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Susan
Roth, Chair of the Women’s Initiative executive
committee, is a professor of psychology and special assistant to
President Nannerl O. Keohane. Roth wrote the final report of the
Women’s Initiative Steering Committee. |
Q: How
will the Women’s Initiative Steering Committee
ensure that its recommendations are implemented?
A: The final report contains a recommendation to have an ongoing
President’s
Commission on the Status of Women. The commission will monitor follow-up
on our recommendations, set benchmarks for progress and entertain further
discussion of all issues, with representatives from all the constituencies
we worked with. I will work with President Keohane throughout the fall
of 2003 to set this committee in motion and clarify the ongoing responsibilities
for follow-up.
Q: Many of the problems identified in the final report emerge from
campus culture, which developed over many years and may be difficult
to change rapidly. How can changes in these areas be brought about?
A: Sometimes it’s mainly a matter of making alternative ways
of being or acting more obvious and prominent on campus – of
creating viable alternatives to the core culture. This may be less
a matter of creating new policies than of making more of what is already
available on campus accessible and visible to students.
Q: The
section of the report about undergraduate women, in particular,
seems to focus
more heavily on women’s social experience
than on their academic life at Duke. Why?
A: We asked the undergraduate women participants about every part
of their Duke experience, but often their discussion of academic
matters
came indirectly – for example, through their focus on “effortless
perfection.” For many of these women, academic achievement may
be taken for granted, and the real challenge they face at Duke is to
integrate this with the new and profoundly confusing social challenges
they face. More faculty attention to what is going on in these women’s
lives both in and out of the classroom is clearly something undergraduate
women would benefit from as they negotiate these changes.
Q: The
Women’s
Initiative Steering Committee divided into smaller groups to study
different constituencies of women at
Duke: undergraduate
students, graduate and professional students, faculty, employees and
alumnae. What will happen to the reports those subcommittees prepared
that are the basis for the final report?
A: It’s important to make clear the relationship between the
subcommittee reports -- which are all extensive and detailed -- and
the final public report. The final public report is much shorter and
summarizes the subcommittees’ major findings in an accessible
and persuasive way in hopes of spurring further action.
While the final report represents the public face of the Women’s
Initiative’s work, the more specific subcommittee reports will
form the basis for further action by campus committees and departments
with authority to make needed changes in various areas of campus work
and life. The lengthy report on graduate education, for example, has
already gone to the Deans Cabinet. Many of the specific issues it raises
are already being addressed there and will now receive further attention.
Another great example has to do with recommendations on improving campus
safety, which will be sent to the Security Task Force to work out more
fully. In many cases, the Women’s Initiative has simply given
an extra push to efforts already under way to address the issues it
raised. Q:
Are all of each subcommittee’s
recommendations included in the final report?
A: The final report addresses all the main issues raised in the subcommittee
reports, but does not contain all the specific recommendations. Where
further study or investigation may be needed to flesh out subcommittee
findings
or
craft recommendations for action, the final report’s recommendations
are more general than those made by the subcommittees. In writing the
final report, we were careful to be only as specific as our existing
data will responsibly allow, while still communicating each subcommittee’s
main findings. The idea is to spur further investigation and, ultimately,
action.
Q: Will the subcommittee reports be available to the public?
A: They were written as internal working documents to guide the next
steps. It is possible, however, that some of them may be reworked
for public distribution.
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