Call for papers on equality in the academy

Achieving Gender Equality in the Academy: Intersections, Interrogations and Practices

Call for Papers

The 2014 Socrel Response Study Day will explore Gender Equality in the Academy.

Abstracts of 150 words are invited by 1 August 2014 to

Dr Abby Day (A.F.Day@kent.ac.uk) and
Dr Sonya Sharma (sonya.sharma@kingston.ac.uk)

The symposium is organised by Socrel, the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group.

Last year’s symposium was over-subscribed and therefore early submissions are encouraged.

Venue: BSA Meeting Room, Imperial Wharf, London
Date:  Saturday 4 October 2014
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

We are delighted to have as our keynote speakers: 

Professor Heidi Safia Mirza, Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Professor Helen Beebee, Philosophy, University of Manchester

Achieving gender equality is a continuing concern in both society and the academy. Many women are attracted to a career in higher education because of its autonomy, collaboration and intellectual rewards. In light of the much welcomed and recent efforts by academics and administrators, universities have been slow to institutionalise gender equality. In recent studies that address issues of gender in the academy, particularly within the humanities and STEM subjects, women scholars, at varying stages of their careers continue to encounter an environment where they are in the minority among men, confront the difficulties of balancing caring responsibilities with the demands of academia, and where they experience bullying and challenges to promotion. Importantly, racialised and classed experiences of gender have also impacted on women in the academy, resulting in multiple forms of inclusion and exclusion.

As such, women’s experiences of higher education have demonstrated both the rewards and costs of pursuing a career in academia. The aim of the symposium is to discuss and interrogate how these issues are being addressed, experienced and resisted in academic spaces. Some of the questions we hope to explore on the day are: how do race and class interact with gender to affect women’s experiences of the academy? How is gender inequality resisted in everyday academic life? How is gender equality being taught? What are students’ experiences of gender inequality amongst the student body and/or with staff? What equality and diversity initiatives are being instituted to shift academic cultures? We welcome women at all stages of their career. We welcome papers that provide intersectional analyses of gender, along with working and outline papers based not only on research but also reflexive accounts based on personal experience.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

-Gender in the curriculum

-Women’s experiences of gender in/equality

-Lived experiences

-Intersectional analyses and approaches

-Career progression

-Power, resistance and change in institutional contexts

-Feminism in the academy

-Researching gender in/equality

-Racialised and classed experiences of gender in the academy

The day will be highly participative and engaged. The symposium will be organised as a single stream so that the day is as much about discussion as it is about presentation. We invite individual papers that are 10 minutes in length and roundtable formats that consist of short papers, all with the aim to encourage interaction and sharing of knowledges and accounts.

Papers are invited from students, educators, and researchers in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, geography, theology, history, philosophy, psychology, political science and religious studies. We hope to attract presentations of sufficient quality to lead to an edited publication.

Costs: £36.00 for BSA members; £41 for Socrel members; £46.00 for non-members; £15 for BSA Postgraduate members; £20.00 for Socrel Postgraduate members; £25.00 for Postgraduate non-members.

What might a bystander say?

There’s a post by a bystander over at What is it Like wishing he knew how to speak up when inappropriate comments are made. Go check out the post, and then perhaps give some advice in comments here.

Body hair teaching exercise

That’s the question confronting students in classes taught by Breanne Fahs, associate professor of women and gender studies in ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Since 2010 Fahs has offered students the chance to participate in an extra-credit exercise related to body hair.

Female student participants stop shaving their legs and underarms for ten weeks during the semester while keeping a journal to document their experiences. For male students, the assignment is to shave all body hair from the neck down.

“There’s no better way to learn about societal norms than to violate them and see how people react,” said Fahs. “There’s really no reason why the choice to shave, or not, should be a big deal. But it is, as the students tend to find out quickly.”

For more, go here.

LGBT information on CV leads to discrimination

Clear evidence:

In the study, fake résumés were submitted for 100 different jobs at eight companies that are federal contractors. One showed that the applicant worked with LGBT groups, the other didn’t.

The applicant whose résumé showed LGBT ties got fewer responses than the other, even though the first applicant was better-qualified, according to the report, the results of which were released this week. Overall, “LGBT applicants were 23 percent less likely to get an interview than their less-qualified heterosexual counterparts,” Take Part reports.