techcommie

If I could time travel to my sophomore self, I would say this: PUBLISH. Presenting at UG conferences is great, but think bigger, too. Submit original research and critical essays to peer reviewed undergraduate journals (they're out there!). Develop relationships with professors who collaborate with students on research and see if you can participate. Respond to calls for proposals; even if you get rejected by the conference, it will be great experience in writing proposals! And if you get in, you'll have that presentation to put down on your CV. Publishing is tangible evidence that you can conduct scholarly inquiry at a rigorous level. Adcomms like making safe bets.

No, it's not something to avoid in interviews, but there is, occasionally, the impression that women who show particular interest in teaching over all other aspects of the profession might be happier/more fulfilled/more satisfied/ more useful/ more fill-in-the-blank-with-your-own-qualifier-here if they went into secondary or elementary education.

The key for women interviewing is to present themselves as well-rounded, capable scholars. Emphasize your research and publication interests first, but when the discussion comes around to teaching let them know you're ready, willing and able to do that too, as long as you have ample time for your research.

I think a major fallacy in the profession is to assume that women naturally gravitate towards the teaching side of things; I know plenty of women who would just as soon never see another undergraduate course in their schedule - they teach because they have to in order to do their research. This can be a problem for women who aren't natural-born teachers, once they are in a tenure-track position, because they can have trouble walking the line between being too hard on their students/having too high of expectations (teaching to their personal level rather than to the mid-range in a class of students including both majors and non-majors) and not caring enough about their students to get good evaluations for their teaching. Good teacher training can overcome this, but is hard to come by at the university level - somehow it is just assumed that once you have taken the teaching methods course in your subject, you'll just know how to do it by experience. Academia could do so much better at training professors for classroom experiences. I'm digressing here, though. Back to our original thoughts on women and teaching...

I worked with a young female professor who was a highly gifted teacher. At a conference, I spoke highly of her classes and of some of the experiences I had in them. Afterwards, she thanked me for saying such great things about her teaching, but also said that she would prefer we not spend so much time discussing it with her colleagues. It was apparent she wanted her reputation in the greater scholarly world to hinge on her research and writing, not her teaching. Yet, she also sought nomination for a teaching award, because her university valued that. So, from her perspective, the teaching should not be emphasized over the research and writing, but needs to be good enough to be recognized on a wide scale as being excellent. Talk about difficult goals! How are our colleagues supposed to know what amazing teachers we are if we never discuss the teaching?

It also seems to be a generational thing, in that younger women professors don't seem to want to emphasize the teaching as much, whereas older female professors are pleased to pick up the "Lifetime Achievement in Teaching Excellence" award at conferences. Or, maybe that is just in my field. But I think that older women who are still in the profession have figured out that the teaching really in the end is the most important part - nothing you research and think and write about means anything, if you can't convey it and pass it on to others. That's the whole point of academia, right? Having amazing, innovative, important ideas about the subject you are working in, and conveying those ideas and elaborating on them and passing them along to the next generation who, in turn, will work with them and maybe take them further? Isn't that why we are all applying to work with POIs?

Ultimately, I think you have to be willing to discuss teaching and to have some good ideas about it, especially if you want to stay in the profession - but that you also need to have a solid research program that informs that teaching.

I think it is still a tough high wire for women to navigate, at least here in the States.