Don't Be Part of the Problem

If you're a white person who studies race, you have something to prove.  If you’re a man who studies gender, you have something to prove.  We’ve all been in rooms where white people are embarrassing themselves talking about race, or men are mansplaining gender to women.  Don’t let that be you.  

Share the load by making it clear underrepresented students can come to you.  Graduate and undergraduate students who are worried about gender, race, sexuality, or disability end up going to faculty who share those attributes.  Do the work to be an ally.  Do the work to make it clear that you’re an ally. Don’t leave all that burden on your colleagues.  

People who grew up speaking a language other than English, or a dialect of English other than standard white academic English, are just as smart as people who are fluent in academic prose.  

Putting one woman or one person of color on a committee risks putting that person in the impossible situation of representing All Diversity on that panel. Try to put minority faculty in places where they'll have allies. Prioritize putting minority faculty on committees that matter.  Maybe let a committee that doesn’t matter stay all male.  

If you want women to be half the people on a panel, or in a syllabus, or in a journal ON AVERAGE, there have to be panels and syllabi and journals that are more than half women. If you think 50/50 is enough, panels and syllabi will vary between 0% women and 50% women, and the mean will be well below 50%. We need panels that are 70, 80, 90% women. We need panels with no white members. If you want the mean of the distribution to be 50%, you can't also set the max to 50% unless every single panel will be evenly split.  It’s just math.  

Your fellow panelists are professional adults, too. "Panel chairs often fail to paint the picture of a competent professional, instead lingering much longer than in the case of male speakers on the women’s physical attributes, age, country of upbringing, family situation etc. "

Maybe just don’t do any of this.  Don’t ask women if they’re pregnant, don’t ask grad students if faculty are pregnant, don’t act like pregnancy is a failure.  Say no to scrutinizing your colleagues’ bodies.  

Say you don’t want to have an all male panel. Do not have senior male speakers and a junior woman moderator to follow the letter of the law. Mix ranks and genders among the speakers. Otherwise you will put the moderator in an impossible position and everyone will learn less than they would otherwise.

People with less social power have a lot of stories of being ignored.  Conference invitations go to the two male co-authors, not to the woman.  People of color get moved out of research teams.  Don’t let that happen to your co-authors.  Put them back on the email thread.  Keep their names on your joint work.  

 Practically, this means getting rid of courses designed to fail the “unsuitable” students.  It means never describing someone as “good at math” or “bad at math.”  It means lots of support in the early stages of graduate programs for people with different backgrounds. 

Even if they're senior scholars. Even if they're great at fundraising.

Make space for other people’s ideas.  This goes double if you’re feeling personally defensive.

Don’t blame women for not acting more like men.  Remember they often get punished if they do.  

Full stop.  If you do, you’re part of the problem. 

When you’re reading grant applications, articles, or job materials, treat gender, race, sexuality, disability, etc like they’re central issues in your discipline.  Don’t discount work on them as niche.  

It’s incredibly common to think someone’s smarter or their research is more important because they make bolder claims.  That’s gendered: men are socialized to be overconfident, women are socialized to hedge (and when women make big overconfident claims they often get shot down). It’s also cultural.  Being careful about what your data does and doesn’t show is smart as fuck.