How gender changes our jobs (24 October 2016)
• A historical view of a long heated debate: what could be more menacing than the singular "they"? (8 September 2016)
• Avoiding gendered bias... for instructors (25 May 2016)
• Indigenous languages and gender (10 March 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016)

Doing anthropology everywhere

In August we had posted about anthropologists doing work in dangerous contexts, highlighting the imprisonment of Dr. Homa Hoodfar in Iran. While Hoodfar has been released, her story highlights how anthropologists can find people and issues to study everywhere.

Hoodfar is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). Her research has long focused on issues of gender, Muslim women, and feminism in the Middle East and North America. Hoodfar holds Canadian, Irish, and Iranian citizenships. In February this year, Hoodfar travelled to Iran to visit family and conduct archival research. However, before her departure in March, the Counter Intelligence Unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard confiscated her personal documents (including passport and research), and subjected Hoodfar to lengthy interrogations that resulted in her imprisonment in June 2016 in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. Hoodfar was sentenced to 15 years in prison for "dabbling in feminism" and "trying to undermine the Iranian government." After being held in prison for 112 days, the 65 year old Hoodfar was finally released on humanitarian grounds.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Hoodfar's story is shown in her resilience, and her ability to find and do anthropology everywhere. After her release, Hoodfar discussed in interviews how she began to treat her detainment as an opportunity for ethnographic research in the infamous women's prison.

 “I decided, I’m an anthropologist and I’m here, so I can use this as a method of doing anthropological fieldwork,” she told the Guardian. “It wasn’t fieldwork that I had chosen, it was not a project I wanted to write, but there I was.”

The research recast the 30 interrogations she was put through while imprisoned. As she sat facing a wall or a one-way mirror while her interrogators screamed and yelled at her, Hoodfar analysed their choice of words. When they hurled threats at her – “They were telling me, ‘You’ll get 15 years here and we’ll send your dead body back to Canada’” – she contemplated the power dynamics at play.

Although without a pen or paper at her disposal, Hoodfar carefully scratched her notes onto her cell wall using her toothbrush. Following her release, she meticulously wrote out these fieldnotes on the long flight to Oman. Her choice to turn this brutal experience into a research project not only allowed her to express her agency in this highly constraining situation, but also proves that any social context can be a site for anthropological research.

Quick links:

• anthro everywhere! post #FreeHoma: Anthropologists in dangerous contexts (18 August 2016)
• "Exclusive | Iranian interrogators 'threatened to send my dead body back to Canada': Homa Hoodfar" (5 October 2016) - including a 5 minute interview with Dr. Hoodfar that you can watch here about her experience in prison.
• "Homa Hoodfar trying to get back to a normal life after Iranian imprisonment" (6 October 2016, Montreal Gazette)
• "Canadian-Iranian professor: I survived imprisonment by studying my captors" (10 October 2016, The Guardian)

How gender changes our jobs

One of the things I love about teaching anthropology is thinking about and showing how -- through everyday experiences -- broad processes shape local lives.

I think that these connections come out very clearly in this piece from The Atlantic, "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (2016). The hook of the piece is that computer programming, which is now a male-dominated field, actually began as a career considered particularly suited to women. So, what happened?

The answer comes down in a very real way to how our

Margaret Hamilton, Programmer for NASA (1969)

conceptions of “expertise” are inseparable from gender. As Judy Wajcman, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, has argued, “The classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skill definitions are saturated with gender bias.” Gender stereotypes pervade definitions of competence and status, contrasting work that requires brain or brawn; mathematical or verbal ability; individualism or cooperation. When an occupation undergoes a shift in gender composition, the description of the job often morphs to better align with the gender of the incoming hires—such as when programming went from being understood as clerical work suitable for women to a job that demands advanced mathematical facility. When women replaced men as typists, it went from a job that was seen as requiring physical stamina to one that needed a woman’s dexterity. In providing profiles not only the male-dominated field of programming, but the female-dominated field of teaching, this piece underscores how our perceptions of different careers, their power, prestige, and the paycheck that goes along with them is deeply coloured by our culturally-informed ideas of gender.

Dr. Christine Darden. Courtesy NASA

This piece is also interesting to use to think about how structure and actions based on socially constructed qualities associated (even unconsciously) with gender and race have helped to shape certain fields, and to keep individuals out of working in certain fields, e.g. women and people of colour in STEM.

Quick links & further reading:

• "What Programming's Past Reveals About Today's Gender-Pay Gap" (The Atlantic, 2016)
• How does language shape our worldview? (17 October 2016) and other anthro everywhere! posts on language
• "Margaret Hamilton, the Engineer Who Took the Apollo to the Moon" (Medium, 2014)
• "Meet the Black Female Mathematicians Who Helped America Win the Space Race" (Observer, 2016)
• "What's Up with Chicks in Science?" Neil Degrasse Tyson responds to an old white dude about minorities (African-Americans and Women) in Science (YouTube, 3.30 minutes)
• "Alabama scientist, one of nation's few black female physicists, breaks ground in cancer research" (AL.com, 2016)

A historical view of a long heated debate: what could be more menacing than the singular "they"?

The use of 'they' as a replacement for 'he or she' pronouns has been gaining momentum not only because it lets one slip around those steadfast predefined gender binaries of 'he or she', but also because the American Dialect Society voted it the word of the year in 2015.

A relatively recent article by Ernie Smith details centuries of debate around the use of this term that linguistic anthropologists and anthropologists alike would enjoy. Smith also highlights Dennis Baron's publicly available essay entitled: The Words that Failed: A chronology of early nonbinary pronouns which might make a good read for those wishing to use those failed and absent words to understand linguistic changes over time.

Smith goes on to describe what they believe to be the most interesting comment on the debate from Ruth Walker at the Christian Science Monitor who likens the use of the singular they to a shortcut through grammar law that while irksome for some, will most likely become more acceptable over time.

In any case, this historical investigation of the manner in which linguists and laypeople think around (literally in this case) the topic of gender binary might be a useful brainstorming session for students or a stepping stone to being rethinking one's own vocabulary.

Related posts on language, gender, and cultural change:

• Avoiding gendered bias... for instructors (26 May 2016)
• Indigenous languages and gender (10 March 2016)
• Gender & Sexuality Info-graphic (25 February 2016)
• The power of language in historical narratives (21 July 2016)
• The mutability of language (LOL!) (9 March 2016)

#FreeHoma: Anthropologists in dangerous contexts

Anthropology is a discipline that was born out of colonial encounters and systems of power. Anthropologists have historically been complicit in supporting the people, systems and ideas through our research of often marginalized communities.

Today, however, many anthropologists critique and challenge the very power structures and relationships that our discipline in many ways helped to build. The topics that anthropologists research and the sites in which we conduct our research can put anthropologists in danger, including at risk of imprisonment by governments who read such research as threatening.

Dr. Homa Hoodfar

Homa Hoodfar has been imprisoned since March 2016 by the Iranian government. Hoodfar holds dual Canadian and Iranian citizenships, and has been a professor at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) since 1991. She has explored issues of gender, development, and politics especially in the Middle East, and especially known for her work on "Muslim women's ability to realize their rights within an Islamic framework, and for her critique of essentializing Western stereotypes about veiling."

As the authors of "Academics and Authors In Support of Professor Homa Hoodfar" explain,

"It is not clear what charges the Counter Intelligence Unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard might bring against her.  Any accusations against Prof. Hoodfar are undoubtedly based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of her ethnographic research which has never been a threat to the Iranian regime. Instead, her arrest points to a renewed campaign to target and intimidate other scholars writing about Iran." 

This can be a very real issue for researchers working in such contexts. In 2014, a University of Toronto political science PhD candidate, Alexander Sodiqov, was arrested during his field research in his native Tajikistan. Sodiqov was arrested and detained under charges of espionage and treason. As in Hoodfar's arrest, the "exact rationale for this charge remains murky, and may never be explained. But the wider context is anti–Western feeling and the fact that Tajikistan's security services are cracking down on domestic non-governmental organizations, emulating Putin's Russia." While Sodiqov was released, Hoodfar continues to be detained.

For instructors, these cases highlight how research, knowledge, can be considered a threat by regimes and potentially place the researcher in danger. How do we balance or value the insights of research and the potential risks inherent in conducting it -- for our participants, and for ourselves?

UPDATE 1 November 2016: Dr. Hoodfar's release from Evin Prison was confirmed on 26 September 2016. News reports following Dr. Hoodfar's release, underscored not only the resilience of this woman, but also how anthropologists can indeed find anthropology everywhere:

After a few days of intense interrogations, she decided to treat her time there as field work. Although lacking pen and paper, she used her toothbrush to scrawl her observations on the stone wall of her cell, prompting her cellmates to view her as a kind of mad professor, she said, laughing.
“My age and the fact I was an anthropologist and quite familiar with their techniques was a problem for them,” said Hoodfar, who now plans to write a book on the anthropology of interrogation. (6 October 2016, Montreal Gazette)

Quick links and further reading:

• #FreeHoma website with background and ways to show support
• Academic petition
• Student petition
• "Homa Hoodfar trying to get back to a normal life after Iranian imprisonment" (6 October 2016, Montreal Gazette)
• "Canadian-Iranian professor: I survived imprisonment by studying my captors" (10 October 2016, The Guardian)
• Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) Statement, news and links
• News stories on Alexander Sodiqov's arrest: 
• Alexander Sodiqov, University of Toronto researcher, being detained in Tajikistan (CBC, 17 July 2014)
• U of T fails to act for PhD student arrested in Tajikistan (MacLeans, 31 July 2014)
• How Alexander Sodiqov was freed following espionage charges (CBC, 23 September 2014)

The emotional toll of masculinity

This personal essay published in the Washington Post's Parenting section, provides a lot of insight into the powerful norms and ideals of masculinity in (North) American society. In "The part I was not prepared for as a Stay at Home Dad" (June 2016), Billy Doidge Kilgore frankly discusses the emotional toll of his choice to become a stay-at-home dad while his wife took on the role of breadwinner for their household.

The emotional toll Kilgore refers to isn't the drain of taking care of a newborn child, but dealing with "the larger, often more subtle, cultural forces. These forces, gender roles, define a man’s worth not by their efforts within their families but by their productivity outside the home."

Instructors may find Kilgore's essay useful for classroom discussions of gender as something learned, and the power of cultural constructions in our everyday lives. He writes:

Despite the fact I am prioritizing my family’s needs and enduring the grueling work of childcare, this is not enough. In my mental fog, my notions of identity turn on their head. I am confused by the strange reality of performing demanding and difficult work, work I love, yet feeling inferior and unproductive. I find myself full of gnawing doubt and fear and insecurity.
No one confronted me directly about my decision to leave my job and care for my son, but they did not have to because the subtle contempt woven into questions, comments, assumptions, and body language did most of the work to undermine my self worth. I feel naive for thinking it possible to move against the rigid gender roles still entrenched in modern America.

The piece drives home how gender is such a powerful construct as he describes his internal, affective struggle to reconcile his choice to become the primary caregiver in his family with idea(l)s of what it means to be a man that he has internalized throughout his life -- even as he disagrees with these rigid norms on an intellectual level.

Further reading:

• For connections to toxic masculinity see our post on Mass Violence and Teachable Moments (13 June 2016)
• For additional posts on transgressing traditional Western gender norms see our posts: Third Gender - 'Two Spirit' (26 February 2016), Feb 29th: Catching a Husband (29 February 2016), An anthropologist walks into... a gym (5 July 2016)

An anthropologist walks into... a gym

Katie Hejtmanek is a cultural anthropologist who studies the culture of strength sports (powerlifting, weightlifting, CrossFit) in the United States.

Her articles for BarBend offer not only interesting insights into her particular 'tribe' but also an easy intro to what ethnographic field research is actually about. For instance, in "Anthropology 101: A Cultural Anthropologist Walks into a Gym" (27 May, 2016), Hejtmanek discusses how she set out to understand the the cultural shift where 'strong is the new skinny': "new phenomenon that women are seeking out fitness activities that actively promote muscular bodies. We’ve been taught that the ideal female body is skinny. It is not “natural” or universal to idealize a skinny female body, rather it has been an American cultural ideal."

What are the larger forces at play behind this cultural shift? What are people saying about their participation in strength sports, and how does this reflect or differ from what they do in strength sports spaces?

In her recent article in this ongoing series for BarBend, Hejtmanek answers some of these questions in "The Morality of Fitness: An Anthropologist’s Observations in a CrossFit Gym" (8 June, 2016). In connecting the official 'origin stories' of CrossFit gyms with the local tellings of these stories in the context of (potential) gym members lives, we see how cultural and moral worlds are created by "1) by mobilizing moral frameworks of health, and 2) linking the activity with a community and relationships."

Quick links:

• All of Katie Hejtmanek's articles on the anthropology of strength sports at BarBend.
• "Anthropology 101: A Cultural Anthropologist Walks into a Gym" (27 May, 2016)
• "The Morality of Fitness: An Anthropologist’s Observations in a CrossFit Gym" (8 June, 2016). 

Mass Violence and Teachable Moments

This past weekend, Orlando, Florida witnessed the worst mass shooting in America's recent history. This violent, planned attack in a public place is tragic, and our hearts go out to the victims and their families.

As the LA Times discussed after the 2015 mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and in an English class at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, in the US such violence has become "often both stunningly senseless and paradoxically routine." We continue to be shocked each time that mass public violence happens, mourn for the victims, and look for answers. As social scientists, and as teachers, we should also recognize these as teachable moments to talk about these mass shootings not as exceptional instances, but as part of broader patterns and systems of violence in (North) American/ Western society.

Precisely because mass shootings and less sensational instances of gun violence in America are so prevalent, there are already a number of interesting discussions and reflections from an anthropological or social science perspective available, such as:

• Jason Antrosio's "Semi-Automatic Anthropology: Confronting Complexity, Anthropologically" (2012) or "Gun Violence: New Guns or New Gun Control?" (2012)
• Daniel Lende's "Guns and Public Health" (2008) or "Newtown and Violence – No Easy Answers" (2012)
• Tim Wise's "Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege" (2012) 
• Joachim Vogt Isaksen's "Why Do People Commit Mass Shootings?" (2013)

An important issue that has been little addressed in the days following Orlando, has been how such violence is part of a long history entangled with ideas of cultural and moral superiority. In my social media feed, I have been seeing many posts about how the headline that Orlando is the worst mass shooting in American history ignores an important part of that history. Many commentators point to Native American massacres, for instance, the massacre at Wounded Knee, where some 150 Lakota men, women and children were killed by the US government. While these deaths were distinctly connected to colonization and the systemic inequality this earlier history established, we continue to see such processes of systemic violence play out in many different encounters today (for instance, see our previous posts on Racist Mascots, or The Anthropology of Terrorism).

As a deliberate attack on LGBT+ people, Orlando shows us how homophobia is woven into these broader patterns, histories, and our cultural scripts in North America about belonging, violence, cultural difference, and masculinity. In America, the realities of how this structural violence is experienced is complicated by how easy it is for people to access a wide range of powerful firearms. In 2015, the connections between toxic masculinity and gun violence were explicit in the murder of female students in Roseburg, Oregon. In Canada, where gun violence is much less prevalent, we have nonetheless seen and remember these powerful connections in the 1989 Montreal Massacre. Homophobia is also intricately connected to these deeply held ideas of what it means to be a man in North America, and how homosexuality and non-normative gender expressions transgress and are thought to threaten such masculinities.

We see this not only in North America, but elsewere in the world as well. For instance, in Montenegro, the country's first Pride Parade (2013) ended in violence. Protesters focused on the parade's logo, the moustache, as a symbol of traditional Montenegrin masculinity. As the anthropologist Branko Banovic commented, in spite of the culturally contextual focus on the moustache, the discourse framing the controversy was "structured on the basis of a pattern with well-documented main elements ... : the centrality dichotomies of normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, and moral/immoral; homosexuality regarded as an illness; religious institutions and officers that play an important role in the public debate on homosexuality; LGBT people who attack the core of national values; and the battle between the police and the right-wing groups."

Although these discursive themes are specific to the Montenegrin context, they resonate with what we've witnessed over the past few years in America -- for instance, in the recent and ongoing legislation regarding transgendered people and public toilets.

As social scientists, we can encourage our students to look for, debate, and dig into the cultural, historical, political, and economic factors that connect eruptions of violence like the Orlando shooting to broader processes of systemic violence and inequality in our societies.

Avoiding gendered bias... for instructors

Writing a reference letter for a student? The Feminist Philosophers blog has shared a handy infographic from the University of Arizona that will help instructors write great reference letters while avoiding gendered bias.

You could also use this graphic as an example in a class about various forms of privilege that we take for granted in our society.

Black Disabled Woman Syllabus

Vilissa Thompson, Disability Rights Consultant & Advocate, has created the Black Disabled Woman Syllabus in response to the lack of intersectionality she has seen in disability studies. In her work Thompson has found that many people "are ignorant of the experiences of Black Americans in general, Black women particularly, and when broken down further, Black disabled women specifically."

This syllabus, intended as a "living" document, currently provides a range of resources for educators and students on:

• Black Feminism / Womanism
• The Black Disabled Body & Identity
• Articles About Blackness, Feminism, &/or Disability
• Books about Blackness in America
• Fiction & Poetic Works
• Audio / Video
• Music

Additional links:

• Chronic Illness, Coping & Critiques: Writings of a Chronically Ill Anthropologist by Niki Thorne (York University) who has already shared and commented on Thompson's work and hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite (19 May 2016)
• Laurence Ralph's Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2015, University of Chicago Press) is an accessible ethnography that engages issues of race, (chronic) illness, and disability.

How 'Maintainers,' Not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn

I have been hearing a lot about 'disrupters' and 'innovators' in tech and marketing industries lately, and something about that language has always irked me.

Lee Vinsel (an assistant professor of science and technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology), and the diverse group of scholars, artists, activists and engineers who attended "The Maintainers" (an interdisciplinary conference that took place April 7-9, 2016) point to some of the reasons why. Presenters "discuss how the human-built world is maintained and sustained—so often by unnamed, unseen, and underpaid labor." Papers explore these issues through a wide range of perspectives, including city infrastructure, the internet, gendered labour, and popular culture -- for example, Vinsel's paper on Mary Poppins as "caregiving hero" in mainstream cinema (available for download).

Quick links:

• How 'Maintainers,' Not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn (2016, City Lab)
• The Maintainers conference program - with many papers available for download!

Indigenous languages and gender

"Indigenous languages recognize gender states not even named in English" (10 March 2016) explores how our social worlds -- including our understanding and experiences of gender -- are shaped by language. Until the arrival of European colonizers, gender wasn't part of a binary system (man or woman) for many indigenous groups in North America. Rather, gender was something much more fluid with non-binary gendered terms and ways of talking about individuals and social relationships.

Indigenous languages have words for gender states that are not expressed in English, as well ... . In Cree, for example, “aayahkwew” means “neither man or woman.” In Inuktitut, “sipiniq” means “infant whose sex changes at birth.” In Kanien’keha, or Mohawk language, “onón:wat” means “I have the pattern of two spirits inside my body.”

This article is part of a series exploring culturally relevant First Nations sex education from The Globe and Mail.

Feb 29th: Catching a Husband

As you may or may not have heard, Feb 29th is known by some to be the day where it is acceptable for women to propose to their husbands-to-be.

While many sources cite the origins of this custom in Ireland or Scotland, this tradition holds today and continues, what one author calls, the masculine & sexist tradition of marriage proposal:

"Parkin, however, argues that leap day proposals were far from a feminist occasion–she believes the tradition perpetuated the idea that initiating matrimony was an exclusively male right, and harmed female agency. "Leap year, by virtue of its exceptionalism, reinforced traditional gender roles."

This interesting story could help introduce the idea of marriage traditions in history to present day.

Third Gender - 'Two Spirit'

"Two Spirits, One Dance For Native American Artist" (AJ+, 25 February 2016)

“Two-spirit” is how some Native Americans describe people whose gender identity doesn't fit as strictly male or female. Meet Ty DeFoe, who's using traditional dance to take this gender identity back from the negative connotations established during colonization. 

Ethnography Summer Reading List

Why not start a summer reading list with Kelly Ray Knight's addicted.pregnant.poor?

In this ethnography, Knight details her work with pregnant addicts in San Fransisco to explore themes of gender, poverty and drugs"  and maps "changing conceptions of ‘deserving’ recipients of welfare, as well as transformations in understandings of addiction and the rise of pharmaceutical ‘fixes’ for these conditions" (Bell, 2016).

Kristen Bell, who covered this book for Somatosphere, describes its worth as such:

Indeed, from a pedagogical standpoint I could see this being a very valuable book in, say, a methods course, as well as the more obvious contenders (namely, courses on medical anthropology and addiction). 

In sum, if you have an interest in addiction or gender, or just engaging ethnography in general, this book is well worth reading.

Gender & Sexuality Info-graphic

The Gender Unicorn (Trans Student Education Resources) is a handy (cute) info-graphic for helping students get their heads around how gender and sexuality are cultural constructs. The page also contains more specific definitions used in the info-graphic and footnotes.