 | After coming together to plan events honoring Yale women for the University's Tercentennial celebration, the founders of the Women Faculty Forum decided to make the group a permanent fixture at the University. |
The Women Faculty Forum (WFF) had its roots in Yale's 300th birthday celebration, when a group of female faculty members came together to plan Tercentennial events celebrating the role of women
In the culminating event, a conference titled "Gender Matters," renowned Yale alumnae in a range of fields -- from the business world to the medical and legal professions, the non-profit sector, academia, the arts, science and politics -- discussed ways in which differences of gender sensibility and proportional representation influence different professions, academic disciplines and sectors of the economy.
Yet, for all the strides women graduates have made both at Yale and beyond, the organizers of the Tercentennial events felt that there was still work to be done to further gender awareness and opportunity. Even more important, they discovered that working together was an enjoyable end in itself. Therefore they decided to make the WFF a permanent fixture of living and working at Yale.
Membership in the WFF is free and open to everyone in the Yale community. The group has a steering committee and 29-member council made up entirely of female faculty members and senior administrators. The group has two staff members: Shilpa Raval, the WFF's research director and an assistant professor of classics, and Rachel Thomas, program coordinator.
The WFF has already undertaken a number of projects. It maintains an online database on current research by Yale faculty and graduate students related to women, gender and sexuality. The forum also recently compiled a report on "The Effects of Gender on Yale University: A Snapshot, 2002."
Last spring, it sponsored a survey and focus group on childcare and has compiled a report on faculty views of current services. In addition, a subcommittee will consider the challenges that faculty face with regards to childcare, including the question of how to connect student babysitters with faculty parents. The forum is also editing and compiling the proceedings of the "Gender Matters" conference for publication.
The group sponsors conferences, seminars, workshops and informal discussions. In the spring, the WFF will present a seminar series titled "Gender, Sexuality and Antiquity: From the Arts to the Sciences," a professional development workshop series and a conference on "Citizenship, Borders & Gender: Mobility and Immobility." The group is also planning a conference on Madame Curie and other women in science, to be held in fall of 2003.
For more information, visit the WFF website at www.yale.edu/wff or contact Shilpa Raval at (203) 432-7162 or Rachel Thomas at (203) 432-8847.
Women discuss the challenges facing female administrators
Women do make a difference, according to four women in prominent administrative positions at Yale who spoke at a dinner and discussion sponsored by the Women Faculty Forum (WFF) on Dec. 4.
Titled "Women and Leadership," the event was one of many programs sponsored by the WFF, which aims to foster a spirit of community and network of opportunity among women at the University. (See related story, above.)
At the dinner, the four administrators -- Maria Rosa Menocal, director of the Whitney Humanities Center; Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art; University Librarian Alice Prochaska; and Barbara Shailor, director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library -- recounted personal experiences that had helped to shape their professional lives. In doing so, they demonstrated how women in leadership positions are able to exert a positive, and arguably uniquely female, influence over the organizations they lead.
Menocal acknowledged that many of the hurdles she had faced in her academic career -- "I didn't get tenure three times," she said -- were placed there by herself. The author of the critically acclaimed book "The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain" among other works, Menocal is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale and, not irrelevantly, the mother of two.
Far from lamenting the struggle to balance her personal and professional life, Menocal was effusive in crediting an enlightened Yale administration for helping to nurture her career -- from Roberto González Echevarría, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, who offered her an appointment at Yale, to President Richard C. Levin and Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead, who supported her efforts to branch out from her academic field (Romance philology) to an administrative position.
Menocal recalled that when she and Shailor decided to throw a party for Levin to celebrate the unprecedented number of women he had appointed to high positions in the University, they found they had a problem: There were too many women to fit in the space they had reserved for the party.
Meyers, who became director of the British Art Center last spring, recounted a poignant and pivotal moment in her "coming-of-age" as an administrator, when she was working at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Early in her pregnancy, she was given a choice by her doctor of continuing to work and risk losing the baby or staying at home for seven and a half months and carrying her baby to term. Meyers was prepared to resign her position when she explained the predicament to her boss.
Rather than forcing her to accept the either-or situation, her boss arranged for her to work from home for the remainder of the pregnancy. Not only did the arrangement have a happy outcome (the birth of a healthy baby), the experience also provided a valuable lesson in management, Meyers said. "I learned that institutions have to take the personal lives of employees into account," she noted, underscoring that she has taken the lesson to heart in her professional life.
Prochaska, who directs the 22 libraries within the University system, described her grandmother as a kind of spiritual beacon in her life. An Oxford graduate, a political radical, a committed advocate of birth control and an elected magistrate, her grandmother was born at the wrong time, said Prochaska. Despite her grandmother's lifetime of achievement, when she died,
When Prochaska herself graduated from Oxford, she marveled at the luck of being born in an era that offered women so many opportunities, she said, adding that she felt her own recognized achievements would be an exoneration of those her grandmother had been denied.
Like Meyers, Prochaska said that experiencing the inevitable tension between the demands of her family and commitments to her profession was an excellent preparation for leading an organization. Sensitivity to and respect for the lives of individuals within the organization is paramount for an administrator to be effective, Prochaska contended.
"Nothing matters more than that the people who work in an organization are happy," she asserted.
Shailor also recalled her grandmother as a major influence on her life. A Polish immigrant, her grandmother was abandoned by her husband and left to fend for their five children alone, she said.
A lasting legacy of that trauma was the limits it placed on the aspirations of those children, noted Shailor. "The women in my family had no education, no notion of careers." Consequently her own expectations were modest, she said. A native of the nearby town of Hamden, Shailor credits a guidance counselor at Hamden High School for steering her to college, a possibility she had not imagined for her future.
"We all stand on the shoulders of those who went before us," Shailor said, noting that she was deeply influenced by the women she met at college, women for whom a professional career was a realistic ambition, not an elusive dream.
Shailor, who has a Ph.D. in classics and had a career as a professor, said she prefers to be on the administrative side of academe. Running a large institution like the Beinecke Library, she notes, gives one far more opportunity to effect change.
-- By Dorie Baker
T H I S
Group addressing gender-related issues in academia
at Yale.
the only salient fact of her life noted in her obituary was her marriage, said the Yale librarian.
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Group addressing gender-related issues in academia
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