printable versionWomen continue to face challenges, despite progress since 1970s, expert says
BY LISA TREI
Nannerl Keohane, a Stanford faculty member from 1973 to 1981 who founded what is now the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, spoke Nov. 3 at the institute’s 30th anniversary celebration.
Keohane, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, spoke Nov. 3 at the 30th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG). Keohane, a Stanford faculty member from 1973 to 1981, was a founder of IRWG, then known as the Center for Research on Women.
The event also featured a panel that reflected on 30 years of gender research from the perspectives of education Professor Myra Strober; English Professor Emerita Diane Middlebrook; Ian Hodder, chair of the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology; and Londa Schiebinger, professor of history of science and director of IRWG.
Thirty years ago, Keohane said, the goal of feminists at Stanford was to get people on campus to pay attention to the lives and work of women. "We've made a lot of progress toward that goal, but there is still a pernicious sense abroad that research on women and gender is a specialized niche that can be done well or badly but it doesn't make much difference to the 'real world' of mainstream scholarship," she said.
Keohane pointed to eight dimensions of life as a measure of gauging how well society is faring:
In Keohane's judgment, the United States scores "anywhere from an A- to an F" on these points, with higher marks going to fields such as education and lower scores in areas such as the cultural depiction of women as people. Although direct sexual harassment has decreased, she said, depictions of women still emphasize sexuality and stereotypical femininity.
Keohane noted that success for women in the "public realm," or life outside the home, depends on progress in the "private realm" as well. And it's not as simple as getting one's spouse to do more or hiring extra help, she said, although lack of accessible, affordable child care was reported as one of the major obstacles women face in professional development.
"There are agonizing dilemmas about whether you want your child raised by someone else, whether you can stand the guilt of not being at home with chocolate chip cookies when the kid comes home from school or contributing your share to the volunteer-mommy arrangements that structure their lives," Keohane said. "Gaining the formal opportunity to pursue a demanding job or hold public office was a crucial step, no doubt about it. Making this operationally meaningful for most women has been a much more difficult enterprise."
Although a few women in public office have tried to improve opportunities for others by instituting better child care arrangements and introducing flexible work schedules, Keohane said, many women in high-powered jobs are less inclined to acknowledge the challenges that ambitious women with families face. "Some of them just don't get it; others get it very well but have made a decision that taking up 'women's issues' is a sure-fire way to get branded as not serious about your work, not really 'one of the guys' at all," she said.
The issue of credibility affected Keohane personally when she became president of Duke in 1993. Although at Stanford and Wellesley she was "free to be as feminist as I jolly well pleased," Keohane made a conscious decision not to put issues around women and families high on her priority list when she first arrived at Duke. Keohane waited until her last three years when she "was already taken seriously and then used that prestige and clout to turn to women's issues." In May 2002, she charged a steering group to launch a women's initiative at Duke that presented its final report in September 2003.
Many more women today enter Duke's graduate schools, the report found, but progress has been slower at the faculty and senior leadership levels. Keohane said such results are often interpreted as evidence of a "trickle up" hypothesis, with women making steady progress. But the findings do not support this. "We suggest that the appropriate metaphor is of a pipeline that is blocked, or obstructed, at several points," she said, particularly where someone could join the junior faculty, become tenured or enter the senior administrative leadership.
Progress has been made insofar as men and women follow the same academic career paths until they receive their final professional degrees, Keohane said. But then striking differences begin to emerge "in terms of the numbers of women who choose to commit themselves to the goal of becoming full members of the tenured professoriate or the senior administration, and are able to sustain these ambitions to the point where the goal is achieved," she said. "We still have a long way to go for equity in these areas."