Panel Held To Highlight Issues Facing Harvard College Women

This weekend, Harvard hosted a three-day symposium entitled "Harvard's campuses and women's experience: where do we fit in?" on women's representation and experiences in academia.

The conference was sponsored by the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' Women in Social Sciences.

"I would consider the whole weekend to be an amazing success," said Kathryn B. Clancy '01, president of RUS.

"The most amazing thing about all the events is that they all ran over," Clancy said. "People were just talking and talking. That really speaks to how important these issues are and that these hadn't yet been addressed."

Of the six events that comprised the symposium, Clancy cites "Beyond Gender," in which issues such as ethnicity and sexuality became the focus of the discussion, as the session that most surprised her.

"What really struck home is that some of the topics we were talking about were things we've never even thought of," Clancy said.

"We talked about how race, gender and sexuality influence the way your academic life is, and the intersectionality of these, particularly within Harvard," said Sarah E. Tavel '04, who organized the discussion.

The audience at the first event of the symposium, a panel discussion called "Women and Tenure at Harvard," was less sizable than Tavel had hoped it would be, she said.

"There wasn't as extremely high turn-out as we had hoped," she said. "I don't think undergraduates realize that [tenure] pertains to them."

"I realized it's such a scary process to become a tenured woman. There's not that many," Tavel said.

In another session, "Issues of Women and Gender in the FAS Curriculum," Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies Juliet B. Schor delved into how women's issues could be better integrated into Harvard's curriculum through increased focus on women's studies in class and through the hiring of more female professors.

"Some alumnae want more women on the faculty, but don't want them studying women; they see that as another kind of ghettoization" Schor said. "They want them doing astrophysics. But others want them changing the way the curriculum is taught."

There is room for improvement should the event be repeated, Clancy said.

"We need to find a way to incorporate more men," said Clancy. "Maybe [this could be accomplished] by adding a panel discussion that would have male panelists talking about what men could do in feminism."

Tavel said putting together the event involved cooperation between many different groups.

"We're definitely working together," Tavel said. "[The symposium] got a large number of different women's groups together, so now we're going to collaborate."