Transcript Divas

www.transcriptdivas.com

Phone: (888) 494-8474

Episode 12 Women in Academia Part 1

Doug Harvey: Welcome to Talking Stock. I'm your host, Doug Harvey, Director of the Institute for Faculty Development at Stockton University. Talking Stock is a space where colleagues can discuss teaching, scholarship and service. This week's topic is women in academia and we have two guests with us.

Sara Martino: I'm Sara Martino. I'm an associate professor of psychology.

Jessie Finch: I'm Jessie Finch. I'm an assistant professor of sociology.

Respondent : Okay. Great. Thanks for joining us today. I know you organize the Women in Academia Conference.

Sara Martino: Yes.

Doug Harvey: That was held in January here at Stockton, and the keynote discussed the pathways women follow in their university careers. So I was just wondering what your pathways were.

Sara Martino: So I was actually in college and I was studying psychology but my intention was to become a guidance counselor. So I thought I really wanted to help kids, at risk youth in particular and while I was in college, I had one mentor. There were very few female faculty. I was at Westchester University in both psychology and sociology at that time. I had one really strong female mentor who said that academia would provide a freedom to you to be able to maybe work in private practice a little bit but also educate students, continue your research.

So my pathway somewhat changed in college and that's when I decided to pursue my PhD. So I went straight thru school. Everyone told me I was not going to get into a school close to home but I did manage to get into Temple University, finish my PhD there and then for my doctoral internship I was told that you're going to have to move. There's no way you're going to get an internship close to home and I ended up at which is right in Ancora Psychiatric which is right in Winslow, New Jersey.

And then as I'm applying for jobs, everyone said you're going to have to move. There's no way you're going to get a job close to home and here I am at Stockton. So I actually came in as a 13D while I was finishing up my degree and that translated into a tenure track line in my second line here. So that's a little bit about my pathway. So somewhat non-traditional at the start, but starting here at Stockton I had a few positive mentors that told me to start advising, even though I was a 13D and keep my research up and sort of be ready if a tenure track position opened up so that's what I did.

Jessie Finch: That's great. I wanted to be a Broadway star and then I realized that they do eight shows a week and I thought that sounds terrible. So when I went to college I was a music major. I wanted to be a choral director because I did decide I wasn't Broadway bound, but I took ear training and I got a B and I was like no, I'm not going to do this anymore.

So I started looking for a new major and I took a basically the equivalent of a first year experience class on families, children and schools and it was taught by the chair of the sociology department and I was like what is sociology? I had never heard the term before. A lot of people think that it's psychology or think that it's counseling or think that it's social work and I was really mentored by ... there were four faculty members at University of Tulsa where I was an undergrad and they were really excited.

They did encourage me to apply to graduate school and I said no, I want to get some real life on the front lines kind of experience. So I worked at headstart for a year and I worked at Big Brothers Big Sisters for a year. And I was like okay now I'm ready to go back to academia. Thank you. So kinda the burnout effect of social work and living with people in poverty every day so I decided to then go back and get my PhD which I'd been encouraged to do but then really focused on issues around immigration and inequality. Dealing with racial ethnic background and sort of the overlap of immigration and race and ethnicity.

So I did my PhD at the University of Arizona in Tucson which is just an hour from the border, and I wanted to do my dissertation on the border patrol and I worked with a number of people sort of higher up in the border patrol and I sent a proposal to the director in D.C. and they were like yeah, we sent this to legal and it's not going to happen. Border patrol was like oh, do we want you following us around? No. So then I started going to court proceedings that were happening in Tucson because the court is open and anyone can go.

So I did my dissertation on criminal immigration proceedings in the Tucson Federal Court. Then when I was looking for jobs, I did look all over the country. I was not trying to stay local. I was really interested in being closer to Broadway but also looking at other places and my husband's last name happens to be Galloway and so I saw an ad for a small school that had community engagement in the ad that I was excited about in Galloway, New Jersey and I thought that would be funny.

It worked out great and I feel like at Stockton I've been really lucky to also have mentors that encouraged me to get involved and to get active which is why I'm working with the WIGS program, the Women Gender Sexuality studies minor and the Women in Academia Conference as well.

Doug Harvey: So you had very different pathways obviously. What were some of the challenges that you faced as women in academia first of all? ANd then what do you think are the challenges that universities and college leaders need to deal with or address at this point in terms of making women in academia feel more empowered and part of the experience and not just numbers and sort of second rate faculty?

Sara Martino: Yes, so this is my 12th year at Stockton so I have a little bit longer history in terms of what the challenges have been at Stockton specifically but I would say that for me starting out at Stockton it sounded very sort of family friendly, very progressive, a very liberal type of school and I quickly found actually being a faculty member here at Stockton, it depends on what school you're a part of, and it depends on how supportive the administrators are section by section or even the older faculty members or the more senior faculty members within your own program.

So the biggest challenge for me coming to Stockton is that I had my daughter in my first semester here and I had my son the year I went up for tenure. I'm not entirely sure but I'm pretty sure that's why I went into early labor with my son but I was up for tenure so that was good. But it was very difficult. So at the time that I actually took family leave with my son after I had him, there really wasn't anyone to talk to you about how to go about doing that. So ironically, I've mentored faculty after me and just sort of helped them negotiate with human resources, know how to use their sick time, how they set that up.

Alternate assignment which is something that isn't talked about a lot at the university but for faculty who are going to use their sick time or family leave time but they won't have enough for the entire semester, there is such a thing as alternate assignment since you can't go back into a class 2/3 of the way through. They will give you things to be working on within your program or within the school so that you're back to work even if you can't go back to teaching a class that hasn't been running. So there are a lot of things that I kind of had to just find out for myself along the way but I would say that was the biggest challenge.

Many people told me you're never going to get tenure especially when I got pregnant again. Like, how dare you do this again. There's no way you're going to be here. I survived all that so that was wonderful. As I've progressed at Stockton and that's when the idea for the Women in Academia Teaching Circle came about which was right after I had gotten tenured because we still felt like okay, obviously family leave is not the only issue.

That was sort of the main barrier I had going into tenure, just managing the same amount of time that maybe other colleagues could have or could do that weren't managing young children. But we were talking about other things in terms of how we were treated within our own programs or administratively, whether or not our research was being taken as seriously as maybe male colleagues, student ratings, student evaluations of teaching is huge. I talk with my students about it all the time, that you have to be nice in order to get high ratings as a female, but as a male you can be mean but still be ranked high because you're seen as competent and students still consistently if my ratings are not super high the feedback is always she's mean, she's short in email responses.

I don't know how you can be angry in an email response but I've learned that to the point that I'll have in person students that I've had online and they'll say you're so much nicer than you are online. I'm still me so I'm not sure how that happens ...

Jessie Finch: Unless you're not typing in caps all the time. I don't know how that works.

Sara Martino: It's associating a female professor with maybe a lack of I'm so happy that you reached out in email to me. If I just answered simply whatever their question is or I tell them what the policy is according to the course, that's not acceptable.

Doug Harvey: You're not being nurturing, you're not being a female.

Sara Martino: Not being motherly. Yes, and so I feel like that has significant impact in terms of tenure, in terms of promotion, that I don't know that the administration is really dealing with. We move from the set to the IDA in my tenure which maybe the IDA is marginally better but I still find, it's just interesting that post tenure it's much, much harder for me to get those high evaluations. But I feel like I'm not focused as much on making sure that I come across as nice. I focus on my competency.

I focus on educating them about my research. That's another thing that I would say is that being involved in research, we have limited resources for faculty. That varies by school but both of us, Jessie and I, are in a school that's predominantly female oriented and has the lowest travel reimbursement of any of the divisions. So we're expected to do research, we're expected to travel, but we're not reimbursed for it. And oh by the way, our students hold us accountable for not being in class even when we're presenting at professional conferences. So this is probably getting too long and winded but ...

Doug Harvey: No, I don't think so at all.

Jessie Finch: No, I think I'll just tack onto that last point is that I do think the unequal distribution of we're all teachers, we're all researchers and we're all people who do service, yet somehow I have I think double the average advising load in my program and I end up doing a lot of service administrative type work in my program and I think women in general tend to be funneled into those types of positions that ... one of my out of state mentors calls it the curse of the competent woman, that once you've demonstrated that you can organize an event like who gets to organize the event every semester?

You do. Congratulations. You've been rewarded for being competent with more work and particularly work that is not highly rewarding. So spending more time writing research or being at home, being able to focus on research work is a lot more difficult when you are at meetings and taking meetings with students as well and in terms of advising students, right, they do expect female professors to do more advising than just what classes are you taking?

I really enjoy doing advising around careers and talking about graduate school and being a mentor, but then it's also here's the problem that's going on with my cat or my family or whatever and I'm like that's great. I am not a counselor, like, do you want me to take you to J204? I am literally not qualified to talk to you about this. I will but it's a sort of replacement mom is what I joke about with my students with.

So I think addressing those issues and recognizing some of the inequalities about and there's some talk about is this choice and does female faculty go that way, but often times it's very constrained choice because of these lack of resources and lack of awareness that oh the person who is a good teacher and is a good advisor ends up doing twice that much work which really does limit the time for research which gets twice as much attention.

Doug Harvey: And so do you feel like there has to be opportunity but it also has to be an opportunity that isn't constrained. So what are some of the things that people could do to change that?

Sara Martino: Well, I think Jessie is tapping into that indirectly in what she just said in that service needs to be valued more at the institution. So for myself, getting prepared to go for full professor, that's definitely something I worry about, the research aspect. So I'm sort of forcing myself to focus more on that which is not allowing me maybe the same amount of time for mentoring. I mean, recommendation letters.

There's such a difference in our program in terms of female faculty and the amount of recommendation letters they write and male faculty. So I'll have students come to me and say I asked so and so and he said no, he couldn't do it or no, he only had me for one class but I only ever had adjuncts. And then I then feel in a position of okay, I'm going to have to try to help them especially in clinical or counseling because that's my field that I'm going to have to do it. But others feel more free to say no. That all again comes back and ties into your evaluation of teaching so it's all inter woven.

So I think the biggest thing is allowing maybe different pathways to success, that high-impact journal publications does not signify a full contributing member to this university or a tenurable member of this university. I feel like there's many different ways to success and there's many different things that faculty could choose to be a part of and would do so maybe more freely if they didn't feel constrained by other duties.