Female mentorship

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Female mentorship is the mentoring of women by women to further their career and development prospects. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] A female mentor is sometimes called a femtor. [6]

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Rhodes Project

The Rhodes Project, which examines the experience of female Rhodes Scholars, was created in 2004 by Ann Olivarius. [7] Rhodes Scholars are chosen from around the world for graduate study at the University of Oxford. The project showcases research on the lack of career-support networks, based on interviews and data from female Rhodes Scholars who were born in the 1950s to 1980s and who earned graduate and professional degrees until the early 2000s. [7] [8] The project is interested in how this data reflects the current situation of women. One interviewee told the researchers: "It would have been helpful to really know to what extent things still haven’t changed for women. ... How I would have handled situations might have been different if I had understood what was going on behind the scenes. The blatant examples are something that you deal with but it’s the subtle things and understanding those that I would have worked through differently." [9]

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Related Research Articles

Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that societies prioritize the male point of view and that women are treated unjustly in these societies. Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexism</span> Prejudice or discrimination based on a persons sex or gender

Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to gender roles and stereotypes, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another. Extreme sexism may foster sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. Discrimination in this context is defined as discrimination toward people based on their gender identity or their gender or sex differences. An example of this is workplace inequality. Sexism may arise from social or cultural customs and norms.

Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhodes Scholarship</span> International postgraduate award

The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mentorship</span> Guidance relationship

Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the personal and professional growth of a mentee. Most traditional mentorships involve having senior employees mentor more junior employees, but mentors do not necessarily have to be more senior than the people they mentor. What matters is that mentors have experience that others can learn from.

The history of feminism comprises the narratives of the movements and ideologies which have aimed at equal rights for women. While feminists around the world have differed in causes, goals, and intentions depending on time, culture, and country, most Western feminist historians assert that all movements that work to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist movements, even when they did not apply the term to themselves. Some other historians limit the term "feminist" to the modern feminist movement and its progeny, and use the label "protofeminist" to describe earlier movements.

Postmodern feminism is a mix of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and French feminism. The goal of postmodern feminism is to destabilize the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality. Postmodern feminists seek to accomplish this goal through rejecting essentialism, philosophy, and universal truths in favor of embracing the differences that exist amongst women to demonstrate that not all women are the same. These ideologies are rejected by postmodern feminists because they believe if a universal truth is applied to all women of society, it minimizes individual experience, hence they warn women to be aware of ideas displayed as the norm in society since it may stem from masculine notions of how women should be portrayed.

Black feminism, also known as Afro-feminism chiefly outside the United States, is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism also acknowledges the additional marginalization faced by black women due to their social identity.

Susan Tufts Fiske is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist literature</span> Literary genre supporting feminist goals

Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.

Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are held by men. The term patriarchy is used both in anthropology to describe a family or clan controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males, and in feminist theory to describe a broader social structure in which men as a group dominate women and children.

Masculism or masculinism may variously refer to ideologies and socio-political movements that seek to eliminate sexism against men, equalize their rights with women, and increase adherence to or promotion of attributes regarded as typical of males. The terms may also refer to the men's rights movement or men's movement, as well as a type of antifeminism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexism in academia</span> Discrimination in higher education

Sexism in academia refers to the discrimination and subordination of a particular sex or gender academic institutions, particularly universities, due to the ideologies, practices, and reinforcements that privilege one sex or gender over another. Sexism in academia is not limited to but primarily affects women who are denied the professional achievements awarded to men in their respective fields such as positions, tenure and awards. Sexism in academia encompasses institutionalized and cultural sexist ideologies; it is not limited to the admission process and the under-representation of women in the sciences but also includes the lack of women represented in college course materials and the denial of tenure, positions and awards that are generally accorded to men.

Internalized sexism is a form of sexist behavior and attitudes enacted by women toward themselves or other women and girls. Internalized sexism is a form of internalized oppression, which "consists of oppressive practices that continue to make the rounds even when members of the oppressor group are not present." Internalized sexism can have a range of effects on women and girls such as problems with mental health and body image. Modes of internalization of sexism include early childhood inculturation and consumption of media, while language can also moderate power imbalances between groups and perpetuate internalized sexism.

Feminist Digital Humanities is a more recent development in the field of Digital Humanities, a project incorporating digital and computational methods as part of its research methodology. Feminist Digital Humanities has risen partly because of recent criticism of the propensity of Digital Humanities to further patriarchal or hegemonic discourses in the Academy. Women are rapidly dominating social media in order to educate people about feminist growth and contributions. Research proves the rapid growth of Feminist Digital Humanities started during the post-feminism era around from the 1980s to 1990s. Such feminists’ works provides examples through the text technology, social conditions of literature and rhetorical analysis. Feminist Digital Humanities is aimed to identify and explore women's sense of writing as well as to prove widespread of women's work in most of the digital archive.

Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.

Sexism in the technology industry is overt, subtle, or covert occupational sexism which makes the technology industry less friendly, less accessible, and less profitable for women. While the participation of women in the tech industry varies by region, it is generally around 4% to 20% depending on the measure used. Possible causes that have been studied by researchers include gender stereotypes, investment influenced by those beliefs, a male-dominated environment, a lack of awareness about sexual harassment, and the culture of the industry itself. Margaret O'Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, in 2019 concluded that Silicon Valley is uniquely influential locale that is shaping our world. But she points to problematic failures regarding diversity. Male oligopolies of high-tech power have recreated traditional environments that repress the talents and ambitions of women, people of color, and other minorities to the benefit of whites and Asian males.

Sexism in American political elections refers to how sexism impacts elections in the United States, ranging from influences on the supply, demand, and selection of candidates to electoral outcomes. Sexism is inherently a product of culture, as culture instills a certain set of beliefs or expectations for what constitutes appropriate behavior, appearance, or mannerisms based on a person's sex. Sexism in American political elections is generally cited as a socially-driven obstacle to female political candidates, especially for non-incumbents, raising concerns about the representation of women in the politics of the United States. Such prejudice can take varying forms, such as benevolent or hostile sexism—the latter stemming from fears of women threatening the power or leadership of men.

Susan M. Kauzlarich is an American chemist and is presently a distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of California, Davis. At UC Davis, Kauzlarich leads a research group focused on the synthesis and characterization of Zintl phases and nanoclusters with applications in the fields of thermoelectric materials, magnetic resonance imaging, energy storage, opto-electronics, and drug delivery. Kauzlarich has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications and has been awarded several patents. In 2009, Kauzlarich received the annual Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, which is administered by the National Science Foundation to acknowledge faculty members who raise the membership of minorities, women and disabled students in the science and engineering fields. In January 2022 she became Deputy Editor for the scientific journal, Science Advances. She gave the Edward Herbert Boomer Memorial Lecture of the University of Alberta in 2023.

References

  1. Pamela J. Kalbfleisch, Joann Keyton, "Power and Equality in Mentoring Relationships," in Pamela J. Kalbfleisch, Michael J. Cody (eds.), Gender, Power, and Communication in Human Relationships, Routledge, 2012, pp. 189–212.
  2. Lori D. Patton, "My Sister's Keeper: A Qualitative Examination of Mentoring Experiences among African American Women in Graduate and Professional Schools," The Journal of Higher Education, 80(5), Sept–Oct 2009, pp. 510–537. JSTOR   27750743
  3. Shannon Portillo, "Mentoring Minority and Female Students: Recommendations for Improving Mentoring in Public Administration and Public Affairs Programs," Journal of Public Affairs Education, 13(1), Winter 2007, pp. 103–113. JSTOR   40215772
  4. Gabrielle Bernstein (2 November 2011). "Reveal the Power of Positive Female Connection". Huffingtonpost.
  5. Erin Ganju, "What 'Star Wars' can teach you about the importance of mentorship", Fortune, 17 June 2015.
  6. Ruth Nicole Brown, Between empowerment and marginalization, University of Michigan (doctoral thesis), 2005, pp. 101–104.
  7. 1 2 Rudy, Susan (November 25, 2014). "The Rhodes Project: Celebrating many versions of what women can be". Oxford Human Rights Club.
  8. "Our Mission". The Rhodes Project. Archived from the original on 19 December 2014. Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  9. Susan Rudy and Kate Blackmon. "'I wish I'd had a female mentor': what Rhodes Scholars say about the lack of change for women". Rhodes Project. Archived from the original (web) on December 9, 2014. Retrieved 9 December 2014.

Further reading