Update: Mentoring Workshop Application Deadline Extended
The Mentoring Workshop is the centerpiece of the Mentoring Program for Early-Career Women in Philosophy, an ongoing effort to foster mentoring relationships between senior women in the field and women just beginning their careers. The Workshop this year will be hosted by the Philosophy Department of Boston University. Information about local arrangements will be available soon and will be posted on the Mentoring Program web page.
Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts) was kind enough to sit down for a brief interview with the APA blog about the Mentoring Workshop.
Would you mind providing some information about what the Mentoring Program for Early-Career Women in Philosophy is intended to do?
The Mentoring Program emerged from an informal gathering of women in philosophy convened to discuss the gender problem in the field, viz., the fact that the percentage of women in academic philosophy has been stuck at around 25% for several decades. At that meeting of what came to be called the Women in Philosophy Task Force, we agreed that we needed two kinds of initiatives, one focused on research, and the other focused on improving the situation for women in the field. Ann Cudd, then professor of philosophy and associate dean at the University of Kansas, had heard from Donna Ginther, her colleague in Economics, about a program she had been involved in creating, designed to establish mentoring relationships between senior women in that field, and untenured women. This was pertinent because the demographics of Economics looks very much like Philosophy’s. The women economists had speculated that a big part of the problem in their field was junior women’s difficulty in building relationships with senior scholars who could give them feedback on their work and guidance about professional development. They set up their mentoring program partly as an intervention, but partly as an experiment. Applicants were divided randomly into two groups, one that would receive mentoring, and one that would not. The mentoring relationships were to be initiated at a “Mentoring Workshop” the first of which was offered in 2004. Three years later, the results of the experiment were clear — women in the mentored groups had fared significantly better than the women in the control groups, by a variety of measures. (See Blau, Currie, Croson, and Ginther 2010) We philosophers, convinced by the economists that “the drug was effective,” decided to embark on a mentoring program of our own, modeled closely on the one in economics. Because of our relatively small size (we estimated that there would be only 15-20 applicants a year) and because of resource constraints, we decided that we would hold Mentoring Workshops biennially. Ann and I agreed to become the co-directors of the Program and to organize a series of Workshops beginning in 2011. (Ann bequeathed her position to Juliet Floyd and Susanne Sreedhar in 2017. I will resign as a co-director after the Workshop coming up in June of 2019.)
What are its general aims? How is it structured?
The Mentoring Program aims to create longterm relationships between successful senior women in Philosophy with women philosophers during the early stages of their careers. We follow the economists in centering the program on a workshop that brings everyone together to do intense philosophical work and share career advice. In our case, the Workshop takes place over three days. Participants are organized into five-membered cohorts, according to their research interests, and a senior woman philosopher is enlisted to serve as a mentor to the women in each cohort. Every mentee submits in advance to their cohort-members and mentor a polished draft of a paper she plans to publish. At the workshop, each of these papers will be critiqued and discussed by cohort and mentor in a one-hour “working session.” Interspersed with the working sessions are panel discussions, staffed by the mentors, focused on topics connected to professional development. Topics often include “Getting Tenure,” “Professional Visibility,” “Balancing Teaching and Research,” and “Work/Life Balance.” At every edition of the Workshop, the co-directors have strived — and succeeded, I think — to recruit a diverse group of mentors to make as many points of contact with our mentees as possible.
This might be a good place to say that our program depends on the personal generosity of our mentors, who receive no pay for their participation in the Workshop, and who agree to maintain a career-long relationship with their mentees. I’d also like to say that the “horizontal mentoring” that goes on at the Workshop — mentees sharing information and forging intellectual friendships — is truly amazing and inspiring.
What have been some of the biggest problems you have faced in setting up the workshop in the past? How has it been received?
The biggest problem by far has been with financing. We work on a shoestring. We do not charge any fee to mentees for participating in the Workshop, although we do require them to cover their own travel and expenses while at the Workshop. But that means that the co-directors every year have to find the funds to cover mentor travel, meeting space, student assistant costs, and We have received a great deal of support from the APA: we’ve been awarded both a small grant and a larger Diversity Grant, but both of these awards are made with the understanding that they represent seed funding, and that continuing funding for projects must be found elsewhere. We have received support from our home institutions, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Kansas, and now Boston University, and we’ve also benefited from some individual contributions. In 2015, we were delighted to be awarded a multi-year grant from the Marc Sanders Foundation, which has covered costs of mentor travel for the 2015, 2017, and upcoming 2019 Workshops, and enabled us to hire a student assistant for 2017 and 2019. In 2015, we were very pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation from Matt Haber, chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Utah, to hold the 2017 Workshop there. Utah Philosophy paid all the local costs of that Workshop, a contribution that, together with the Marc Sanders money and some additional funds from U Mass and BU, enabled us to pay even some of the mentees’ costs, something we’ve not been able to do in the past. Juliet, Susanne and I are hoping that the Program can go forward with this model for future Workshops — local arrangements taken care of by a sponsoring philosophy department, with other expenses covered by grants and personal contributions.
The feedback we’ve received has always been extremely positive, although we’ve also gotten suggestions for improvement and some complaints. (The complaints have mostly concerned food and the quality of accommodation, both issues we’ve struggled to address.) We have struggled in some years to construct cohorts when we have only one or two individuals working in some areas of philosophy. I would like to find funds to do a proper survey and study of all the women who have attended Mentoring Workshops. We have never had control groups, so I don’t think our data would support any causal conclusions, but it might be informative, nonetheless, to look systematically at the professional development of women who have participated in the program.
How can one apply to the workshop?
Send an email to Mentoring2019@umass.edu stating your intention to apply, and indicating at least two areas of specialization, in ranked order. Include as attachments (in .docx or .pdf format) your CV and an abstract of the paper you would like to workshop.
In choosing a paper to discuss, you should take care to choose a paper that is squarely in the area of philosophy that you work in. We will place you in a mentoring group according to the topic of your paper, and that means that the papers you will read and comment on will also be in that area of philosophy. We will do our best to match members of the cohorts and their mentors, subject to availability and space in the workshop.
Louise Antony
Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of many articles in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of feminism, epistemology, and philosophy of religion, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes, A Mind of One's Own (with Charlotte Witt), Chomsky and His Critics (with Norbert Hornstein), and Philosophers Without Gods. She has served as President of the Eastern Division of the APA, and as President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and was a winner of the Marc Sanders Lecture Prize. She has long been active in efforts to diversify the profession of philosophy.
