Christine V. Wood

How Women in Biomedical Phd Programs Manage Gender Consciousness as They Persist Toward Academic Research Careers

Purpose Women remain underrepresented as biomedical faculty and are more likely than white and Asian men to lose interest in faculty careers in graduate school. However, some women maintain interest in academic research careers during PhD training and are the most likely candidates for faculty positions. This study explored how these women described and interpreted gender issues at early stages in their training. Method Annual interviews from 2009 to 2014 with 22 female PhD students aspiring to research faculty careers were analyzed using an iterative, content analysis approach rooted in the interview data. Focusing on career intentions and experiences with gender, race, and ethnicity, authors arrived at 11 themes which describe a range of gendered experiences and strategies. Results Of the 22 women, 19 (86%) acknowl edged systemic gender inequities in science and/or reported instances of bias, while 15 of them also said they had not yet experienced unequal treatment. All 22 described using at least one “gender-explicit strategy,” where they based decisions on gender or in response to perceived biases. “Gender-agnostic strategies” emerged for 12 (55%) who doubted that gender will affect their career. Conclusions Findings show that women biomedical PhD students continue to face conditions that can lead to unequal treatment; gender biases continue to persist. Students displayed a range of perceptions and strategies in response to these conditions at this early training stage. Following these students over time will determine whether these or other strategies are required and sufficient to enable persistence toward academic careers.

Knowledge Practices, Institutional Strategies, and External Influences in the Making of an Interdisciplinary Field Insights From the Case of Women’s and Gender Studies

This article analyzes the formation of women’s and gender studies as an interdisciplinary academic field. The author draws on comparative case studies of three early-adopter women’s studies departments from historical records and interviews with faculty members. Existing research on disciplinary formation focuses on the way practitioners forge institutional niches for new academic programs but not on sustained analysis of knowledge-making processes. Research on processes of knowledge construction focuses on established research situations, such as physics labs or literary seminars, as opposed to newly emerging fields and fields with politicized origins. The author combines institutional and practice-oriented approaches to explain the formation of knowledge-making agendas in new interdisciplinary research fields. In the case of women’s and gender studies, practitioners’ strategies for promoting the growth of their programs corresponded with the kinds of knowledge that they produced. In the period of adoption in the 1970s, scholars across the three units defined the intellectual goals of women’s studies similarly in working to redress the lack of research on women in existing disciplines and to analyze social problems affecting contemporary women’s lives. Each program acquired institutional stability, which involved the negotiation of budgeted faculty hires in specific research areas and the development of degree programs. Over time, practitioners at each program justified the continued existence of women’s studies programs by claiming expertise in a diverse range of topics relating to human gender and sexual experience and by constituting their academic programs in relation to local intellectual agendas.

A Summary Report from the Research Partnership on Women in Science Careers

BackgroundIn response to the landmark report “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health issued a request for applications that funded 14 R01 grants to investigate causal factors to career success for women in STEM. Following completion of the 4-year grants, the grant PIs formed a grassroots collaborative, the Research Partnership on Women in Science Careers.ObjectiveTo summarize the work of the Research Partnership, which resulted in over 100 publications.MethodsWe developed six themes to organize the publications, with a “Best Practices” for each theme at the end of each section: Barriers to Career Advancement; Mentoring, Coaching, and Sponsorship; Career Flexibility and Work-Life Balance; Pathways to Leadership; Compensation Equity; and Advocating for Change and Stakeholder Engagement.ResultsWomen still contend with sexual harassment, stereotype threat, a disproportionate burden of family responsibilities, a lack of parity in compensation and resource allocation, and implicit bias. Strategies to address these barriers using the Bronfenbrenner ecological model at the individual, interpersonal, institutional, academic community, and policy levels include effective mentoring and coaching, having a strong publication record, addressing prescriptive gender norms, positive counter-stereotype imaging, career development training, networking, and external career programs such as the AAMC Early and Mid-Career Programs and Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM).ConclusionsCultural transformation is needed to address the barriers to career advancement for women. Implementing the best practices noted of the work of the Research Partnership can help to achieve this goal.

Tender Heroes and Twilight Lovers: Re-Reading the Romance in Mass-Market Pulp Novels, 1950–1965

In mid-century popular presses published paperbacks about lesbians, gay men, and characters with male and female lovers. Barbara Grier was the first to catalog novels featuring lesbian subplots by classifying stories based on the extent and style of lesbian content. I perform a content analysis of 49 novels, motivated by these questions: How did novels with lesbian and gay characters differ from heterosexual romances? What do differences reveal about cultural understandings of love, gender, and sexuality? I find uniformity in the structural logic of novels. However, there are different narrative strategies, and protagonists’ gender and sexuality predict a novels trajectory.