Building Research Connections

Fall/Winter 2002
Volume 13, Issue 1

INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

The Beyond Parity Conference
UIC's Women in Science & Engineering Program (WISE)
Report from the Interim Director
Center of Excellence in Women's Health Updates
CRWG Welcomes two Visiting Scholars
Recent UIC Scholarship on Gender and Women
CRWG Begins Workshop Series on Stress and Gender
Conference Pays Tribute to Our Bodies, Ourselves
Writers From Around the World

THE BEYOND PARITY CONFERENCE:
Women’s Leadership in Academic Medicine

On September 23, 2002 more than 120 leaders in academic medicine gathered in Chicago for a conference entitled “Beyond Parity: Transforming Academic Medicine Through Women’s Leadership.” The international conference was co-sponsored by the UIC National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health (CoE), the Office on Women’s Health, Region V, USDHHS, and the UIC Center for Research on Women and Gender (CRWG), under the leadership of Claudia Morrissey MD MPH, Associate Director at the CRWG. The conference focused on the status of women leaders in academic medicine, the structural and cultural barriers that impede women’s advancement, methods to dismantle these barriers, and ways to redefine traditional notions of success beyond parity.

Plenary speaker Janet Bickel, Associate Vice President and Director of the Women in Medicine program at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), began the program by presenting statistics about the scarcity of female leaders in medical schools. A study commissioned by the AAMC’s “Increasing Women’s Leadership in Academic Medicine” project found that in 2001, women comprised 14% of tenured faculty in medical schools, 12% of full professors, and 8% of department chairs. In an article published in Academic Medicine (October 2002), Bickel and her colleagues noted that the percentage of women who are full professors in medical schools has increased by a mere 1% in 15 years. It was once believed that as the number of women entering medical schools increased and achieved parity with men, women would also achieve parity in leadership positions. Although the proportion of women in medical schools reached 45% in 2001, there has not been a similar increase in opportunities for women in academic leadership.

Many women in academic medicine occupy lower level academic positions as instructors and assistant professors, and experience significant structural and cultural barriers to promotion to the associate professor or higher levels. Barriers include traditional gendered expectations for men and women at work and at home (expectations which are held by both men and women); isolation experienced by female faculty at work; difficulties among male faculty in effectively mentoring their female counterparts; a lack of institutionalized practices to support women’s professional development; and a tenure track that is gendered in ways that discriminate against women. Not only does the tenure track assume a male model of full time work without family responsibilities, it neither adequately acknowledges nor values the work that is more likely to be done by women or in which women’s burden is greater. This includes interdisciplinary academic work, teaching, and organizational service.

In other words, while some barriers to women’s advancement are based in the beliefs, attitudes and actions of individual women and men, other barriers are organizational, institutional and societal. These factors limit women’s representation in higher, decision-making positions within academic medicine. The AAMC committee concluded that only those institutions that recruit and retain women would be able to have the best house staff and faculty, and that the long-term success of academic health centers was inextricably linked to the development of women physicians.

The lack of female representation in leadership positions has many institutional costs. It leads to the under-utilization of women’s talents and abilities when women are not promoted. It leads to a direct loss of talent when women become discouraged and leave the organization, with the subsequent cost of recruiting new employees. It limits an organization’s ability to respond to a changing healthcare environment and marketplace when women’s management and leadership styles are not available as a resource. Lastly, it has a negative impact on both male and female employees when family friendly policies are not implemented that would allow employees to balance work and family responsibilities.

Bickel compared the situation of women’s leadership in academic medicine to that of women in the corporate world, noting that change has occurred more readily in the corporate world. For instance, corporations have begun to recognize the value of their female employees and have implemented labor policy changes accordingly. The fact that the cost of recruiting and training new employees far exceeds the cost of retaining qualified employees has led some corporations to examine ways to reduce institutional and other barriers to women’s advancement. Changes in policies have benefited everyone. (Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women executives had higher median earnings than firms with the fewest female executives). Bickel argued that similar benefits would accrue to academic medical institutions if policies supportive of women were implemented.

Program attendees discussed barriers to women’s advancement and potential solutions that have been implemented at their own medical institutions.Suggestions included: emphasizing faculty diversity in departmental reviews, targeting the professional development needs of female faculty (including guiding men to be effective mentors of women), assessing gendered institutional practices enhancing the effectiveness of search committees in attracting and evaluating female candidates, and financially supporting Women in Medicine programs and an AAMC liaison officer. Discussions focused on collaborating with male peers and leaders in order to achieve institutional change that would benefit women, men, and medical institutions.

The conference concluded with a call to action.Michelle Hoersch, Director of Region V of the USDHHS Office on Women’s Health, encouraged the development of innovative programs to promote women’s leadership in academic medicine. She pledged to provide seed money to support such programs. Saralyn Mark, MD, Senior Medical Advisor to the Office on Women’s Health, advised participants to think creatively and find innovative ways to promote women’s leadership in academic medicine. She suggested that participants try to understand the other side, find a mentor, create their own opportunities, and be leaders. As Dr. Morrissey emphasized in her introductory comments, women must be the key agents to initiate and sustain change in medicine, because if they don’t do it, then no one else will. Although there is a risk in acting, there is a greater risk in inaction. (by Mary Kleinman, CRWG).

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CRWG SUPPORTS WOMEN IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Through the WISE Program
by Claudia Morrissey, MD, MPH, Associate Director, CRWG

What is the history of UIC WISE?
Active work to focus attention on women in science and engineering at UIC began over a decade ago. The first official event, sponsored by the Center for Research on Women and Gender after its founding in 1991, was a conference on Improving Access to Careers in Science for Women. This conference, funded by the Johnson Foundation and held at the Wingspread Center in Racine, Wisconsin, brought together scientists from around the Midwest working in universities and colleges, in government and industry. An important outcome of this first conference was the development of two networking strategies: the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Women in Science and Engineering initiative; and the WISENET listserv. The CRWG continues to maintain WISENET, which has had over 1000 subscribers and functions as an important resource for discussion, job announcements, mentoring for younger women scientists, and sharing of expertise.

The CIC WISE initiative brought together representatives from CIC universities to promote women in science and engineering across participating campuses by sharing best practices and building leadership among women students. In 1992 the first CIC WISE conference was held in which each of the CIC institutions, including UIC, developed its institutional action plan. CIC WISE activities continued to build, thanks in part to funding by NSF from 1996-2000. During this period UIC faculty and students were actively involved in CIC WISE initiatives and used the project to foster support for WISE efforts on campus, including the establishment of a campus student WISE group, WISE-Chic.

UIC was also one of ten campuses selected competitively to participate in another NSF-funded national program, Women and Scientific Literacy, which was conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities from 1997-2001. UIC's project, Professing Science by and for Women, emphasized pedagogy and curriculum in science and women's studies, toward establishing dialogue and airing issues raised by feminist science studies. One of the results of this project was to increase visibility of efforts to increase participation of women in science and technology at UIC.

During 2000-01, an intensive evaluation was conducted of CRWG. In recognition of its impressive volunteer efforts to build a WISE program on campus, the Center was provided with a position of Associate Director, to be responsible at 50% time for the development of WISE programs at UIC. Dr. Claudia Morrissey assumed this position in January 2002, with Grace Geng joining the team in August as a research assistant.

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Why does UIC need WISE?
Why do so few women enter and persist in the STEM disciplines, particularly in engineering and physics? The answer to this question probably begins the minute newborns are wrapped in either a pink or blue blanket. Research shows that gender stereotyping operates from birth: girl babies are described as "delicate" or "sweet," and boys as "husky" and "active." As babies grow into children and young adults, society continues to view and judge their interests and activities though what Dr. Virginia Valian, (Department of Psychology, Hunter College) calls a "gender schema." Schemas are hypotheses, often unconscious, used to interpret social events. The gender schemas for girls and boys are divergent, with girls seen as innately less capable and interested in STEM areas, and thus offered less support and exposure to these subjects as early as elementary school. Women that persist in pursuing careers in science and engineering are often pegged as outside the norm. As Catherine J. Didion, Executive Director of the Association for Women in Science puts it, "The basic idea is that if you are a woman interested in science, you are gender confused." Recent efforts to redress this gender stereotyping in middle and high schools have resulted in increasing numbers of girls taking advanced math and science courses, and entering STEM disciplines in college. To support these women students, programs such as WISE have sprung up on campuses throughout the nation. WISE programs also focus attention on increasing the recruitment, retention and promotion of women STEM faculty where the numbers are even more glaring than for students.

Despite more than 10 years of committed, though often disjointed, attention to equity for women at UIC, great disparities persist for women faculty, particularly in STEM disciplines. The current levels of tenured and tenure track women faculty in STEM departments range from a high of 31% in Biology to lows of 0% in Civil Engineering, and 4% in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chemistry. For a Table with this data, go to www.uic.edu/orgs/wise/). Only one UIC STEM department (Biology) has a higher percentage of women faculty than in comparable Top 50 Research Departments in the United States. There are no women STEM deans and only one out of the 11 focus STEM departments has a woman as head. Of the existing women STEM faculty, only three are minority women.

Evidently UIC STEM units have been much more successful at attracting women students than faculty, although the percentages of undergraduate women in four of the six Engineering Departments and Physics continue to be quite low. The dearth of STEM women faculty is further highlighted in UIC's 2001 Office of Access and Equity Affirmative Action Faculty Status Report. The report notes that in order to close the gap between existing and expected numbers of tenured and tenure-track women faculty given the size of the STEM talent pools, the following increases in women faculty would be necessary: Biology-4; Chemistry-4; Earth and Environmental Sciences-1; Physics-1; Math-13; Engineering-5. Clearly, UIC is in need of a robust WISE program.

What are current UIC WISE initiatives?
Although attention to the "pipeline" for STEM women must start in the middle and high school years, the UIC WISE program will initially focus its limited staff and resources on campus-based efforts. A proposal has just been submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) that if successful, would fund initiatives to increase the recruitment, retention and advancement of women STEM faculty for five years. Several WISE efforts that focus on students are currently underway, shepherded by Grace Geng, Director of Student Programs. Others are in development with launch dates dependent on funding. "As a graduate student in the College of Engineering, I'm really thrilled to see so many programs under development and am proud to be a key organizer," says Geng.

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WISE Space
Isolation is often cited as a formidable consequence of pursuing a STEM discipline. Thus, one of the cornerstones of successful WISE programs across the country has been the creation of designated spaces where STEM women can gather. The effectiveness of women-only living/study areas and centers/lounges for improving academic performance and retention has consistently been documented. This is not surprising given that the STEM academic environment has often been characterized as "chilly" for women. A key objective of the current UIC WISE program is to establish just such a locus for WISE programming: a place where STEM students and faculty can meet and network.

To address this need for space, efforts are underway to establish a WISE Wing (learning/living community) in Commons West Dorm for 2003-4, and a designated WISE Center on the East campus to meet the needs of STEM commuter students. The dorm and lounge/computing space that UIC currently provides for Honors and Engineering students and Minority Engineering students are important examples of the kind of investment UIC can make to encourage excellence and foster success. The WISE Center would provide space for programs, training, networking, studying, computing, and showcasing. Programming for dorm-based students would take place in the lounge on the WISE Floor as well as at the WISE Center.

WISE Programs
This academic year, pending identification of designated WISE space, a series of WISE programs will take place in the lounge on the Engineering floor and at the Honors College. Four programs geared to first and second-year students will be offered exposing students to STEM career options - "A World of WISE Choices" - and to IT skill enhancement - "WISE FIT- Focus on IT." An end-of-year dinner will bring together both dorm and commuter WISE women and give them the opportunity to hear a noted woman speaker and representative of a STEM discipline.

One of the most successful approaches to increasing retention of women STEM students is to establish a high-quality mentoring program. Programs usually pair first and second year students with upper classmates in their field of study. WISE will begin the process of setting up a student-to-student mentoring program, with a fall 2003 start date. WISE will work with existing campus faculty mentoring and shadowing programs to make them responsive to the needs of women STEM faculty.

WISE is exploring, with the Office of Academic and Enrollment Services, organizing a study group initiative targeted at the large "gate-keeping" courses such as Physics, Chemistry and Calculus. WISE will also work with the Honors College to utilize its tutoring services. Recently, money has been given to CRWG to establish the Anne Sluzas Martin Fund. This fund will support a yearly scholarship for a deserving woman engineering student. The first scholarship will be announced this spring. WISE is approaching foundations to increase the number of scholarships and travel grants it can award each year.

What can you do?
These are just a few of the programs WISE staff hope to begin or expand over the next year. As Director of the WISE initiative, I encourage the involvement of CRWG supporters both on and off campus. "Changing the climate for women students, staff and faculty is key to changing the face of science and engineering. We ignore the talent and sensibilities of half the population at our peril." If you are interested in helping with any of the WISE activities please contact me or Grace Geng at CRWG: morrisse@uic.edu; jgeng1@uic.edu.

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REPORT FROM THE INTERIM DIRECTOR

Dear Colleagues: As the Interim Director, I'm delighted to be working with the wonderful women and important projects of CRWG. Since the retirement of Alice Dan, who shaped and led CRWG for the past decade, all of us at the Center are forwarding CRWG's activities in the areas of health, work, and culture. Programs I've initiated for this year focus on stress and women's health, while also strengthening the core of the program by expanding our faculty advisory board, networking with colleagues working on issues related to women and gender throughout the university and the Chicago area, and renovating our office space. Other future plans for CRWG include programs for integrating materials on gender and sexuality into courses for secondary education teachers and efforts to expand CRWG's own funds, awards, and scholarships.

CRWG Series on Stress and Gender
Our series of programs on "Stress and Gender" (also see page 9 in this issue) seeks to understand the increased stress levels now built into so many jobs and personal lives, with a focus on making institutional norms and structures less stressful. The impetus for these programs was a staff meeting last spring, when one of our researchers sought (and received) reimbursement for a stress management workshop. As she explained her situation, it became clear that her frustration and overwork did not result from any problems in her own management style, or even in that of the outside organization with whom she was partnering, but rather from double binds and contradictions caused by changing federal guidelines for grants, increased competition for dwindling funding sources, and expectations that women workers who care about their research or client populations would never say no; they were expected to define no boundaries in how much work they agreed to take on, delaying vacations and working evenings and weekends, often to make up for other employees who had been let go or hired without adequate training due to the budget constraints.

I realized that this was not an isolated case but now a typical one, although the details of job binds differ greatly in differing situations, and so I proposed that CRWG discuss Stress and Gender in relation to women's university roles, work, and caregiving obligations, with attention to the interrelated topics of the institutionalization and the gendering of stress. As women have entered the workplace, their ambitions and expertise have been increasingly engaged with waged work, yet expectations for women to remain in charge of housework and childcare have not diminished, while eldercare increases with an aging population. In the University, junior faculty face rising standards for publication; senior faculty face swollen administrative responsibilities; lecturers face increasing job insecurity; academic professionals face ill-defined job expectations; staff face the prospect of cutbacks and increasing workloads; and students face uncertain futures. As work becomes more pressured, traditional supports may be eroding, and family-work conflicts increasing.

Since deciding to do this programming on stress, I notice stress-inducing factors everywhere. Whenever I tell someone about the topic, that person - whether a student, staff member, or university dean - tends to laugh and say, "Stress, oh I should go to that. But I'm too busy." Frequently this is said with pride, as we collectively collude in creating a work environment that becomes more taxing for everyone in it. Then, this fall, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and suddenly became a participant observer in the interactions among gender, women's health, and stress. We hope our University of Illinois Hospital will be designated a Women-Friendly Hospital, a point of pride for all of us. But I discovered, for example, that this program has not yet reached the mammography department, which serves women almost exclusively. As everyone who has been ill knows, dealing with the health care delivery system can augment anxieties, often despite the best efforts of our excellent health care providers and staff. My prognosis is fortunately a good one, and I'm looking forward to further programming in the areas of stress and women's health that will decrease the former and improve the latter for us at UIC.

Teaching Gender & Sexuality in Secondary Schools
This spring and summer I will be working on a grant from UIC's Center for the Study of Learning,Instruction, and Teacher Development on the topic of "Teaching Gender & Sexuality in Secondary School Literature Classes." The purpose of the project is to work with high school literature teachers enrolled in a UIC Summer 2003 English course on "American Identities" in order to provide them with new information about women's literature, gender, and sexuality and to help them plan, implement, and assess a gender and sexuality component for their literature classes. This goal will be achieved by helping the teachers develop their own curricula and assignments for future classroom use, addressing questions such as: "What makes reading acceptable and interesting respectively to boys and girls? How do literary representations of American manhood and womanhood affect and influence students? How can knowledge about the histories of such movements as suffrage, second wave feminism, and gay liberation be usefully integrated into the secondary school literature curriculum?" Funds from the seed grant will pay for a research assistant, materials for the course, and an evaluation developed by CRWG's Evaluation and Technical Assistance team.

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Extending CRWG's Networks
Because publicizing our activities throughout the university and the community is one of our goals, I've devoted much of my attention since arriving to networking. Our Faculty Advisory Board now includes several colleagues new to the university as well as those who have been guiding the Center for many years. The current members of our Faculty Advisory Board are listed below. I also initiated a city-wide meeting of Gender and Women's Studies Programs, Research Centers, and university women's offices. The purpose of this group is to share calendars, plans, and websites; help one another with publicity; and consider joint projects and funding applications. I've also met with directors of comparable centers and programs at the National Council for Research on Women conference and on visits with representatives of women's programming at the Radcliffe Institutes for Advanced Study.

CRWG Continues to Develop Programs in Health, Work, and Culture
All of the staff at CRWG remain actively engaged in our many projects. CRWG Associate Director Stacie Geller is Director of the UIC National Center for Excellence in Women's Health (CoE), heading a large and active team of health professionals. The CoE has received continued funding for the next four years. CRWG Associate Director Claudia Morrissey planned the successful Beyond Parity Conference for women in academic medicine and has begun activities for Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) students and faculty (see reports on pages 6 and 7). Mary Lynn Dietsche remains as CRWG Assistant Director, keeping all of us on financial track and in good order with the university bureaucracy, while she also appears as a co-chair of the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women subcommittee on Academic Professionals. Janise Hurtig continues the parent writing and participatory research project "Parents Write their Worlds" as a Great Cities Faculty Scholar. Patricia Newton, our Program Services Aide, also acts as receptionist, catering consultant, and our graphics designer, making dynamic publicity fliers and formatting this newsletter.

The CRWG's Evaluation and Technical Assistance (ETA) program continues to help women's organizations and researchers evaluate programs funded through grants and contracts. The program is currently completing a strategic planning process that will guide its growth over the next five years. Members of the team include Janise Hurtig (Coordinator of the ETA Team), Nancy Bates, Denise Harbert, Manorama Khare, and a committed group of research assistants: Alefiyah Abid, Nihal Hassan, Erin Small, Darcy Sutika, and Kristine Zimmermann. Kathy Crittendon, UIC Professor Emerita and member of the CRWG Faculty Board, has been an invaluable contributor to the program and in particular to its strategic planning process.

If you have any comments or suggestions for programming or projects for the Center or for this newsletter, feel free to get in touch with me at gardiner@uic.edu.

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UIC's NATIONAL CENTER OF EXCELLENCE IN WOMEN'S HEALTH

UIC's National Center of Excellence in
Women's Health Extended to 2006

The Office on Women's Health (U.S. Public Health Service) has extended UIC's designation as a National Center of Excellence in Women's Health. UIC is the only such center in Illinois and one of only thirteen in the United States. The UIC Center of Excellence in Women's Health (CoE) took on the challenge of integrating biomedical expertise with the grassroots women's health vision, in the spirit of partnership: multidisciplinary and inter-professional partnerships, university-community partnerships, and partnerships between health care providers and patients.

Since 1998, UIC's National Center of Excellence in Women's Health has created a model of women's health rooted in partnership among its various constituencies. These constituencies include women who come to UIC as patients, the health care providers (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and others) who care for them, health care educators, health care researchers, and community and state organizations. The CoE has also built a solid foundation within UIC through collaborative relationships across the six health colleges and across the community. Strong institutional support from the Provost, Vice Chancellor for Research, Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and the Colleges of Nursing, Pharmacy, Medicine, Public Health, Dentistry, and Applied Health Sciences made the renewal possible. The Center for Research on Women and Gender is the administrative unit of the CoE.

The University of Illinois at Chicago CoE model promotes a program of comprehensive health care to women across the life span, integrating biomedical, psychosocial, and preventive approaches across clinical, research, educational, and community settings. Over the past four years, the CoE has inspired significant gains in women's health care access in Chicago providing a major transformation in health care delivery, primarily for underserved populations of women. The linkages that have been built by the UIC CoE program have provided significant improvements in health care utilization and outcomes, infrastructure development for collaborative research programs, major revisions to our health colleges curricula in women's health, and increased communication and interaction with communities for the betterment of women's health. This renewal will provide the resources for further expansion and innovation of these numerous initiatives.

Adolescent Girls Health Clinic at the Center for Women's Health

The Adolescent Clinic has been a successful addition to the services at the UIC Center for Women's Health. The clinic is located at 1801 W. Taylor. A gynecologist and a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine staff the weekly Adolescent Clinic, which has a dedicated registered nurse, assigned medical assistants, and clerical support staff. This multidisciplinary Adolescent Clinic was originally established to provide specialized gynecology services for those young women who need them. With the addition of an adolescent pediatrician, young women can receive a full scope of health care in one stop. This service has increased in popularity and continues to grow from both internal referral and referrals from the community. Initially open only on alternating Wednesdays, the clinic recently increased its availability to every Wednesday.

Enhancing Patient-Provider Communication for Botanical Use in Women's Health

Botanical dietary supplements/herbal medicines are increasingly popular in the United States among individuals from a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic groups, and women in particular. A significant number of women who consult their health care provider regarding the effects of perimenopause refuse or discontinue treatment of HRT for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, in recent years, many women have begun using botanical dietary supplements or herbal medicines (DS/HM). In conjunction with the Women's Health Services, Community Center of Excellence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, UIC's CoE will work to identify the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of health care providers regarding the use of DS/HM for menopause. This information will be used to develop and implement an educational intervention for health care providers working in the community to facilitate the integration of complementary and alternative medicine with conventional medical practice.

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RECENT UIC SCHOLARSHIP ON GENDER AND WOMEN
Featured Scholar: Judith Kegan Gardiner, PhD
"Theorizing Age with Gender"
(Adapted from Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theories: New Directions,
edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner, Columbia University Press, 2002)

Author's Note: Some of my first forays into feminist theory concerned relationships between mothers and daughters and how these relationships appeared in women's fictions. My focus was on women, but I was also interested in how generations and different ages interacted. I've written about fathers and their children, too, in comparison with feminist theories about "mothering." Recently I've been thinking about masculinity in contemporary U.S. culture, for example by looking at the gross scatological humor enjoyed by young men in cartoons like "South Park." I decided to edit a book that discusses how masculinity studies looks now from a feminist perspective. This book includes scholarly essays on literature, pedagogy, and popular culture by both men and women. My own essay in the volume returns to the themes of time and generations as well as to gender. I've excerpted from my introduction and this essay in the passages below.

Contemporary feminist theory highlights interdependencies between the categories of race, class, and gender. I suggest the advantages to feminist theory of thinking gender through analogies with the multiple categories of age rather than in exclusively binary terms. A developmental, age-inflected theory of gender, I argue, could oppose the challenge of "being a man," not to being a woman or a male homosexual but to being a boy. Such a theory could allow feminists to affirm rather than reject some forms of masculinity in men. At the same time, this approach historicizes masculinity, responding to changes over the individual life course as well as to the changes in society that have eroded breadwinner models of masculinity in the contemporary United States.

Age, like gender, is a social, not merely biological, category, and whom a society considers boys or men is very much a feminist issue. Whereas current feminist theory has worked hard to incorporate nuanced understandings of racialized differences and those of sexual orientation, however, it has not seen age as so important a category. . . . Age tends to be an undertheorized category in comparison to gender. I think that it has promising attributes for feminist theory and strategy now, especially as both age and gender are taking new shapes in the United States today. Such developmental models should be understood as deeply social and mutable. Age has important parallels with gender. All societies recognize and make use of both age and gender categories. Both correlate with differences in social power, status, and access to resources. Like gender, age appears to have an obvious biological basis in a way that many other social categories, like social class, do not.

These analogies with age can help facilitate more flexible thinking about gender. The most obvious advantage of age categories over gendered ones is that although they are sometimes seen in binary terms, more frequently they are understood as continuous as well as oppositional. Although laws separate minors from adults, for many purposes society sees age as a continuum. Whereas gender is usually seen as permanent, dichotomous, and stable, age is seen as changing, continuous, and unidirectional. In contrast, both popular opinion and some feminist theories regard gender as oppositional, not merely relational, with masculinity defined in opposition to femininity and frequently as dominant over it. Similarly, whereas masculinity and femininity are felt as internal characteristics that define men and women not only to others but also to themselves, becoming deep and fixed aspects of individual identity, this is less true of age categories, which are sequential through the lifespan. Most people expect to live through the full range of age categories and are expected to behave in rough concordance with the conventions for each stage. Although people are defined in part by their age, however, age is not usually seen as an intrinsic attribute of personality in the way gender is. On the contrary, older persons often say they do not recognize themselves as old but maintain a sense of themselves as forever younger than their chronological age. Thus dissonance between biological age and self-perception is considered normal, though often comic, in comparison with dissonance between biological sex and self-defined gender, which is often considered tragic. (Currently, the affluent can resort to surgical remedy for both kinds of dissonance.)

Analogies with age may also help clarify the falsity of dividing views about gender between the biological and the cultural. Age begins as a biological category that is intrinsically tied to those genuinely essential definers of human existence: temporality, embodiment, and mortality. Many markers of age are bodily changes, yet it is clear that social pressure, not just the passage of time, goes into creating age divisions. Such categories are not innocent, not obvious, and often seem arbitrary. The age of majority is an obvious example, since the legal age varies from place to place and may vary by gender. Even in a single locale, the age - and gender - of majority may vary for different functions, such as the rights to drive, work for wages, buy alcohol or cigarettes, serve in the military, marry, or vote. Moreover, we understand age as not only biologically and socially constructed, but also as performative, with the performance strongly affected by evaluative norms that vary by culture. What does it mean to act your age - or to act your gender?

Issues of dependence, independence, and interdependence are intrinsic to American understandings of age. Naturalized as part of each person's life cycle, problems in navigating from childhood to youth, from maturity to old age are acknowledged as both normal and difficult, complicating each individual's relationships with authority in the family, other institutions, and the state. Age, unlike gender, is thus a category in which asymmetries of power and experience are overt rather than masked. Although some people claim that gender differences can be complementary distinctions denoting equal worth and detachable from differences in power, the model of age categories puts that belief into question, especially in the conflation of the categories of "women and children" as persons needing protection from the valorized category of men. So, too, it is perhaps clearer in the case of age than of gender that the common categories used to describe them continually slip back and forth between descriptions of typical behavior and prescriptions for how people should be and behave.

Transgressions of both age and gender are socially policed, though with varying sanctions. Thus young performers are frequently praised for exhibiting adult poise and accomplishment, while the elderly, especially old women, are frequently ridiculed for trying to look too young. These standards for behavior according to age vary in emotional charge according to gender, indicating the need for a conceptual model that integrates age with gender categories.

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CRWG Welcomes Two Visiting Scholars for 2002-2003

In the fall of 2002, two scholars who do significant research in the areas of women, gender and health have come to the Center for Research on Women and Gender as Visiting Scholars: Mary Kleinman and Martha Holstein. Mary Kleinman, a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, has been a Visiting Project Coordinator at CRWG since 1999. Mary is currently completing her dissertation, entitled "Expanding Professional Jurisdiction: Incorporating Women's Health into Medicine." Her research addresses how women's health has expanded across the primary care medical specialties, and the factors that have led to that expansion. This includes factors internal to the profession of medicine, as well as external factors such as grassroots women's health groups and government actions.

Mary has worked in the field of women's health for several years, developing new multidisciplinary educational models to train physicians in women's health issues. She created courses that were designed to be multidisciplinary, to incorporate both biomedical and psychosocial aspects of illness, to encourage prevention behaviors by patients and physicians, to incorporate life span issues, and to facilitate cultural competence for physicians in the context of women's lives. Most recently, Mary directed a series of continuing medical education programs about "Osteoporosis in African American Women" while at CRWG.

Dr. Martha Holstein is a health ethicist whose projects address long-term care for the low-income elderly. Martha received her Ph.D. in 1996 at the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Her doctoral dissertation was titled Negotiating Disease: Senile Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease, 1900-1980. Since 1996 she has been a Senior Research Scholar at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, developing program areas on aging and old age and on Judaism and health care ethics and teaching courses on ethics and Alzheimer's Disease. Dr. Holstein is currently teaching courses on Health Policy and Bioethics at DePaul University, and a course on Ethics for Human Service Professionals at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies.

Martha has published extensively in the field of ethics and aging. Her most recent publications include a monograph, Reconceptualizing Ethics and Community-Based Care for Elders (Chicago: Park Ridge Center, 2001), and a volume co-edited with Phyllis Mitzen, entitled Ethics in Community-Based Elder Care (New York: Springer, 2001). While at the CRWG, Dr. Holstein will be working on a paper entitled, "What do you see when you look at me: A Feminist reflects on sexuality and aging."

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CRWG Begins Workshop Series on Stress and Gender

This year, CRWG's interim Director Judy Kegan Gardiner initiated a series of programs on "Stress and Gender." The series brings together UIC faculty and staff in an effort to understand the increased stress levels now built into so many jobs and personal lives, with a focus on making institutional norms and structures less stressful. The programming was partially supported by seed money provided by the UIC Humanities Laboratory for this year's programming on stress and gender. Two panels with UIC speakers were held this fall. The first panel took place on September 16 on the east side of campus. Prof. Jamie Daniel, Department of English and Executive Board Member of Jobs with Justice, discussed recent changes in the labor market and the relationship to stresses in women's work. Aruna Jha, Ph.D., of the Health Research and Policy Centers, described the extremely high levels of alienation and stress among UIC students, particularly honors students. Miriam Schoeman, Interim Director, Office of International Services, described proposals for structuring less stressful jobs for academic professionals developed by the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women. Stevan Weine, Psychiatry, would have spoken on gender and social trauma, had he not been in Kosovo dealing with the realities of civil unrest and mental health.

The second panel on stress and gender, held October 17 on the west campus, targeted the stresses of health professionals and the science of stress. Sue Carter Porges, Professor of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, connected female hormones, social supports, and stress alleviation, while Professor. Debra Klamen, also in the Department of Psychiatry, discussed reducing stress among medical students and other health workers. Geri Biamonte, Employee Assistance Counselor, described kinds of staff and student stresses based on her work with individual clients, and Gwen Duffin, Urban Health Program, put flextime and other proposals to improve UIC women workers' lives on the job in the context of the CCSW recommendations for academic professionals.

The Stress and Gender series will continue in the spring when distinguished labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble will talk on the issue of "Women's Double Day." Dr. Cobble's talk will take place on March 31, 2003, at 3 p.m., in the Humanities Institute, located in the Basement of Stevenson Hall. For more information, contact the CRWG at 312-413-1924.

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CRWG's WISE Program Offers Undergraduate Engineering Scholarship

Thanks to a generous gift from John and Arlene Norsym, the CRWG's WISE Program announces the first Anne Sluzas Martin Engineering Scholarship, in honor of Arlene's mother. The fund is targeted to support nontraditional women engineering students. After receiving B.A. and MBA degrees from UIC, Norsym dedicated 15 years of her career to advising and supporting women engineering sutdents as Assistant Dean at UIC College of Engineering. This fund will continue that support. Norsym is currently the Vice President of Alunmi Relations and a member of the WISE Steering Committee.
The one-year renewable scholarship, at $1000 a year for up to two years, aims to help a woman with children successfully complete two years of her undergraduate engineering training.

To be eligible for the Anne Sluzas Martin Scholarship the applicant must: be a female full-time student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Engineering; be caring for a child(ren); show evidence of average academic performance or above; maintain that average and full-time status for renewal; meet UIC financial aid criteria. Women of color (African American, Latina, Native American) are strongly encouraged to apply.

Applicants must submit an scholarship request form along with a brief biographical statement; a current resume; UIC transcript; proof of financial aid eligibility; and two letters of recommendation. The application deadline is January 30, 2003. Submissions that meet the application requirements will be evaluated by the WISE Scholarship Committee, with the top 3 candidates invited to interview. The scholarship will be awarded in early April, 2003.

For additional information and a scholarship request form, visit the WISE website: http://www.uic.edu/orgs/wise/or contact Claudia Morrissey, MD, MPH, WISE Director, at Morrisse@uic.edu; or by phone at 312-413-1034.

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CONFERENCE PAYS TRIBUTE TO 30 YEARS OF OUR BODIES, OURSELVES

This spring, the Center for Research on Women and Gender and the UIC National Center of Excellence in Women's Health will present a conference entitled, "Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Future of Women's Health." The conference will take place on March 26, 2003 in Public Health, 1603 W. Taylor.

The keynote speaker for the conference will be Judy Norsigian, a founding member of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, the organization responsible for creating the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves. This book, first produced during the women's health movement of the 1960's and 70's, encouraged and empowered women to learn about their bodies and to care for their health at a time when such knowledge was denied to them. The book continues to be updated and has been translated and adapted into 19 languages. The keynote address will be followed by a panel discussion about the main problems faced by those who are working to promote women's health, and strategies for future action.

For conference information, call the CRWG at 312-413-1924.

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Rethinking Building Network Connections:
A Note from the Editor

As our readers know, the CRWG has undergone considerable growth and change over the past ten years. These changes are being reflected in the Center's newsletter, Building Research Connections (BRC). Under the guidance of our new interim director, Judy Gardiner, we are rethinking the purpose of our newsletter and how best to engage with our audience.
As an initial step, we have decided to publish the newsletter twice rather than three times a year, but to change the format in order to include more reports and substantive essays about the activities of our staff and other UIC scholars doing research, programming, and evaluation on gender and with women and girls. We have expanded our feature article to two pages and we have added another feature covering the current research and publication of a UIC scholar. The newsletter also now includes a Report from the Director.

Readers will note that in order to accommodate this new focus we have eliminated the listing of upcoming events that used to appear at the end of the newsletter. These listings can now be found in the monthly online newsletter of the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ccsw/.

As we continue to modify the format and focus of BRC, we encourage our readers to let us know what you find most useful and interesting. Please send your comments to Janise Hurtig, BRC editor, by e-mail at jhurtig@uic.edu; by phone at 312-413-7721, or by fax at 312-413-7423.

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Writers From Around the World

Thirty-five widely published writers of poetry, fiction, and drama from thirty countries came to UIC for a reception sponsored by the Center for Research on Women and Gender. The reception was held on November 1 in the African American Cultural Center (209 AH). Several of them gave brief readings in English from their work. They are a diverse and accomplished group that we were proud to host here at UIC. Among the women writers were Radostina Grigorova from Bulgaria, Jiang Yung from China, Amma Darko from Ghana, Sukrita Paul Kumar from India, Dorit Rabinyan from Israel, Nori Nakagami from Japan, Marjorie Evasco-Pernia from the Philippines, Marzanna Bogumila Kielar from Poland, Ksenija Dragunskaya from Russia, and Freedom Nyamubaya from Zimbabwe. This was a wonderful opportunity for faculty, students, and staff to meet writers from around the world. Cosponsors of the event include African American Studies, the African American Cultural Center, the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Asian Americans, Rafael Cintron Ortiz Latino Cultural Center, and the English Department Program for Writers.