ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Women’s Mentorship: The Gendered Job Market

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

Organized by the HSS Graduate and Early Career Caucus (GECC), this session aims to bring together graduate students, early career, and established academics to discuss navigating the job market as female or queer scholars. The structure will feature a brief mini-roundtable of established “mentors” followed by small group discussions around guiding questions.

The proposed theme this year is the gendered job market. We invite contributions and conversations that first address the often intersectional challenges that impact scholars applying for jobs in the field. This includes imbalanced access to mentorship and professional development for female and queer graduate students, access to queer healthcare, institutional support for maternity and childcare, negotiating salaries or spousal hire, addressing non-academic service or extenuating life-circumstances in cover letters, navigating interview expectations and etiquette, and other parts of the gendered “hidden syllabus” of the job market that impact the prospects and career trajectories of students and faculty.

The goal of this panel is not only to recognize the additional obstacles faced by queer and female scholars entering the professional field, but to provide a mentorship space for scholars at all stages to ask for and provide guidance, share experiences, encourage connections across career levels, and highlight existing examples of community-driven systems of support (and continue creating our own!). All queer and women-identifying attendees are welcome!

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Participants

• Mary Kate Wolken, University of Minnesota

• Claire Ann Votava, University of California, Los Angeles

• Ellie Louson, Michigan State University

Session Organizer

• Katherine White, University of California, San Diego