Tag Archives: sociology

02.09.18
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Is Gender Bias an Intended Feature of Teaching Evaluations?

Every semester brings with it a new series of articles, blog posts and stories about gender and racial biases in teaching evaluations. A large and constantly growing body of academic literature demonstrates how bias shapes these tools.

For example, experiments with students in online courses show that identical courses are rated lower if the instructor is randomly assigned a woman’s name. Students may also use evaluations to comment on faculty appearance, tone of voice or even their .

And in a political environment where much of the population denies basic empirical facts about racial and gender inequality, teaching about such controversial subjects can open one up to claims of political bias. Social sciences don’t have laws, but if we were attempting to devise one, “Women and minorities get lower teaching evaluations” would be pretty close to axiomatic.

From a methodological standpoint, teaching evaluations are a mess. These evaluations lack external validity and don’t correlate with student learning outcomes. Typically, when social scientists recognize a research instrument is providing an incorrect measure, or that a measure is systematically biased, the measure is abandoned and (hopefully) replaced with a better one. Everyone knows — or should know — that teaching evaluations are better measures of student stereotypes than teaching effectiveness. Yet colleges and universities persist in laundering systematic bias through tenure and promotion processes, the legitimacy of which depend upon their supposed neutrality.

Although the methodological problems with these tests matter, it is also important to not get lost in the abstract; we must remember that biased evaluations can actually destroy people’s dreams. Promotions, raises and tenure are partially based on biased evaluations. Students who are unhappy with a grade, who dislike the opinions of a disciplinary expert or who are simply sexist can play an outsize role in their instructor’s future job negotiations.

Using biased evaluations allows colleges and universities to punish those whose identities deviate from white male normativity. Take a hypothetical gender discrimination case for denial of tenure because of poor teaching. Substantiating the harm requires evidence that discrimination was based on membership in a protected category. The institution will be able to point to poor teaching evaluations — despite their known biases — to argue that denial of tenure was based on less meritorious teaching.

The irony here is clear; the discriminatory bias built into measures of teaching effectiveness can be retroactively used to justify unequal outcomes based on those measures. Biased evaluation criteria explain biased outcomes, which the college or university then considers legitimated. The case of Ellen Pao followed just this logic after she filed a discrimination suit against a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. A jury saw her performance evaluations as legitimate, despite the fact that they were systematically lower once she complained of gender discrimination — a pattern she attributed to retaliation.

Feminist sociologists have long argued that one of the features of contemporary organizations is their gendered nature. Claiming that organizations are gendered means that supposedly gender-neutral jobs are actually considered men’s prerogative and that women in “men’s jobs” — like, say, professors — are thought of as interlopers, out of place or what consistently shows up on evaluations: less competent. The key here is that, of course, these ratings aren’t based on objective measures of competence; rather, they are sifted through widely held stereotypes about women. But they are given the patina of legitimacy once the institution accepts them as credible when it comes to retention, promotion and tenure. That also has the benefit of protecting the university from potential lawsuits down the road.

Biased teaching evaluations, like race- and class-biased test scores, support the status quo and don’t create the same type of public outcry as, for instance, certain affirmative action policies that may slightly disadvantage white men. They are the perfect vehicle for a type of gender-blind discrimination because they allow one to claim detachment and objectivity. They pretend the “best qualified” is measured and confirmed through a neutral process that just so happens to confirm the worst stereotypes about women. Recent research by Katherine Weisshaar shows that, even accounting for productivity, gendered differences in the way tenure committees evaluate women contributes to fewer women moving up.

Given the evidence, I’ve almost reached the conclusion that gender- and race-biased evaluations are not used in spite of their bias, but because they are biased. Of course, my assumption about bias being a desirable feature of student evaluations is speculative. Hard evidence would be difficult to establish, because part of the point of these evaluations is that the bias is plausibly deniable. Administrators are unlikely to admit that they knowingly employ a biased instrument in employment proceedings. But I think the evidence for concluding that bias is a feature of teaching evaluations is in my favor. If colleges and universities know that evaluations are biased, and those biases are more likely to harm women and minorities (and the intersection of these categories), at what point can we start to assume that such evaluations are an intended feature of the process?

I don’t believe colleges and universities are going to drop these types of evaluations anytime soon, as the pressure to quantify every area of academic life is increasing. But making department heads, deans and tenure committees aware of both the biased nature of these evaluations and how they can influence tenure decisions will help to reduce the harm that reliance on such biased measure inflicts.

Bio

Victor Ray is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. His research examines race and gender discrimination in organizations. His commentary has appeared in Newsweek, Boston Review and Gawker. He is the new editor of “Conditionally Accepted,” an Inside Higher Ed career advice column for marginalized academics. You can follow him on Twitter at .

11.10.17
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Dismantling Whiteness In Academia

Note: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed (here). Dr. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is associate professor of sociology at American University. He recently published a co-edited volume, Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, with University of Texas Press, and has a forthcoming co-authored book, Race and Sexuality, with Polity Press.

Dismantling Whiteness In Academe

Academics, primarily those of color, are fighting for a voice to disrupt the neoliberal (some would say white supremacist) logics now embedded in false practices of choice and equality in education today. Academic circles operate as inhospitable sites to faculty of color, as higher education is built on the exclusionary processes of symbolic and tokenistic inclusion. The ways in which those historical exclusionary processes impact nonwhite faculty involve those faculty having to constantly negotiate or say no to extra work — work that oftentimes involves managing diversity for whiteness.

In this essay, I discuss some of the characteristics of whiteness as embedded in multiple university sites and experienced by many of my colleagues. I also begin to point toward a project of dismantling whiteness in order to make room for an academic transformative engagement.

Scholars’ vocal actions against “light” multiculturalism, reactions to shallow accusations of “reverse racism” and active resistance to neoliberal diversity often encounter a challenge. That challenge is, namely, that whiteness and a strong racial inclusion and justice project cannot occupy the same space. By whiteness — as an institution, as discourse and as the invisible norm — I am referring to the entitlements provided to most professors by virtue of a white academic institution that privileges cultural norms of formal communication, professionalism and appropriateness. A rule of sameness often applies here: of sameness in hiring practices, in trusting others like them, in the advancement of knowledge and in simple networking endeavors that invoke “fairness and equal opportunity” through the vaguest language of multiculturalism (or the 21st-century upgrade: “diversity and inclusion”).

Those institutions may, conversely, tag nonwhite faculty members as unfitting, creating the conditions that make them feel out of place. Indeed, when an institution is not made for you, you are out of place and, indeed, conditionally accepted. When faculty of color speak up, we are often silenced — and put in “our place.” Over all, the failed project of watered-down academic diversity is a reminder of how whiteness is structured — and structuring our interactions in academe.

It bears repeating that the dismantling of whiteness (as structure) is different from white (as race). When we talk about race in the classroom, I always make sure to distinguish between a race, a group of people, and the system that races encode. Here, I talk about whiteness as a discourse that enables a set of practices, which activates, with its own set of codes, certain responses and actions. But I am not speaking of white people — whether administrators, colleagues, students — or even whiteness as a race.

Academe is poised to transform the bias of traditional and canonical curriculum. Yet while the philosophy and policies at many universities have become more robust, inclusive and oh so diverse, in actuality, the leadership of many of those institutions has continued to reinforce whiteness as a rule. Universities may have incompetent administrators in departmental units, but the code of white networks makes any honest actions or comments about the challenges those people create difficult at best. Thus, whiteness remains pretty invisible to the very powers that be and that operate in and through it, maintaining a ruling on norms that directly impact faculty of color in recruitment, retention and promotion.

Networks among the “we” that hire base their decisions on a white collective imaginary of who produces important work (read: gets the right grants), who seems to work hard, who meets the standards — creating self-fulfilling situations that repeat, and thus reify, whiteness (and that obscure when folks of color do, indeed, produce the work). Universities that are in constant tribulation for their lack of diversity ironically use “target of opportunity” hires, but white people get tenure-track positions in (at best) dubious processes. We also see white folks who leave and come back to institutions as they please, without formal hiring processes, who may be claimed as target recruitments. Nowadays, the process of tenure has become a bargaining of sorts — with (often) white folks holding other offers in hand, ready to quit and move on.

Indeed, whiteness talks — it always has, and it does so in silence, as the norm, as whiteness often most successfully reproduces itself. And yet if one notes how that work gets done, those mentioning it become the problem. In neoliberal talk, some of us don’t do the work that matters, or that gets us (and the university) funded, or that is published in presses and journals that are ranked, so we best stay in our place. I’ve heard so many of such versions from colleagues across the country, countless times. This is not new.

I am a Latino queer tenured sociologist at, like most scholars, a white institution, or a majority white institution. But here I use “majority” in the sociological sense. I am referring to the actions that make it a majority white institution irrespective of the numbers. The terms “majority” and “minority” are not literal; rather, these terms are about power, control of institutions and resources, and a sense of ownership and belonging. When academic settings operate in and through whiteness, the process constructs ethnoracial groups as minorities, irrespective of the numbers. Faculty, staff and students are often engaged in sometimes innocent, often implicit, or at times explicit engagements with a code of whiteness that reproduces a specific social order that sets exclusionary traps for most people who feel ill placed (sometimes including women, often gender and sexual minorities, and, generally, people of color).

At many universities in the United States, diversity bypasses race for country of origin, for gender, for sexuality, for queer identity and experience, for working-class status (in white students) and for disability. To bypass here is not just to ignore but also to avoid. Yet this avoidance is also a significant passing through, in that it depends on a loose notion of how to include “the other” in academe, while it co-opts any efforts to confront the structural systems of racism embedded in the culture of universities.

Sites that bypass racial-minority faculty hiring often simultaneously master showcasing how “diverse” they may be — with white women constituting the majority of the ranks, as well as gays and lesbians. (Some universities go as far as to argue that conservatives, Republicans and religious applicants who hold sexist, racist and homophobic beliefs are minoritized.) This bypassing of diversity is in actuality an erasure of minorities — and of Blackness in particular — that gets constituted into benign acts of inclusion. These acts serve the dual purpose of salvaging the university’s attempts and efforts to diversify, while at the same time justifying why the focus is not on ethnoracial minorities. Students at many campuses have noticed this and begun to demand practices that move beyond tokenism. Faculty and staff members must follow suit.

It is taxing to call out the whiteness of those so comfortably supported by the web underneath that discourse, and it sure has repercussions — any challenge to systematic control and power does. Sometimes, faculty of color do not find the room to challenge the systems in place; sometimes, we do not even have the energy to communicate this effectively, given our frustration at academe’s inability to articulate itself outside of neoliberal markers.

To dismantle whiteness is to enunciate its characteristics, denounce how it works (when it does and through whom), and make evident the patterns that may be obvious to some people (and how and why others are oblivious to it). Dismantling whiteness in academe is about giving up power and privilege, yes. It is also about recognizing how inherently hostile the university spaces and environment are for faculty, staff and students of color. It requires a rage about diversity and that we move into a sociohistorical and cultural analysis of academe as a racist institution.

09.29.17
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Bringing The Political Self Into The Classroom In The Era Of Trump

Note: this blog post was originally published on Write Where It Hurts in March and republished on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed today. Dr. Katie L. Acosta () is an associate professor of sociology at Georgia State University, where she teaches courses on race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and family. She maintains her own blog at katielacosta.com.

Bringing In The Political Self

Shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I attended a meeting at my institution designed to explain the boundaries of academic freedom to faculty members. A second goal was to collectively brainstorm best practices for creating a civil classroom environment that presents students with a balanced picture of contemporary political happenings. The session covered a lot of ground, but the general gist of it was that we should try to appear as neutral as possible when discussing political candidates and issues.

This is where we are in higher education under a Trump administration. I am supposed to teach my students about their social world, about racism, gender, sexuality and the family — all while remaining neutral on the hostile and deeply offensive statements that our president made during his campaign and since he was elected. But herein lies the problem: my political ideologies are shaped by my sociological lens, and my sociological lens is shaped by my personal experience. These three things do not, nor have they ever, existed in separate spheres for me. Arguably, this is what makes me a good professor, or at least it is what fuels my passion for what I do.

Sitting in the aforementioned meeting, hearing the suggestions being made, brought me back to the morning after Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. I was an assistant professor at Tulane University at the time, and that morning I was scheduled to be in my Introduction to Sociology undergraduate classroom teaching about racial bias. I remember my heart racing as I scoured social media, learning the details of this awful tragedy: the murder of an innocent teenager. I desperately wanted to cry, but instead I pulled myself together and walked downstairs to teach.

I made the tough decision to avoid the murder entirely. I was certainly not in any position to have a “balanced” conversation about it with my students. Avoiding the topic was the only way that I knew how to keep myself from feeling my pain. Inevitably, however, 10 minutes into the lecture, a student raised their hand and wanted to discuss the events. Most of the class still did not know who Trayvon Martin was. And as this student explained the events that transpired, I remember looking at their mostly blank, white faces, first with perplexity and then with anger.

I began to feel myself shaking behind the podium. How could so many students have such blank stares hearing about this innocent boy’s death? My rage regarding this incident is deeply personal. As a mother of a black teenage boy, I imagined my son walking at night with a bag of Skittles. But my rage was also fueled by my sociological understanding of this incident as part of a larger systemic problem in our society — of this country’s fear of black men and boys, and of this country’s failure, time and again, to give them the benefit of the doubt during such encounters.

Channeling my sociological lens and harnessing my personally driven passion helps me bring intellectual material to life for my students. It allows me to make their learning about more than just words on a page, key terms or lecture notes. It allows me to make their learning about something real, tangible and consequential.

How do we get our students to understand the consequences of political happenings without letting them see why we are invested in these issues? I would never want a student to feel alienated in my classroom, but I have no interest in perpetuating an idea of myself as a disembodied worker whose personal life and work life do not intersect.

Keeping our political selves out of the classroom also presumes that our bodies do not advertise this self. I am an Afro-Latina queer cisgender woman. Don’t these identities speak for me even if I do not? How many of my students believe they know my political leanings before I ever open my mouth? And if they make assumptions about my politics, then why not make my political ideologies clear in the interest of transparency?

I spent the first few weeks of last semester stumblingly awkwardly over how to teach my courses without being “too” political. But I do not believe it has done me or my students a bit of good. Instead, it has flattened my delivery and robbed me of the passion that used to come with every lecture I delivered. So now, this semester, I take a different approach. Our democratic system as it currently stands is the most illustrative example I could possibly come up with for the prevalence of racism in the United States.

Rather than ignoring political happenings, I can draw connections between sociological theories about racism and our contemporary reality. Now my students are unpacking the executive orders, cabinet picks and proposed legislation that the Trump administration has planned or implemented since the inauguration. For instance, I do not mince words in exposing the religious and racial intolerance of Trump’s travel ban. Only in a country that refuses to take an honest and direct look at the deep-seated racism that plagues it can we have fertile ground for lawyers, judges and politicians to defend a ban that bars entry to the United States for citizens from targeted Muslim-majority countries.

This past spring, I had my students read Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter in opposition to Jeff Sessions’s nomination for a federal judgeship. It was important to me that my students read it, particularly after Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, was prevented from doing so on the Senate floor. I wanted them to understand Sessions’s role in disenfranchising black voters and, subsequently, Senate Republicans’ willingness to overlook those actions and confirm Sessions’s appointment as U.S. attorney general anyway. Such political happenings speak volumes about the crisis of race relations we are currently experiencing in the United States — where whites give themselves and others permission to overlook the racial disparities that they are complicit in creating in the interest of preserving their power.

Only in a democracy that is largely run by rich heterosexual white cisgender men who refuse to acknowledge their privilege do we see such willingness to overlook the racist, Islamophobic, sexist, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic and classist actions and policies of Trump’s administration. I do not have control over that. But I do have the opportunity to ensure that the next generation does not so thoroughly miss the boat in understanding the covert and overt ways that racism exists and persists in our country. I will continue to encourage my students to engage in respectful dialogue with me and with one another on the many issues we currently face — not with a forced or feigned sense of neutrality but with the promise of respect and integrity and in the spirit of understanding. For creating this environment in my classroom, I apologize to no one.

09.22.17
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Latinxs In Academe: Rage About “Diversity Work”

Note: this was published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed (here). Dr. Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is associate professor of sociology at American University. He recently published a co-edited volume, Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, with University of Texas Press, and has a forthcoming co-authored book, Race and Sexuality, with Polity Press.

Latinx students’ higher enrollment in colleges and universities in the United States should produce hope. But the attrition rate is higher for Latinx students than for their peers from other racial and ethnic groups. That lower rate of undergraduate completion is reflected at the graduate level as well: a recent report shows that less than 1 percent of Latinxs hold Ph.D.s — far fewer than Asians, whites and African-Americans. And while academic institutions may be recruiting more Latinx students, they often aren’t increasing their Latinx faculty hires.

People in higher education talk a lot about diversity, but the aforementioned disparities should raise concern as to whether institutions are all talk when it comes to inclusion. The gap between what is said and done sustains what Sara Ahmed has called diversity work, a project that often supports the public relations goals of colleges and universities at the expense of Latinxs and other ethnoracial minority groups.

Early on in any given fall semester, I attend a reception for Latina/o students — a common occurrence these days, as growing numbers of Latinx students attend private institutions like my own. According to colleagues I have consulted, there seems to be a pattern across our institutions: the majority of the Latinx faculty members are largely “term” or visiting faculty — concepts used to describe faculty employed on yearly contracts. In contrast, the number of Latinx scholars who are tenure-track faculty is relatively small at these colleges. It seems that our institutions typically have one or two full professors who are of Latin American (not U.S. Latinx) descent and a handful of Latinx tenured associate professors (myself included).

It is with those patterns in mind that I begin to notice my rage at the unfortunate set of events — the unintended setup, I prefer to think — unfolding in front of me. Such patterns do not merely become evident with statistics and numbers; they are part and parcel of many Latinx students’ everyday lived realities in academe.

Mine is a rage against “diversity work.”

“Diversity” has become a shorthand for the insertion of minority students into predominantly white academic spaces, while at the same time leaving untouched the historical enforcement of exclusion inherent from the inception of these institutions. Often times, to “diversify” means to change brochures, update website pictures, hire key administrators who represent the face of any given historically excluded group. Yet colleges and universities still prioritize enrollments and registration over spending time and resources to support the retention of students.

Let’s not kid ourselves — the stakes are partially monetary. In the view of corporate-minded academic administrators, the more diversity there is, the more “experience” students gain. That, in coded language, means more diversity allows U.S.-born, non-Hispanic white students to consume otherness and develop the appropriate skills at managing difference (and a portrayal of their “tolerance” for difference) for when they work with — not in — a “diverse” environment. This translates in a direct gain — monetary and otherwise — for a white student body that eventually becomes part of the work force. Their coded experience with “diversity” allows for them to “manage” diversity without having to address inequality. It also means disciplining students of color to assimilate to that diversity project — preparing them to abide by these unequal work-force standards, to fit within that system.

This superficial diversity work is not only a challenge for private colleges and universities. Some public institutions I’ve recently visited have become Hispanic-serving institutions — a designation that recognizes the significant number of Latina/o and Hispanic students enrolled. It also, ironically, makes those institutions less accountable to diversity, as they are academic models by the act of surpassing “quota” numbers, but they continue to instill a consumption of difference (or the showcasing of their nonwhite students for the benefit of the institution without addressing inherent inequalities). At those institutions, the experiences I hear about from Latinx students are similar: no matter how many brown students I see, the professoriate is white and does not get our concerns, cannot think with a truly intersectional lens, and is unable to rescind some of the hegemonic views that inspire the “canon” in any given field.

I experience a personal rage about some of these things and how they impact faculty members, students and academe in general. That is not the rage of the “angry Latino man” — a common stereotype even in academic circles. Rather, it is my own rewriting of it. Like the discourse that presupposes Latinas and Latinos are homogeneous, rage is but an individual aspect of Latina/o racializing in the United States and in academe in particular.

Latinx professors are expected to know everything about diversity. Even if you work on the sciences in a lab, you should be able to, at the drop of the request, pull out a set of handouts and a 60- to 90-minute session on “my culture has these distinctive features” or “diversity is good because of …” Some of us decided to study topics of race, gender, class and sexuality in order to own and redefine the tenets of the discourse we were simply invited to join. We have been pushed to speak for a group of people, and our behavior, emotions and expressions of support for X or Y administrative task are read through a lens of representation not expected of white men or women.

This rage is not violent — it is affirmative. I feel rage for Latinx students. Many of them come from community colleges and are hungry to discuss their take on being a Latinx or multiracial student on the campus. Yet they don’t have the resources to adjust (read: assimilate) to such a new and unwelcoming environment. In privileging their current diversity project over the needs of Latinx students, colleges and universities constantly lump those U.S. students together with Latin American ones, even though their socioeconomic backgrounds and linguistic practices are significantly different.

I sometimes rage at administrative staff members whose interests may be more in line with the institution’s diversity project and who could care less for students’ challenges and concerns — or worse, who may dismiss those challenges or channel them to faculty of color. I feel rage with the junior faculty members whose research and teaching must excel, all while having to take under their wing dozens of Latinx students who continually demand they listen to stories about experiences of institutional violence — you know, those inherent in colleges and universities that were not made, and are unwilling to be transformed, with Latinx students in mind. I have to let the rage sink in.

Rage is that constant exasperation with the contemporary hypocrisy that aims to be “inclusive.” It may give visual sense to the invisibility of white dominance in the curriculum, or solidify the unnoticed classed markers in academic expectations and “professional” behavior, or perhaps reclaim diversity in ways that are less about inclusion and more about institutional transformation. Rage is also a tool to turn the presupposed norms upside down — that is, the orderly ways in which both women and men articulate whiteness in academe — and the responses to the inertia we sometimes see.

Transforming this rage means teaching about race at historically white colleges and universities, interrogating existing diversity discourses, revisiting curriculum so that whiteness is not left invisible, or involving non-Latinx faculty members (or other faculty of color) in the mentoring of nonwhite students. Collaborating on making our rage productive means multiple things at once.

This rage does not belong to Latinxs alone. It is an important source of action, of challenging meaningless “diversity work.” We should not engage it alone. Collaborative rage on diversity might end up producing more transformative changes — real diversity — or something new altogether.

07.07.17
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Navigating Sexual Harassment In Academia As A Young Black Femme

Note: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed (here). Gabi Jordan (a pseudonym) is an assistant professor of sociology. She studies race, ethnicity, gender and intimate relationships.

“Oh, you have everything going on there, don’t you?”

The above question took me by surprise. I was going about my usual routine in the campus writing center, checking in with student athletes and their graduate student mentors about upcoming assignments. My questioner had appeared from around a corner just as I was leaving a study room. With a smile, he gestured toward my face.

I laughed, awkwardly. It was immediately clear to me that the “everything” to which he referred were my nose and septum piercings, as I had become accustomed to people commenting on them regularly.

As I prepared myself to make an excuse to turn and walk away, he said, “You even have one in your tongue; let me see it.” The awkward smile on my face fell, and I choked out a short laugh. I felt frozen, unsure of what to do or what to say.

This older man was not my superior, but a coach for one of the university sports teams for which I tutored at the time. Though I had been warned that coaches should not be asking questions about student athletes, little direction was provided for how to avoid a coach if they did try to chat. As I mumbled about having students to check on, he reached out a hand towards my curly hair and inquired as to whether I was married or had any children.

I was able to end this encounter by entering another study room and checking in with some other students. But I spent the rest of my shift at the writing center feeling extremely uncomfortable and questioning whether I had done something to invite the coach’s comments and questions about my appearance and personal life.

This moment remains vivid in my memory because it is not the first time that I experienced unwanted attention in my workplace or other professional spaces. Truly, it is not the first time in my life that I have had my appearance discussed in a way that made me uncomfortable.

I am a light-skinned, mixed-race black woman who is visibly feminine, with big curly hair and what is considered to be both a “voluptuous” and “fat” body. Consequently, I have been subjected to aggressive street harassment, followed by men in stores, grabbed by men (and women) in bars, had students write offensive comments about me in their course evaluations, and witnessed rape “jokes” being directed at student athletes in the middle of a writing lab.

I have even experienced sexual harassment at the hands of fellow academics. For example, at the 2016 American Sociological Association annual meeting, I had the unfortunate experience of having a male professor comment on my “beauty” in the middle of a conversation about my research, with him reaching out to caress my face.

A lifetime of men (and many women, too) feeling entitled to make lewd comments or touch me without my permission has, in some ways, made me numb to the ways in which my body is viewed as accessible. My research on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality has allowed me to intellectualize why such harassment often happens. Yet even with the minor protections that an intellectual understanding of these experiences lends me, I continue to struggle with being socialized to believe that I am somehow complicit. I often feel guilty about wearing makeup and dressing in formfitting clothing, even as I wear high necklines and hemlines that come to the knee. Despite teaching my students about how the notion that women are sexual gatekeepers is part of an oppressive gender structure, I have a hard time not blaming myself for the harassment I experience.

My physical appearance remains a factor in everything that I experience in the academy, particularly the ways that my students and my colleagues find it appropriate to speak on my attractiveness (or lack thereof). My experiences contribute to well-documented evidence of the ways that femme people are subjected to particular kinds of surveillance and, subsequently, harassment and violence. My membership in a discipline that recognizes and produces knowledge about various forms of sexual violence yet also fails to address harassment forces me to realize that there are still many gaps in how sociology departments and national organizations take steps to protect scholars.

I spent most of my graduate training unsure to whom to report these encounters and feeling awkward about discussing them with my (black, cisgender) male adviser. That awkwardness mostly stems from my own insecurities about admitting that I am vulnerable rather than deficiencies on my adviser’s part; in bringing up my harassment, I confirm that I am a sexualized body. Due to having had colleagues who are men of color tell me that the racialized and gendered harassment that runs rampant in higher education is something that I should “get used to,” I feel hesitant to bring up how my appearance impacts my ability to teach, to network with others or to conduct my research.

When I did report to one of my university’s human resources offices, I was told that I was not guaranteed any anonymity and, in the case of the coach’s unwanted attention that I described above, he would be let off with what they called a “positive confrontation” that I was assured would not enter his employee record. Instead, I was moved to another writing center and forbidden to work with student athletes who were members of that coach’s team. Essentially, this suggested that I was actually at fault, rather than the man who invaded my personal space and asked me inappropriate questions.

A Call For Change

Considering that women and femmes of color in academe already must anticipate that they will be viewed as less capable based on racist and sexist assumptions, what steps can they take to care for themselves amid a culture that fosters harassment?

To survive and thrive in the midst of these issues, I find it important to note that I am not alone. A 2017 report from the University of Texas at Austin found that 22 percent of students have experienced harassment perpetrated by a faculty or staff member. To this end, I have relied upon friends and mentors as a source of support while navigating these experiences. They remind me when something I have experienced is not OK and help me determine how to report or confront sources of harassment.

For women and femmes of color to thrive in the academy, and within sociology more specifically, there must be structures in place to support mentorship and community building. For instance, having multiple women and femme scholars and allies to reach out to redistributes the labor that often is placed on a single faculty member of color to provide all emotional support.

Further, faculty advisers need to be sensitive to the specific kinds of harassment that women and femmes of color may be subjected to. Advisers and department administrators must actively work to swiftly and effectively address harassment at the hands of faculty and other superiors, as well as between graduate students.

These interventions are just a few that can reduce feelings that there will be repercussions for reporting or that someone being subjected to harassment is at fault. Recognizing this issue, implementing clear and direct procedures for reporting and reprimanding harassment, and encouraging those with social and institutional power to intervene and quickly shut down inappropriate behavior are small steps that can be taken toward making the academy a safer place.

06.09.17
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How Universities May Facilitate Sexual Violence In Academia

Note: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed (here). Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her most recent book is No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work (Temple University Press, 2012).

Are Universities Enabling Sexual Harassment And Assault?

Over the last year, several news stories have surfaced describing allegations of sexual assault against professors. While the details varied, the general outlines of the stories were pretty much the same: women who were graduate students or junior faculty accused tenured male faculty members of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault. In response, departments and administrators often offered light punishments and made little effort to establish that their departments and universities were not places where the types of sexual violence described could occur with impunity.

Sexual assault and harassment are not limited to academic settings. But there are aspects of the university structure that make it too easy for those in powerful positions to abuse their status and engage in harassment and assault against less powerful groups (including, but not limited to, women).

In 1990, the late sociologist Joan Acker published a study that introduced the concept of the gendered organization. Acker argued that while we might think of bureaucracies as neutral, objective, impersonal institutions, they are actually gendered in ways that have serious implications for those working within them. Specifically, she contended that gendered organizations are structured in ways that privilege and advantage men through social processes including hiring, job expectations, culture and rewards.

According to Acker, this also shapes the ways that occupations are structured, such that organizational processes cast certain jobs as better suited for men or for women, and dictate job expectations and rewards accordingly. Acker’s framework has been widely used among sociologists and other social scientists, as this approach pushes us to think less about individual behavior and more about how gender inequality can actually be embedded in organizations’ basic functions.

Sociologists have used Acker’s framing to explore social processes in occupations as varied as flight attendants, firefighters and accountants. In most cases, they find that when occupations are gendered female or feminine (think legal secretaries), workers in those jobs are expected to be emotionally nurturing, deferential and supportive of the men in higher-status roles. In contrast, “men’s work” (think financial analysts) usually offers higher pay and status and allows for expressions of belligerence, frustration and anger.

When women are employed in “men’s” or masculine jobs, however, their gender still carries more weight than their employment category. This means that while female lawyers may do “men’s work,” they still are penalized for behavior that seems unfeminine. Similarly, when it comes to men in “women’s work,” they are viewed first as men who are therefore not expected to be nurturing or deferential.

Organizations thus shape the occupations that exist within them in ways that push men (much more so than women) into the more rewarding, highly valued positions and cushion men from the feminized aspects of their work even when they are employed in the jobs seen as “women’s” or feminine jobs. Scholars have dubbed this phenomenon the “,” contrasting it to the well-documented glass ceiling — the invisible yet very real barrier that women face in advancing in male-dominated or masculine fields. (My own research, however, suggests that those gendered arrangements intersect with race and sexuality, among other identities; for example, Black men are denied such gendered privileges in “women’s” or feminine jobs like nursing.)

What does all this have to do with academe and sexual violence? Acker’s work can help us understand how and why sexual harassment and sexual assault typically go unpunished in academic contexts. If we think of the university as a gendered organization, it is structured in ways that disproportionately reward men with high-paying administrative roles and tenured professorships that convey autonomy, comfortable salaries, status and control over one’s time. Professors are also expected to be intellectual, dispassionate, driven by an extensive commitment to a particular field of study and willing to pass on their knowledge by training students and mentoring their junior colleagues. While those criteria can certainly apply to men or women, men are typically the ones stereotyped as more intelligent, rational and capable of the higher-order thought associated with academe. Additionally, organizational demands for achieving tenure assume a worker who is unencumbered by the sort of external demands that typically fall to women (unpaid household labor, child or elder care) and can thus devote copious amounts of time to teaching, research and service.

A professor who can fulfill these qualities is typically forgiven, to put it gently, personal eccentricities or antisocial behavior. But these protections can extend further in ways that can be damaging for those in the lower-status positions in the university hierarchy. Tenured professors may be rewarded with silence, tacit support, excuses or indifference if they engage in sexual violence or harassment toward those who are in subordinate roles that are not protected by the gendered organization. And to be clear, those vulnerable populations do not only include women. Men of color, trans men, gay, bisexual and queer men, or even men who lack the cultural and social capital to navigate the university bureaucracy may find themselves in a fragile position relative to those whom the university, as a gendered organization, is designed to protect.

This situation is complicated further by the fact that academic careers depend heavily on patronage and support from senior faculty. Recommendations, research assistantships, fellowships and co-authorships are valuable rewards that can make or break the academic career before it even begins. This puts all graduate students and junior faculty in a vulnerable position, but it leaves members of groups who are socially disadvantaged in one way or another in an especially precarious place. These are the populations that are already underrepresented in the university and more likely to be slotted into positions where they have little recourse should harassment or assault occur. Acker’s framework offers a way to think about the university as a gendered organization in which cultural norms, avenues for mobility and occupational expectations sort men into tenured professorships where they are often cushioned from the consequences of their actions if they decide to engage in sexual harassment or assault.

Viewing the university as a gendered organization does not mean that it is fixed, immutable or impervious to change. In some cases, faculty members have spoken out against fellow professors accused of repeated cases of harassment. Growing numbers of professors who stand against sexual violence can help change university culture and give this issue the attention it deserves.

It may also be the case that more women in leadership roles within university settings can help change the gendered processes that contribute to silence around sexual assault. In a 2015 study, sociologists Kevin Stainback, Sibyl Kleiner and Sheryl Skaggs found that having great numbers of women in management and executive positions can help reduce gender segregation in Fortune 1000 companies. Consequently, it may stand to reason that when more women (or underrepresented groups more broadly) are represented among the ranks of provosts, deans, chancellors and university presidents, they can change gendered organizations to ones that actively discourage and punish sexual offenders. Short of that ideal, we must reckon with the subtle, structural ways that basic university processes and norms are designed to reward and protect most sexual offenders from punishment.

05.12.17
by

Advice To Graduate Students Experiencing Sexual Violence

Note: the following was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed (here). Jen Dylan (a pseudonym) is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology. She stands in solidarity with all graduate student victims of sexual harassment.

7 Steps You Can Take

Sexual harassment comes in many forms, including physical misconduct and verbal and psychological abuse. My own experience with a tenured harasser consisted of an unsolicited kiss and thigh stroke. I eventually decided to confront him directly, stating that his behavior was completely inappropriate and must not happen again. It never did; he kept his distance from then on.

I was lucky. I am privileged in terms of my social location, I did not work in the same area as this faculty member and I had already forged strong relationships with other professors who supported me in all things. In other words, my choice to confront the perpetrator did not pose any harm to my career.

Other grad students in my department were not so lucky. One friend worked with the perpetrator and endured years of psychological abuse. Others in the department faced racist and homophobic verbal abuse or unwanted physical contact. Some endured a combination of all of the above. After a protracted battle on several fronts, our shared perpetrator, who had enjoyed a successful career and was well respected in his field, was asked to retire. Nothing more, nothing less. Those affected were disappointed that he did not face any real consequences for his actions, despite years of documented harassment.

I fear that my experiences and those of my colleagues are far too common. Over the past several years, professors have been accused or convicted of sexually harassing students at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Yale University, among other higher education institutions. However, it is impossible to know how many graduate students have to deal with predatory professors. I am sure many, if not most, victims do not come forward with complaints.

There are several reasons for this. For one, the burden of proof when filing a complaint is often unreasonably high. It can be difficult to collect supporting evidence when the harassment occurs in private contexts. Even if a student does decide to move forward with a grievance or lawsuit, doing so comes at a high cost. If the perpetrator is their supervisor, filing a grievance may put the student’s career in jeopardy. Finding a new supervisor could set them back months, if not years. And academe is a small world. Grad students may not come forward for fear of how it will affect their professional reputation. Finally, all too often, victims of sexual harassment are not even aware of their options for dealing with faculty perpetrators.

I fell into the latter category. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to deal with the perpetrator. With time, I discovered a network of fellow students and faculty member who had either been victimized or who were willing to take action. Their support helped to clarify the steps that I wanted to take for myself, as well as ways that I could help others. I am not an expert on sexual harassment, and I strongly urge victims to seek out expert guidance that is tailored to their individual experience.

That said, below are some suggestions for action to take that helped some of my colleagues and me through our experiences.

  • Document everything. Write. It. All. Down. Write down times, locations and whether anyone else was present. If you have text or email correspondences, save them. Even if you do not think you that want to do anything about it, you might change your mind months down the road. There is a greater likelihood that your claim will be taken seriously if the harassment or abuse is documented in detail. Or your experience might even provide crucial supporting evidence to help move someone else’s claim forward.
  • If you are privileged along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, ability and/or cultural capital, speak up. For better or worse, your voice gives credence to the experiences of marginalized students in your department. Defend your peers, especially if their complaints are met with hostility. Provide corroborating evidence if you can.
  • Find your people: no matter how well respected the perpetrator is, there is, in all likelihood, a group of faculty members and fellow grad students who are disgusted by the person’s behavior. Seek them out. They may be able to provide comfort and solidarity.
  • Provide helpful advice to younger students as well as those in your own cohort about which faculty members are safe (or not). Doing so ensures that institutional knowledge about the perpetrator gets passed down.
  • Be open yet cautious about going through formal channels when filing a complaint. Administrations may be limited either by a daunting series of legal roadblocks or a lack of will to take action (especially if your perpetrator brings in grant money and is well established in their field). Either way, the burden of proof required to take action is immense, and you may end up mired in a multiyear battle. On a positive note, pursuing a lawsuit or grievance may help you find better social support, as more people become aware of your situation. It may also inspire other victims to come forward, providing more evidence and further helping your case. And while we still have a long ways to go, faculty members in recent years have become more vocal in supporting student victims who have experienced backlash for coming forward. It can be grueling to stay the course, but support is out there.
  • Don’t just blindly follow the guidance you receive from your institution’s sexual harassment or Title IX officers. They operate at the pleasure of the university administration, and while they may be ardent advocates for students, they nevertheless work in a wider organizational context that must contend with operational budgets and public relations optics. Cross-reference their advice with that from a nonprofit or student-run organization that supports victims of sexual harassment.
  • Take the issue to your union. Those grad students lucky enough to work as teaching or research assistants in unionized work settings may be able to file a grievance on the grounds that the perpetrator contributes to a hostile work environment. Unions have resources that make taking action far less burdensome. They have staff dedicated to handling cases of sexual harassment, and they can provide the costly legal support necessary to move lawsuits along.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to dealing with perpetrators of sexual harassment in academe, and the above list is incomplete at best. LGBTQ and racialized student victims, in particular, confront additional barriers that make taking action all the more difficult. Unfortunately, while grossly unfair, any type of response on the part of victims usually comes at a cost — be it emotional, psychological or professional.

The most important takeaway for victims is this: do you. If you have experienced sexual harassment, do whatever you need to do to get by.