Our department(full information, I am in the social sciences) has very few (3) TT female faculty and we are having serious problems attracting female junior faculty and retaining female graduate students. We should not have a less diverse program than physics or engineering, but we do. Figuring out how to support female colleagues is not about teaching you to demonstrate contempt for your male colleagues or the system that seems to do such a poor job with getting women to tenure, it should be about assisting them to navigate a system that appears to be especially difficult for new and junior female faculty to navigate.

I think you are right on about the difficulties that all of us face in navigating the transition to faculty and progress toward tenure. That said, finding mentors who are outside your gender or outside your race is complicated. Athey, Avery & Zemsky demonstrate that homogenous organizations generally develop the talents/productivity of the dominant type (AES:2000). Which is fine if we think the talents are concentrated in that type (males). If we think that talents are not, then we need to find some way to transition from that functioning homogenous organization to a diverse one. Helping men and women equally does not seem to fit with that goal- it seems to be addressing a different problem entirely. I do not think that better junior faculty mentoring is a common solution if mentoring is going to focus on improving the mentoring of male colleagues that we might expect if the authors are correct.

I am not advocating hindering male colleagues, but why is establishing an organization to assist and mentoring female colleagues frequently treated thusly? Is it a failure to understand the numbers?

It becomes an issue of unfairness when only SOME groups get this sort of support, which doesn’t seem to be the case described. Maybe in an ideal world there’d be no ’special interests’ that bring people together to share experiences, support each other, and possibly campaign for better facilities, and we’d all be so perfectly integrated into the network of our organisation that we’d always be able to find people with common interests, but I can’t imagine a world where that was true. Especially not in academe!

Blogland lets us make contacts with similar-minded people and make ’sorting decisions’ about who we associate with easily, at the click of a mouse – readership of particular blogs may as Whimple implies indicate commonality of experience, though I’d argue that it’s NOT necessarily the case, and that blogging is a relatively painless way to learn about different experiences of the academy – but in the real workplace this is a lot harder.

The 3 departments I studied in all had a “token” woman, who of course did not have kids. Even the grad students noted how shabbily the male profs treated the token diversity profs, so I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to be that person. Keep in mind that I got my PhD in the early 2000’s in the physical sciences, so it isn’t like this is ancient history! I have had ZERO role models in how to deal with gender issues in academic science. I find it hard to imagine a man in science with the same experience.

When I finished my PhD, I ran screaming from academia. I did a postdoc then a staff position at a National Lab in the US, where I met several successful woman scientists in academia, industry, and government. They inspired me to pursue my dream of being a professor at a research university. I need role models myself, and I want to be a role model for those who follow me. I do have male mentors for different things at my university, which is awesome. But the men can’t tell me about what it was like to be the first woman in the department to have kids, or about how much of my entitled maternity leave I should consider taking early on in the TT without screwing myself over for productivity on proposals. That is why I am interested in women’s groups in academia.

I fail to see how this issue would also affect men.

And I think this is reason enough to set up something where women can get together, meet, discuss and not feel that maybe they are inherently unsuited to academia, purely because of their gender.

You can look around you and still dream the American dream even when it’s hard. Sometimes it’s hard to get up the energy to do that when you have to keep finding where it is and who it’s for, and prove to people you know what it is, again and again.

My only criticism of drda’s initiative is that I don’t think it need be selective in terms of its contributors gender (if it is at all), but only in terms of its issues. Why not simply describe it as a faculty meeting group specifically aiming to discuss issues relating to women in science? If some jr faculty guys want to tag along with their 2 cents, let them. But it is self-defeating for a group to end up mirroring rather than overcoming the very inequalities that inspired its formation in the first place. The only criteria for an attendant should be a) do you have anything relevant to contribute? and/or b) will it benefit you to participate in this mentoring initiative?

So, a more appropriate response to the following reSnark:
“Must be nice. I hope your Dean is as supportive of the younger academic career men with 2 kids … pre-tenure.”

Would be,
“He certainly is. We meet on Fridays, by the way. I’ll put you down for bringing the bagels shall I?”

You and I have common problems and we could both benefit from the implementation of common solutions. Your sexist attitude that men generally, and therefore me specifically, can’t possibly relate to issues of relevance to you, and therefore should be excluded from the discussion, is intensely irritating, as well as counter-productive.

Yes, we do have some common problems and there are many areas where common solutions will fit. I wouldn’t argue that point- because you are right. Maybe common solutions will be enough eventually- I don’t know. Maybe the whole bias against women in academia is about women bearing the children and doing most of the parenting (traditionally anyway)- but I doubt it. Why do I doubt it?? Because 99% of my women colleagues don’t have children. They are being handicapped by something else, and it is not because they suck as scientists.

Secondly- it’s not my intention to exclude or irritate you- I want you to understand where I am coming from- and I want to understand where you are coming from. Otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering with this discussion. At the end of the day I want a fairer, more family friendly academia where one can have a real life and do great science- and I want not to be held back because I am a girl.