All posts by Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky

Looking back, looking ahead

collaboration & leadership, Institutional Climate, JHU

Looking Backfall-leaves-3744649_1920

You may know that former WFF@H members Naveeda Khan (anthropology) and Angus Burgin (history), longtime members of the committee, stepped away last year. They are very much missed!

Additionally, Karen Fleming (biophysics) has finished up her three-year appointment as co-chair, and Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky (expository writing) will finish her term in December.

You can read our 2018-19Annual Report–featuring research and recommendations on student evaluations of teaching (SETs), the NAS report on sexual and gender harassment, and graduate student advising–here: WFF_AnnualReport2018-19_ForWeb

Looking Ahead

Karen Beemon (biology), Yi-Ping Ong (comparative thought and literature) and Todd Shepard (history; women and gender studies) are the remaining members of WFF@H.

So, YES–WFF@H definitely needs to build up its membership. Interested? Email [email protected] or Dean Wendland’s office.

Also, save the date for the Where We Stand reception! Monday, November 4, 5:30pm in Mudd Atrium. Please bring kids, friends, students, colleagues.

Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, & Migration Program Loses 13 Tenured Professors

equitable policies & practices, Institutional Climate

Key terms: URM; programs (v. department); labor; tenure review.Screen Shot 2019-04-02 at 1.32.54 PM

Excerpt:

When 13 professors at Yale University said on Friday they would cut ties with the institution’s ethnicity, race, and migration program, they said their decision was rooted in a history of inequity.

The professors, all senior-level scholars, said the program had been stuck in a vulnerable position for years, without the hiring authority, resources, or stability that departments and other programs have. And despite promises from senior administrators, the faculty members, many of whom are scholars of color, said nothing had changed.

So they resigned from the program en masse, in hopes of sending a message that the model — a “formula of borrowed labor,” one professor called it — was unsustainable.

Read more here: “Yale Professors’ Protest Casts Doubt on a Big Faculty-Diversity Initiative:”

Image:  https://erm.yale.edu/

 

“Wisdom without apology”

collaboration & leadership, equitable policies & practices, Institutional Climate, Unconscious Bias

Today, a brief excerpt from Tina Brown’s NYT op-ed “What Happens When Women Stop Leading Like Men: Jacinda Ardern, Nancy Pelosi and the power of female grace”: 

It’s past time for women to stop trying to cram themselves into outdated NASA spacesuits designed for an alien masculine physique. Salvation doesn’t lie in pursuing traditional male paths of ejaculatory self-elevation. In drawing on women’s wisdom without apology and pushing that wisdom forward into positions of power, we can soothe our world and, maybe, even save it.

Image: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/women-leadership-jacinda-ardern.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

Related: Marisa Porges, “What the Failed All-Female Spacewalk Tells Us About Office Temperature: In a for-men, by-men world, the little things still really do hurt women”

Jessica Marie Johnson: Pay the Thunder No Mind

equitable policies & practices, Institutional Climate, JHU

Take a moment to read Professor Johnson’s recent essay reflecting on the Hopkins police force debate. Here is an excerpt:Screen Shot 2019-03-19 at 10.13.28 AM

Johns Hopkins University isn’t a person. It’s a lot of moving parts. Those parts can be dismantled, reassembled, refurnished into something more human, more loving, more attuned to the people around it, people hurt by its monstrosity. This bill may pass, but it won’t be the same bill it was before students and community members began organizing it. More important, those organizing, reading, writing, testifying in Annapolis, running public meetings in Baltimore, signing open letters are not the same people they were before they began organizing against it. This is a long game and we lose it if we walk through this city as though our disempowerment is a foregone conclusion.

The gender data gap

equitable policies & practices, Institutional Climate, Unconscious Bias

Screen Shot 2019-03-12 at 3.59.39 PMIn “The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes”: (The Guardian) Caroline Criado-Perez explores which questions get asked in our research, and how they get asked.

“The gender data gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male.”

Just one example among many (cancer research, stab vests, safety masks, office temperature, bathroom access, nuclear testing, voice recognition technology, questions Siri can and cannot answer, and more):

Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in them. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.

Women tend to sit further forward when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard. This is not, however, the “standard seating position”, researchers have noted. Women are “out of position” drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.