Lifting A Ton Of Feathers

Forewarned is forearmed, and Caplan presents a list of the forms that the maleness of the environment take: two of these are the conflict between professional and family responsibilities, and sexual harassment.

Lifting a Ton of Feathers is not only a survival guide, it is also a destroyer of academic myths about women's career chances in the university, and a revelation of the catch-22 positions in which women find themselves. Caplan demonstrates that while many women believe that when they fail it is their fault, their fate is more likely to be sealed by their encounter with the male environment, and by the manner in which they are tossed about by it. She aims to help women avoid self-blame and understand the real sources of their problems. Readers will find the information about the mine-field of academia for women infuriating, but the means of telling it highly entertaining. Women account for more than half of all undergraduate students in the US and Canada, yet they make up only 10 per cent of faculty members at the level of full professor. What happens to women between freshman level, the tenure track, and the ensuing following professional years that keeps them out of the highest levels of academia? Paula Caplan is herself a veteran of the academic career struggle, and she sets out to explore this question with not only her own observations but also those of many women whom she has interviewed, and with a strong backing of established research. With these tools she provides a clear-eyed assessment of what women who have embarked on an academic career, and those who are considering it, may expect. Forewarned is forearmed, and Caplan presents a list of the forms that the maleness of the environment take: two of these are the conflict between professional and family responsibilities, and sexual harassment. In addition, her book offers advice on practical techniques of how to prepare a curriculum vitae, how to handle job interviews, and how to apply for promotions and tenure. A final chapter is a unique checklist which serves two purposes: to provide guidance in a search for a woman-positive institution and to give suggestions for ways individual women, and women in groups, can work to improve the situation at their own institutions.

Includes biographies of selected American women choral conductors.

The risk-taking and creative thought inaugurated here by editors Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Denise Leckenby will undoubtedly serve as a model for other scholars fully engaged, both as professionals and as social individuals, in careers and lives on Catholic campuses."--BOOK JACKET.

A pathbreaking study of the critical role women’s institutions play in global higher education. Educating girls and women is a powerful route to improving societies worldwide. When women receive more education, literacy rates in children rise, maternal and infant death rates drop, and women enjoy an increased earning capacity. Yet in parts of the developing world, women’s education is considered a low priority at best and a dangerous countercultural activity at worst. In Europe and North America, the number of women’s colleges is shrinking—yet women-only institutions are growing in size and number in many other regions of the world, where they provide access to female students who are prevented for legal, cultural, religious, or practical reasons from attending coeducational universities. Women’s Colleges and Universities in a Global Context is the first book to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of the increasing significance of single-sex higher education institutions for women around the world. Based on Kristen A. Renn’s on-site study of thirteen women’s colleges and universities in ten different countries—Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom—this timely and provocative volume combines interviews of campus leaders, faculty, and students with extensive online and archival research. Renn provides an overview of each country’s political, economic, and educational situation, then explores the theoretical and practical themes she uncovers in their educational institutions for women. In the end, this volume addresses not only the role of women’s colleges in their own countries but also what these institutions can teach us that would benefit higher education worldwide.

Across North America a growing body of “chilly climate” research documents the role played by environmental factors in reproducing gender inequality: practices that stereotype, exclude and devalue women are persistently powerful forces in creating “glass ceilings” and maintaining “pink ghettos.” Women academics in North American universities and colleges offer an especially striking case for such research. Precisely because of their elite status, the accounts now emerging of the “chilly climate” faced by academic women throw into sharp relief the mechanisms that foster gender inequity throughout North American society. Collected in this volume are a number of reports and commentaries on “climate issues” as they affect women faculty in Canadian universities. They include Sheila McIntyre’s Memo, an account of gender harassment in the context of a law school that was first circulated in 1986; two reports by and about women faculty at the University of Western Ontario that were inspired by McIntyre’s Memo; accounts of the reactions of male colleagues, the administration and the media to “climate” studies; and several chapters that critically reframe the discussion of chilly climate practices in terms of questions of race and sexual identity. Taken together, these reports and discussions demonstrate the importance of addressing the environmental roots of women’s continuing inequity both within and outside contemporary academia. They communicate specific experiences which testify to the existence of a chilly climate in our universities, and call into question any supposition that women and men have achieved equity to the degree that they could be said to work in “the same” environment in these institutions.

Challenging readers to rethink the norms of women's health and treatment, Prescribed Norms concludes with a gesture to chaos theory as a way of critiquing and breaking out of prescribed physiological and social understandings of women's health.