Submit a job opportunity: https://sws.memberclicks.net/post-a-career-opportunity
Visit the SWS Job Board: https://sws.memberclicks.net/career-opportunities
Submit a job opportunity: https://sws.memberclicks.net/post-a-career-opportunity
Visit the SWS Job Board: https://sws.memberclicks.net/career-opportunities
The forced resignation of Harvard’s president provides a peek at the blueprint for the war against justice in the U.S., concludes a long-time observer of attacks on academia
View full article here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/attacks-on-diversity-in-higher-education-threaten-democracy/
Maro Youssef, a valued member of SWS Member, has been recognized by Arab America Foundation as one of the 40 Under 40 Awardees most influential Arab Americans.
Dr. Maro Youssef is an Arab-American feminist, immigrant, academic, and public sociologist focusing on women’s empowerment in the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on the MENA region, US foreign policy, gender, and broad feminist coalitions. She has briefed her research at the United Nations, the US Department of State, and the Canadian Foreign Ministry. She consulted for the World Bank, the US Department of State, and the Solidarity Center. Previously, she worked at the State Department for eight years on various thematic topics and countries in the Middle East. She was born in Egypt, raised in California, and lived in Turkey and Tunisia.
Maro is also an active member of the SWS International Committee as an ECOSOC Delegate and Past Chair of the Global Feminist Partnership for SWS. For more information on the SWS International Commitee, please visit: https://socwomen.org/about/international-committee/.
’40 Under 40 is a celebration of accomplished young Arab Americans. The program spotlights Arab American professionals in all fields, including education, law, public service/politics, non-profit, business leaders, entrepreneurs, engineers, medical professionals, artists, entertainers, writers, and media representatives. These young professionals have great achievements both in the workplace and in their communities.’ To view the full 40 Under 40 list, please visit: https://www.arabamerica.com/arab-america-foundation-announces-40-under-40-awardees-class-of-2024/. For more information about the 40 Under 40 initiative, click here.
The Op-Ed Writing Workshop was led by Dr. Stacy Torres.
In this workshop, you will learn the basics of op-ed writing, begin to draft your own piece, and receive feedback on translating your scholarly work for broader audiences. By the end of the session, you should feel more prepared to complete your op-ed and pitch it for publication.
This workshop is sponsored by SWS’s Media Relations Committee, Sister to Sister, and Social Action Committee AND ASA’s sections on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology, and Political Sociology.
View the recording here: https://youtu.be/nlwCZ8yjBUg
Committee Chair: Dr. Ophra Leyser-Whalen (oleyserwhalen@utep.edu)
Selection Subcommittee Chair: Koyel Khan (kkhan@tamu.edu)
The 2022 Feminist Activism Award Winner, Dr. Georgiann Davis, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, will make one campus visit during the 2024-2025 academic year.
Dr. Davis’ research, teaching, and activism are at the intersection of medical violence and feminist theories. She describes herself as a feminist sociologist and intersex activist who is dedicated to four goals: 1) raising intersex awareness, 2) educating future doctors, 3) ending the genital mutilation doctors often subject intersex people in order to surgically squeeze the intersex body into the arbitrary sex binary, and 4) challenging dominant narratives about white upward mobility. She is currently working on a feminist autoethnography tentatively entitled Five Star White Trash where she discusses the complexities of intergenerational mobility, whiteness, gender dogma, and the ways in which anti-fatness is rooted in anti-Blackness.
Dr. Davis’ scholar-activism has also been recognized with the 2017 Feminist Scholar-Activist Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Sex and Gender as well as the 2016 Donald W. Light Award for the Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology.
Outside of the university, she has served as board president of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth from 2017-2020 as well as a past-president of InterConnect Support Group from 2014-2015, which is one of the largest intersex support groups in the world.
You can read more about her research, teaching, and activism on her website at www.georgianndavis.com.
Applications from all types of institutions are welcome. Priority will be given to campuses with departments with a focus on feminist activism, social movements, sociological practice, and/or activist research, or those who are working towards building and centering these subfields. The selection subcommittee will look especially favorably on campuses that are committed to gaining the widest possible audience for these visits. This may be demonstrated by evidence of:
SWS will fund a portion of the expenses for the campus visit, thus institutions should not let resource scarcity prevent them from applying. SWS will fund up to $750 toward domestic travel and a maximum of $1500 toward international travel. The host campus is responsible for the costs associated with meals and lodging for the duration of the campus visit.
If you are interested in applying to host a campus visit, please submit your application letter by May 13, 2024 here: https://sws.memberclicks.net/campusvisit-georgianndavis.
The application should include the following information:
If you have any questions, please email Dr. Koyel Khan, kkhan@tamu.edu. We look forward to receiving your applications!
Committee Chair: Dr. Ophra Leyser-Whalen (oleyserwhalen@utep.edu)
Selection Subcommittee Chair: Dr. Jaime Hartless (hartlejn@farmingdale.edu)
The 2022 SWS Feminist Lecturer Awardee, Dr. Marlese Durr, is a Professor of Sociology at Wright State University, a Senior Fellow of the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project, and a Research Associate at the Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities at the University at Albany. We are now accepting applications for Dr. Durr’s campus visit, which will occur in Spring 2025.
Dr. Marlese Durr has had an illustrious career of feminist research and service. Her compelling intersectional research centers African-American women, exploring the emotional labor they do while working managerial positions in public institutions, their outcomes in the labor market, their position within urban neighborhoods, and how they navigate stressful life events, such as HIV diagnoses. Her published works include: The Donut Hole Experience: Using a Discerning Eye while Walking in Cities (Temple University Press), “Small Town Life: A Study in Race Relations” (Ethnography), “Sex, Drugs, and HIV: Sisters of the Laundromat” (Gender & Society), and African American Women: Gender Relations, Work, and “The Political Economy in The Twenty-First Century” (Gender & Society).
Dr. Durr has served as President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS). She was a founding member of The Sociology of Race & Ethnicity editorial board and has also served on the boards of the American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, Social Forces, and Social Problems. Her other honors include serving as a Franklin Fellow and Social Science Advisor to UNESCO, being selected as a Postdoctoral Fellow on Stressful Life Events and Addiction Recovery in the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Program at the National Development Research Institutes (NDRI), being recognized as an Ohio Public Health Leadership (OPHLI) Institute scholar, and working with the U.S. Census.
This campus visit is intended to celebrate feminist scholarship and inspire social activism on college campuses. A key goal of the program is to bring feminist voices to campuses where such perspectives are unusual or embattled. We welcome applications from all kinds of institutions. However, priority will be given to campuses that are rural, under-resourced, HBCUs (i.e., historically Black colleges and universities), Hispanic- or AAPI-serving institutions, and/or located in states where feminist, queer, and DEI-centered educational initiatives are under attack.
The selection committee will look especially favorably on campuses that are committed to gaining the widest possible audiences for these visits. Applicants can demonstrate evidence of this through:
Institutions should not let resource scarcity prevent them from applying. Although the host campus will be responsible for the cost of meals and lodging for the awardee, SWS will pay up to $750 for domestic travel and up to $1500 for international travel.
If you are interested in applying to host a campus visit, please submit your application letter by April 16, 2024 here: https://sws.memberclicks.net/campusvisit-marlesedurr.
Your application letter should include the following information:
Applicant letters should be approximately 5 pages in length.
If you have any questions, please email Dr. Jaime Hartless (hartlejn@farmingdale.edu). We look forward to receiving your applications!
Please join us for an Op-Ed Writing Workshop, led by Dr. Stacy Torres, a sociologist who has cracked the code on how to write and get published in popular media. In our current political environment, the power of the media to influence public opinion is critical.
Date: March 22nd from 1:00-3:00pm/EST (10am-12pm/PST; 11am-1pm/MT; 12pm-2pm/CT)
Please click here to register!
In this FREE 2-hour interactive workshop, you will learn the basics of op-ed writing, begin to draft your own piece, and receive feedback on translating your scholarly work for broader audiences. By the end of the session, you should feel more prepared to complete your op-ed and pitch it for publication.
Following this session, you will also be invited to a follow-up “Op-Ed-athon”, where we will build on the work folx have done in the Op Ed Workshop, with a goal of providing a network of support for people to write topic-oriented op-eds, as well as develop a collective strategy to submit op-eds to local papers across the country. Stay tuned!
Dr. Stacy Torres is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing, and an avid public sociologist. She is the author of the forthcoming book, At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America (University of California Press). A proud first-generation college graduate, Stacy grew up in New York City.
This workshop is sponsored by SWS’s Media Relations Committee, Sister to Sister, and Social Action Committee AND ASA’s sections on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology, and Political Sociology.
Registration form: https://sws.memberclicks.net/opedregistration.
Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women and to the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly entitled “Women 2000: gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century”
Statement
Gender is a defining factor in poverty. Women and other gender minorities overall experience higher rates of impoverishment than men while minoritized
women, such as Black and Indigenous women, women with disabilities, immigrant women, older women, and LGBTQ+ experience even more extreme conditions. The majority of the world’s poor live in rural communities of color, where agriculture continues to be the main source of employment. However, rural women disproportionately struggle to own land and benefit from new agricultural innovations. High poverty as such remains pervasive. It is not limited to women living in the Global South, for in the United States, the largest economy in the world, 70 per cent of the nation’s poor are women and children. Children living with only their mothers are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than those who live with only their father.
There are several reasons for this phenomenon, the feminization of poverty, that continues to increase overtime. Many of the current crises of the global economy are expected to have a disproportionately negative effect on women, especially for women in diversely, vulnerable situations. The causes of the higher levels of poverty among women are intersectional, as gender identity, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability are among the main factors that are interwoven with structural and institutional dynamics. These include access to education, work in the formal or informal economy, occupational segregation, gender pay gaps, the domestic division of labor and domestic violence, among other factors.
Labor force participation
Women’s participation in the labor market globally has stagnated and, in some cases, fallen in the last decades. It is a complex trend, often hinging on disproportionate numbers of women vulnerably working in informal employment or unemployed and lacking alternative income security and protections. This is especially evident in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southern Asia and, more generally, in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Women are overrepresented in the most vulnerable categories of the informal economy, with many laboring as home – based workers doing piece-rate work in the lower tiers of supply chains, or domestic work.
Workers in the informal economy have no or little job and social security protections. They do not have access benefits that guarantee income security, particularly in cases of unemployment, sickness, invalidity, work injury, mater nity, old age, or loss of a breadwinner. The gender disparity is exacerbated among women of color in informal employment. Indigenous women are more likely to work in the informal economy than their non-indigenous counterparts (86.5 percent versus 60.9 percent).
Recommendations
Member States should:
Care work, Part-time work, and Unpaid work
Women tend to work fewer hours in the paid workforce as they balance work and care commitments. There is no country where men and women provide an equal share in terms of unpaid care work, defined as the work of caring for others including minors, older adults, those who are ill, disabled, or unable to care for themselves. Such work is quite often challenging and goes undervalued by society, and underpaid, if compensated at all. Globally, women contribute two to ten times more care work. In fact, women account for 76.2 percent of total hours contributed to unpaid care work. Women also do much of the paid care work, which typically tends to be low- wage work.
Recommendations
Member States should:
Gender Wage Gap
On average, women earn less than men—and the wage gap is wider for minoritized women. The gap compounds over a lifetime, with women ending up with
fewer resources and savings than men. As it stands now, it will take 170 years to close the gender wage gap. This represents a significant factor contributing to the gender disparity in poverty rates, especially among older women. The gender wage gap is driven by numerous factors, including differences in types of occupation, hours worked, and years of experience. Women with disabilities are further disadvantaged, as they make 72 cents to every dollar made by a disabled man.
Recommendations
Member States should:
Occupational segregation
When occupations are dominated by men they usually pay better than female – dominated fields, even when those jobs require the same level of education and skill. Even when women enter traditionally male dominated fields, they tend to go into the lower-paying specialties. However, women, especially women of color, are often segregated into low-wage jobs such as childcare and domestic work. In the United States, women represent about two-thirds of workers earning the federal minimum wage and nearly 70 percent of tipped workers, for whom the federal subminimum wage is even smaller. Women are underrepresented in high-wage occupations such as engineers, computing, and other STEM occupations, which are among the fastest growing and most lucrative careers.
Recommendations
Member States should:
Rural Women
Globally, over 70 per cent of people in poverty live in rural areas where agriculture continues to be a key source of economic livelihood. Women make up
almost half of the global agricultural workforce yet are less likely than men to have access to new agricultural technologies. Globally, fewer than 1/5 of landholders are women, and women are denied the right to inherit their spouse’s property in over 100 countries. Climate change has led to an increase of drought and desertification, yet rural women are often blocked from full participation in mediating climate change risk.
Recommendations
Member States should:
Domestic Violence
Survivors of intimate partner violence lose a total of 8 million workdays each year. Nearly all survivors experience economic abuse, such as financial control and exploitation by their abusers. Women with disabilities from various backgrounds encounter structural and gender-based violence, leading to heightened barriers to accessing education, securing employment, and receiving social support. Consequently, women of diverse backgrounds find themselves trapped in
impoverished and unstable situations, restricting their possibilities to live in environments free from violence. Furthermore, many nations enact economic
violence against women and children through their austerity policies that disproportionately have a negative impact on women.
Recommendations
Member States should:
PANEL I: Navigating Gender, Class, and Racial Inequalities in a Patriarchal Society
PANELISTS:
MODERATOR:
DATE & TIME:
ZOOM REGISTRATION:
PANEL II: Global Feminist Resistance and Advocacy in Addressing Poverty, Homelessness, and Financial Inequity
PANELISTS:
MODERATOR:
DATE & TIME:
LOCATION: