Cecilia E. Ford

The effect of an intervention to break the gender bias habit for faculty at one institution: a cluster randomized, controlled trial.

Purpose Despite sincere commitment to egalitarian, meritocratic principles, subtle gender bias persists, constraining women’s opportunities for academic advancement. The authors implemented a pair-matched, single-blind, cluster randomized, controlled study of a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention at a large public university. Method Participants were faculty in 92 departments or divisions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Between September 2010 and March 2012, experimental departments were offered a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention as a 2.5-hour workshop. Surveys measured gender bias awareness; motivation, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations to reduce bias; and gender equity action. A timed word categorization task measured implicit gender/leadership bias. Faculty completed a work–life survey before and after all experimental departments received the intervention. Control departments were offered workshops after data were collected. Results Linear mixed-effects models showed significantly greater changes post intervention for faculty in experimental versus control departments on several outcome measures, including self-efficacy to engage in gender-equity-promoting behaviors (P = .013). When ≥ 25% of a department’s faculty attended the workshop (26 of 46 departments), significant increases in self-reported action to promote gender equity occurred at three months (P = .007). Post intervention, faculty in experimental departments expressed greater perceptions of fit (P = .024), valuing of their research (P = .019), and comfort in raising personal and professional conflicts (P = .025). Conclusions An intervention that facilitates intentional behavioral change can help faculty break the gender bias habit and change department climate in ways that should support the career advancement of women in academic medicine, science, and engineering.

Contingency and Units in Interaction

Starting with Houtkoop and Mazeland’s (1985) study of discourse units, and touching upon recent studies aimed at detailing unit projection in interaction, this article argues that the drive toward abstract and discrete models for units and unit projection is potentially misleading. While it has been established that to engage in talk-in-interaction, as it unfolds in real time, participants rely on projectable units (Sacks et al., 1974, 1978), research aimed at defining units unintentionally backgrounds the contingency inherent in interaction. A central function of language for collaborative action is the management of simultaneously unfolding facets of action, sound production, gesture, and grammar – produced by multiple participants. This article draws upon classic and current data analyses foregrounding linguistic/interactional practices designed to manage local contingencies. It is argued that attention to participants’ regular methods for managing and exploiting contingencies be incorporated from the outset in our descriptions of language and the nature of unit building in interaction.

Women Speaking Up

The United States has failed to implement a coordinated strategy to address HIV and AIDS systematically throughout relevant sectors in the U.S. This has resulted in increased infections in particularly vulnerable communities, as well as inefficient delivery of care, treatment, and support services. The United States Positive Women’s Network, the only national membership body of women living with HIV, believes the next Administration must develop and implement a National AIDS Strategy that sets and evaluates ambitious targets to comprehensively address the HIV epidemic in the United States. Furthermore, United States HIV and AIDS policies and programs continue to operate under the paradigm that HIV/AIDS is primarily a disease of gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSMs). While MSMs do bear a disproportionate burden of HIV infections in the U.S., in part due to homophobia, rates of HIV infection in women have risen over the past 27 years such that women currently account for almost one-third of new HIV diagnoses in the United States. HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death among Black women aged 25 to 34 in the United States. And women living with HIV experience disproportionate lack of access to care, treatment, and support services. Women of color and women in poverty are especially vulnerable to poor health outcomes – with or without HIV infection. To reduce the rate of new HIV infections among women, particularly women of color, and to increase access to care and utilization of treatment and support services, women living with HIV must be meaningfully involved in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of HIV policy and programs. This paper outlines some of the legislative and resource allocation priorities of women living with HIV in the United States. We look forward to ongoing dialogue with the new Administration and Congress on these critical matters. I. Who We Are: The U.S. Positive Women’s Network The U.S. Positive Women’s Network (PWN) was founded in June, 2008, by 28 HIVpositive women reflecting the diversity of the U.S. epidemic, with initial funding from the Ford Foundation. We are the only national group led by and for HIV-positive women addressing issues that affect women living with HIV in the U.S. Currently a project of WORLD (Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Disease) in Oakland, California, the PWN has quickly grown to a membership of over 400 women living with HIV with representation from over 15 States. The U.S. Positive Women’s Network strengthens the strategic power of women living with HIV in the United States by: 1) Identifying, cultivating, and supporting leadership among women living with HIV in the U.S. 2) Building capacity for collective action between individuals and organizations working in the field of women and HIV 3) Engaging in strategic campaigns to change policy. II. Purpose of this Document The U.S. economy and health care infrastructure are failing millions of Americans, with a devastating impact on women living with HIV. The Ryan White Treatment Modernization Act will sunset in 2009, unemployment rates and poverty levels are rising, the burden on social service providers and the nonprofit sector is ever-increasing, and investment in service delivery by the private sector is expected to drastically reduce over the next few years. Budget cuts and dwindling resources for service delivery often disproportionately impact women living with HIV, who already are socio-economically vulnerable. At this critical moment, the U.S. Positive Women’s Network urges that the next President and Congress of the United States make a commitment to develop, fully fund and implement an outcomes-based National AIDS Strategy that takes into account the unique needs of women and girls living with HIV or who are at risk for contracting the virus. To ensure this, women living with HIV and those who work with them must be meaningfully involved in the development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of such a National AIDS Strategy. This Executive Summary is intended to help inform the next Administration and Congress as well as the HIV community and other allies about the legislative and resource allocation priorities of HIV positive women throughout the U.S. as a comprehensive plan to address the domestic HIV epidemic is developed. This document was created by the Founding Members of the Positive Women’s Network, utilizing our life experiences as HIV-positive women and community advocates, together with data gathered from surveys and focus groups of HIV-positive women throughout the U.S., individual interviews with HIV positive women, and expertise from allies, including members of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) Philadelphia, the BABES Network, the Center for Health Justice, the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), the HIV Law Project’s Center for Women and HIV Advocacy, Kaiser Family Foundation, the National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA), the National Working Positive Coalition, the National Women and AIDS Collective (NWAC), and The Well Project. . We are deeply inspired by and indebted to every woman whose life has been transformed by an HIV-positive diagnosis, and the work of our allies in this struggle. The U.S. Positive Women’s Network is committed to transparently and accountably representing the voice of over 300,000 women living with HIV in the United States. III. Background: The HIV Crisis Among U.S. Women According to 2006 estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are nearly 300,000 women living with HIV in the United States, not including transgender women, for whom no accurate national data are available. Studies show that HIV prevalence is higher among the transgender male-to-female (MTF) population than any other population (27.7% based on a 2008 review of U.S. studies, with some studies demonstrating rates double that for the African-American MTF population). Over the last 27 years, the epidemic’s toll on women has steadily worsened and now appears to have stalled at a stubbornly high level. In 1985, the earliest year for which data is available, women represented 8% of HIV infections. By 2006, the proportion of the epidemic among women had more than tripled to 27% of HIV infections in the U.S. The HIV epidemic among women in the U.S. is disproportionately made up of women of color and low-income women. Over 80% of women living with HIV in the U.S. are women of color. While African American women comprise about 12% of the U.S. female population, 66% of new AIDS diagnoses among women in 2006 were among African American women. Latinas represented 16% and Caucasian women 17% of new AIDS diagnoses in that same year, though they comprise 13% and 68% of the U.S. female population respectively. Over 80% of women diagnosed with HIV were infected through heterosexual contact, and about 17% through intravenous drug use. The epidemic is taking a particular toll among younger women and low-income women. Over 60% of women newly diagnosed with HIV are between the ages of 13 and 39. According to the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study (HCSUS), 64% of women with HIV receiving regular medical care had annual incomes under

Bodily-Visual Practices and Turn Continuation

10,000 compared to 41% of men. Additionally, the majority of women with HIV in the study (76%) had children under 18 in their homes. Women living with and at risk for contracting HIV report disproportionate rates of violence, including both physical and sexual abuse. The underlying factors fueling this violence are many of the same that fuel the HIV epidemic among women – including sexism and poverty. The U.S. Positive Women’s Network notes that there are some groups for whom there is no accurate national data on HIV incidence and prevalence rates including transgender populations, the Asian and Pacific Islander community, and the Native American community. While this report does discuss some of the needs of the transgender community, it is difficult to accurately represent the unique needs of transgender women living with HIV in the U.S., as they are often classified as MSM (Men who have Sex with Men). We strongly recommend the CDC push States to adopt gender identity in HIV surveillance data to address this critical issue. IV. The Unique Needs of Women at Risk for and Living with HIV in the U.S. Women in the U.S. need an effective response to HIV that takes into account the realities of women’s bodies and lives. This response should begin with addressing stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV and AIDS and should continue with analysis in the following areas:

Securing Recipiency in Workplace Meetings: Multimodal Practices

This article considers points in turn construction where conversation researchers have shown that talk routinely continues beyond possible turn completion, but where bodily-visual behavior doing such turn extension work is found. The bodily-visual behaviors examined share many features with verbal turn extensions, but it is argued that embodied movements have distinct properties that make them well-suited for specific kinds of social action, including stance display and by-play in relation to simultaneous verbal turns and sequences.

Clarity in applied and interdisciplinary conversation analysis

As multiparty interactions with single courses of coordinated action, workplace meetings place particular interactional demands on participants who are not primary speakers (e.g. not chairs) as they work to initiate turns and to interactively coordinate with displays of recipiency from co-participants. Drawing from a corpus of 26 hours of videotaped workplace meetings in a midsized US city, this article reports on multimodal practices – phonetic, prosodic, and bodily-visual – used for coordinating turn transition and for consolidating recipiency in these specialized speech exchange systems. Practices used by self-selecting non-primary speakers as they secure turns in meetings include displays of close monitoring of current speakers’ emerging turn structure, displays of heightened interest as current turns approach possible completion, and turn initiation practices designed to pursue and, in a fine-tuned manner, coordinate with displays of recipiency on the parts of other participants as well as from reflexively constructed ‘target’ recipients. By attending to bodily-visual action, as well as phonetics and prosody, this study contributes to expanding accounts for turn taking beyond traditional word-based grammar (i.e. lexicon and syntax).

Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications

Acknowledging the perils of interdisciplinary and applied conversation analysis, this essay argues for clarity in articulating relationships between methods, addressing, in particular, the language used to formulate claims regarding how participants’ post hoc reflections relate to findings from CA analyses.

Laughter and the management of divergent positions in peer review interactions

Significance Scientific grant peer reviewers must differentiate the very best applications from comparatively weaker ones. Despite the importance of this determination in allocating funding, little research has explored how reviewers derive their assigned ratings for the applications they review or whether this assessment is consistent when the same application is evaluated by different sets of reviewers. We replicated the NIH peer-review process to examine the qualitative and quantitative judgments of different reviewers examining the same grant application. We found no agreement among reviewers in evaluating the same application. These findings highlight the subjectivity in reviewers’ evaluations of grant applications and underscore the difficulty in comparing the evaluations of different applications from different reviewers—which is how peer review actually unfolds. Obtaining grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is increasingly competitive, as funding success rates have declined over the past decade. To allocate relatively scarce funds, scientific peer reviewers must differentiate the very best applications from comparatively weaker ones. Despite the importance of this determination, little research has explored how reviewers assign ratings to the applications they review and whether there is consistency in the reviewers’ evaluation of the same application. Replicating all aspects of the NIH peer-review process, we examined 43 individual reviewers’ ratings and written critiques of the same group of 25 NIH grant applications. Results showed no agreement among reviewers regarding the quality of the applications in either their qualitative or quantitative evaluations. Although all reviewers received the same instructions on how to rate applications and format their written critiques, we also found no agreement in how reviewers “translated” a given number of strengths and weaknesses into a numeric rating. It appeared that the outcome of the grant review depended more on the reviewer to whom the grant was assigned than the research proposed in the grant. This research replicates the NIH peer-review process to examine in detail the qualitative and quantitative judgments of different reviewers examining the same application, and our results have broad relevance for scientific grant peer review.

Placing and Designing Disaffiliative Actions

In this paper we focus on how participants in peer review interactions use laughter as a resource as they publicly report divergence of evaluative positions, divergence that is typical in the give and take of joint grant evaluation. Using the framework of conversation analysis, we examine the infusion of laughter and multimodal laugh-relevant practices into sequences of talk in meetings of grant reviewers deliberating on the evaluation and scoring of high-level scientific grant applications. We focus on a recurrent sequence in these meetings, what we call the score-reporting sequence, in which the assigned reviewers first announce the preliminary scores they have assigned to the grant. We demonstrate that such sequences are routine sites for the use of laugh practices to navigate the initial moments in which divergence of opinion is made explicit. In the context of meetings convened for the purposes of peer review, laughter thus serves as a valuable resource for managing the socially delicate but institutionally required reporting of divergence and disagreement that is endemic to meetings where these types of evaluative tasks are a focal activity.

Meeting Organization: Openings, Turn Transitions, and Participant Alliances

While it is clear from excerpts in Chapter 5 that women are perfectly able to produce questions that challenge co-participants, we should note that taking issue with others’ ideas is a delicate and disaffiliative action, as has been amply demonstrated in studies of ordinary conversations. Disaffiliative actions are regularly formulated with care: they are delayed, prefaced, and interwoven with displays of hesitancy. Once launched, such turns are formulated in ways that further delay and also mitigate the disaffiliative action itself. Disaffiliative actions are regularly accompanied by accounting, with such accounts or excuses indexing a speaker’s recognition of deviation from the normative preference for agreement (Sacks, 1987; Pomerantz, 1984). That delicate and dispreferred actions are presented with care is one way in which interactants display the general orientation to avoid such actions. But, of course, disaffiliative actions cannot be avoided altogether, particularly in workplace meetings.