EGOS Women's Network Meeting 2015

prior to the 31st EGOS Colloquium in Athens, Greece

Wednesday, July 1, 2015, 15:00–17:00

Location: The American College of Greece; room: DEREE-7-AUD

Coffee and tea will be available from 15:00 onwards. At 15:30, five parallel Round Table sessions will start. Detailed descriptions of each Round Table can be found below.

To sign up, please send an email to Angelika Zierer by June 15, 2015 [= extended deadline].

Please do not forget to mention the Round Table of your choice!

We look forward to meeting you!

On behalf of the EGOS Women's Network, the Standing Working Group (SWG) on "Gender and Diversity" and the EGOS Board

Regine Bendl, Christine Teelken, Marieke van den Brink & Angelika Zierer

Aim is discussing the complex dynamics of mentoring relations with both junior and senior academics. Although recognized as a key solution for gender equality in academia, research shows that mentoring programs often force mentees to adapt to pre-existing (male) conditions and thus do not challenge dominant masculine career tracks in academia (Avotie 2008; De Vries 2010). As such, this roundtable will debate the potential of mentoring as a tool for more transformative gender equality change. More specifically, this round table will address three questions:

• How do senior academics become good mentors? Do they advice mentees to play by the rules of the (masculine) game, or do they allow for room to do it differently?
• How would a good mentor look like in the eyes of junior academics? What is important, and should mentoring be more than just advice and support?
• Does it matter how mentors achieved their senior positions (playing by the rules, or walking the tight rope of being a change agent)? 

'Originality', ‘relevance', 'rigor’, 'clarity', 'logical progression of argument', 'readability', 'theoretical and practical implications', 'generalizibility', 'credibility' – amongst many others, these are notions with which authors are confronted with when receiving feedback from journal editors. However:

• What makes a paper submission successful?
• When does it fail?
• What are positive/negative experiences of publishing?
• How to develop publishing skills?
• How to handle pressure from supervisors/faculty?

In this interactive session, the participants will reflect on these and other questions based on their own experiences and knowledge about the publishing process. We invite scholars to exchange their publishing experiences for succeeding in academic publishing.

 

While post-doctoral researchers (post-docs) are an increasingly important and productive group of employees in academia, they are lacking a further career perspective and embeddedness within their organization. A comparative study amongst two Dutch universities (a survey with both closed and open questions amongst 225 respondents) reveals that nearly all post-docs (85%) want to stay in academics, but only less then 3% was offered a tenure track.
Given these limited career perspectives, I would like to invite the EGOS scholars to discuss the following questions in our interactive round table:

• What options do you have for further career perspective, both inside and outside academics?
• How can you create and enhance such options?
• What kind of support do you receive from your institution and from the academic community, and what do you actually require?
• And what kind of role does gender play in your own current and future career? 

In many ways, academia provides a difficult context for feminist organizing: work overload, fuelled by the imperative of "publish or perish", leaves little time for activities which cannot be translated into an extra line on the CV. An individualized and competitive work culture contradicts the collectivist spirit which underlies women's solidarity. And the subtlety of gender discrimination which exists even in the context of seemingly objective recruitment and assessment procedures obscures the legitimacy of and need for feminist organizing.
Nevertheless, female academics can gain strength from building networks of power, reflection and mutual support. Such networks help us identify structural inequalities and provide a space for exchange, theorizing and strategizing. In this panel, we will exchange ideas around, and experiences of, women's organizing in academia. Participants will discuss possible forms and aims of women’s networks in academia, and develop strategies towards feminist organizing.  

 

This round table is dedicated to support scholars to develop their papers; it's open to all scholars at all stages. The focus will be on small group interaction and pragmatic issues related to the papers and publishing. Accepted papers will be briefly presented and thoroughly discussed in small groups with leading scholars in the field. All participants are expected to have read the papers of their fellow participants and be ready to contribute to their discussion.
Please submit a single document of application (.doc, .docx or .pdf file) that includes:

• full details of name, address (postal address, phone and email), affiliation;
• a summary of the paper (max. 3 pages), including the problem, research aim of the paper, research question, structure of the paper, theoretical basis, (preliminary) research results and max. three questions which the author wants to discuss with the participants of this round table.

Please submit the papers to: Cinzia Priola (cinzia.priola@open.ac.uk) and Barbara Sieben (siebenb@hsu-hh.de) until June 15, 2015.