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Career Coach: More on Gender Balance
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By Susan O'Doherty
November 15, 2009 5:43 pm
The undergraduate institution I attended went co-ed the year I matriculated. It had previously been an all-women’s college, the sister school to a nearby men’s university that began admitting women the same year.By the time I graduated, there were about thirty men among a student body of 2500. Some of these guys were stellar — bright, committed, enlightened, and fun to be around. Most were ...
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Career Coach: Gender Balance
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By Susan O'Doherty
November 8, 2009 8:19 pm
Scott has a fascinating article in this week’s Inside Higher Ed News, about a proposed inquiry by the US Commission on Civil Rights into the admissions policies of private liberal arts colleges. The concern is that, in an effort to correct gender imbalances, these colleges favor applications by men.Such an inquiry sounds reasonable, but the proposed solution seems insane:Much of the probe is ...
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Career Coach: What Do Mothers Want?
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By Susan O'Doherty
November 1, 2009 6:07 pm
I was moved by a number of the responses to last week’s column. I find it really helpful when people share their stories, humanizing what is otherwise cold (though interesting) data and speculation. I felt, though, that several writers fell into traps which, because they’re all too common, I’d like to address here.The first is the tendency to generalize from one’s own experience, or “I ...
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Career Coach: Having a Baby in Grad School
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By Susan O'Doherty
October 25, 2009 5:48 pm
In this week’s Chronicle, Mary Ann Mason discusses reasons why relatively few students, especially women, opt to have children during the graduate school years. The entire essay is worth reading, but I was struck by one of the comments: “There's also the problem of isolation. Having a baby can be (not always -- but can be) very isolating, and so can graduate school.”This was my impression ...
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Career Coach: Gender and Book Reviews
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By Susan O'Doherty
October 18, 2009 6:25 pm
One of my clients has written a book that is about to be published. It is an excellent book -- beautifully written, with interwtined themes that reverberate long after the narrative ends. The book was recently reviewed in a distinguished publication with an online presence, and my client sent me a link to the review. It was outstandingly positive, the sort of review that makes you want to run out ...
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Career Coach: Student Reactions and Gender
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By Susan O'Doherty
October 11, 2009 9:52 pm
Reader Tekbek sent this article from ASEE Prism describing a study that examined students’ reactions to stereotypically “male” and “female” self-presentations. The authors found that male engineering students were less tolerant than other students of what are described as “female-typical speech styles,” in which the speaker admitted to difficulties or mistakes:These men were more ...
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Career Coach: More on Women and Work Styles
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By Susan O'Doherty
October 4, 2009 8:29 pm
I thought all of the responses to last week’s post were terrific. Differential treatment can be hard to talk about, but several readers managed to write eloquently about their impressions and experiences. All provided food for thought, but I was particularly struck by “Long Distance Mom”’s observation: “After serving as a department chair at two universities, I learned that the "Speak ...
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Career Coach: Women and Work Styles
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By Susan O'Doherty
September 27, 2009 8:46 pm
In a recent article in The Chronicle , Mary Ann Mason discusses ways the deck is stacked against ambitious women. The entire article is worth reading, but this passage, in particular, evoked strong memories and mixed feelings:As the only female dean at the University of California at Berkeley for several years, I sat in on countless meetings where men held the floor. One day a female colleague ...
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Triple Whammy: Academic Moms of Color
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By Susan O'Doherty
September 20, 2009 6:48 pm
A recent study of women with postgraduate degrees suggests that black women born after 1950 are increasingly likely — and twice as likely as their white peers — to be unmarried at age 45. The study also found that 45 percent of black academic women born between 1955 and 1960 were childless at age 45, compared with 35 percent of white women born in the same time period. The authors discuss ...
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Career Coach: More on Women, Majors and Careers
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By Susan O'Doherty
September 13, 2009 5:55 pm
Two very intelligent and thoughtful responses to my previous post, on women and majors, caused me to reread the post to try to determine where my communication skills had gone off the rails. I still don’t see where I blamed women workers for anything, but one of the problems with writing is that because you know what you mean to say, you assume that that’s what you are saying. So I want to ...
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