January, 1998
IN THIS ISSUE:
Nawal El Saadawi, M.D., M.P.H. CRWG Scholar in Residence
Experiences of Low Income and Poor Women with Breast
Cancer
CRWG Director Returns from NIH
Adolescent Health Promotion Project
New grant awards support the Voices for Girls project
Women in Science and Engineering Student Conference Leads
to New UIC Organization
CRWG People
Nawal El Saadawi, M.D., M.P.H.
CRWG Scholar in Residence
Nawal El Saadawi, political activist, physician and novelist, will visit the Center for Research on Women and Gender as Scholar in Residence during March and April, 1998. In Egypt, her home country, Dr. El Saadawi has been an active advocate of women's rights and human rights more generally. She has practiced medicine in Cairo, held high level positions in the Egyptian Ministry of Health, and frequently consults on women's issues for United Nations agencies. Her criticism of fundamentalist attempts to restrict women's freedoms has frequently attracted official censure and even serious reprisals, including dismissal from her job and a period of imprisonment. Early in her medical career she began to write, both fiction and non-fiction. Much of her work has been translated into English and other languages.
As scholar in residence Dr. Saadawi will work on her autobiography and present her work at various events at UIC and other Chicago area locations. Dr. Saadawi will co-teach a literature class, Journey and Diaspora, with Nancy Cirillo, Ph.D., of the English Department. She will participate in women's heritage month and conduct seminars in the College of Nursing and various departments in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Dr. Saadawi will be the keynote speaker at the Conference on Health, Gender and History on April 24, 1998. This conference has been organized by the UIC Institute for the Humanities and will be held at the Chicago Illini Union.
One of the features of Dr. Saadawi's visit to CRWG will be the presentation of two dialogues funded by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council. These two dialogues are designed to enable the wider public of Chicago to engage in an exchange of ideas with Dr. El Saadawi and Suzanne Poirier, Ph.D., and Margaret Strobel, Ph.D., two humanist scholars from UIC. The dialogues will focus on the issues of women's writing, physical and mental health, human rights, and social welfare, as these impact the lives of women in Chicago and in the Middle East. The first dialogue will take place at the Field Museum (March 5, 1998) and the second at the Arab- American Action Network headquarters (March 27, 1998). In addition to these two organizations, the Midwest branch of PEN and the Advisory Council on Arab Affairs are co-sponsoring the dialogues.
The Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Nursing, The Center for Research on Women and Gender, the Departments of English, Psychology, Political Science, and the Women's Studies Program, the Institute for the Humanities, and the Chicago Foundation for Women have contributed to Dr. El Saadawi's visit to Chicago.
For more information about the dates and places of Dr. Saadawi's appearances
in Chicago, call the Center for Research on Women and Gender at 312-413-1924
or check the CRWG Events page at http://www.uic.edu/depts/crwg/datesetc.htm
Experiences of Low Income and Poor Women with Breast Cancer
CRWG is pleased to announce that Anne S. Kasper, Ph.D., former CRWG Women's Health Policy Research Fellow, has received a grant from the Agency for Health Care Policy Research to conduct a pilot study of women with breast cancer. The study will focus on low-income and poor women and their encounters with the health care system.
Little is known about poor and low-income women with breast cancer. Available research demonstrates that low-income women are more likely to be diagnosed with later stage breast cancer and to face higher mortality from the disease. Little empirical research has focused on how economically disadvantaged women access treatment. The broad objective of this study is to explore the barriers that may deter access to care for poor and low-income women with breast cancer to promote appropriate health care policy, health service delivery, and practice.
Dr. Kasper employs a qualitative methodology that involves in-depth, narrative interviews with study participants about their experiences with breast cancer. The goal of the research is to explore the illness experiences of women from their own perspectives; to identify barriers women may encounter to appropriate prevention, screening, and treatment services; and to generate experientially-derived hypotheses for further testing in a large study of diverse populations.
Dr. Kasper and her assistant, Frances Aranda, will interview 12 women in the Chicago area. The interviews will be analyzed so that the women's experiences can serve as a knowledge base from which to determine whether economic, personal, or health system barriers impede access to care. Dr. Kasper plans also to use her research findings to set the stage for further research to improve outreach, health interventions, service delivery, and support for current and future populations of poor and low-income women with breast cancer. Dr. Kasper and Ms. Aranda can be reached through the Center for Research on Women and Gender for more information.
CRWG Director Returns from NIH
During the Fall 1997 semester Alice Dan, Center director, worked as visiting researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) in Bethesda, Maryland. A major focus of her work at ORWH was the public hearing and scientific workshop held in November in Bethesda. This meeting, Beyond Hunt Valley: Research on Women's Health for the 21st Century, was the culmination of a series of research agenda-setting regional meetings held over the last two years. The process was a critical activity for ORWH in reviewing its progress and planning for the future. Beyond Hunt Valley was very successful in assembling a great variety of researchers, practitioners, advocates, and others interested in women's health. Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Senator Barbara Mikulski, and others addressed the over 500 people who attended. The meeting represents the largest attempt at broad, nation-wide outreach beyond the biomedical research community, of any NIH activity.
While at ORWH, Dr. Dan was able to observe the ways in which the NIH
is practicing the congressional directive to include women and minorities
in all publicly funded research, and learned the latest information about
the Women's Health Initiative clinical trial. She attended a workshop
sponsored by the Institute of Medicine on Lesbian Health Research Priorities,
which will result in a report to be released this spring. Her interests
in multidisciplinary research collaboration were developed through conversations
with staff from several institutes, centers, and offices at NIH. She is
completing a paper titled: "Overcoming Barriers to Multidisciplinary
Collaboration in Women's Health Research." In the next newsletter,
she will provide an overview of this work.
Adolescent Health Promotion Project
CRWG has recently begun serving as an outside evaluator for an innovative Adolescent Health Promotion project with the Chicago Commons Association. The United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention has funded this demonstration project and the evaluation.
The project will take place at the Mary McDowell Settlement House and several surrounding elementary and high schools in Chicago's Fuller Park, Englewood, West Englewood, and New City neighborhoods. The young people in these communities face many hazards and have too few resources available to them. This project aims to provide young women and men and their parents with education, resources, and experience to help adolescents make healthy life choices. The project objectives include: (1) working with a community council to plan project activities; (2) teaching 500 students in neighborhood public schools about medically accurate health issues and how to make good choices of lifestyle; (3) leading activities for youth and parents that build positive communication about sexuality and health; (4) train and support youth and parent peer educators who will provide information to the community.
Alice Dan, Stacy Wenzel, and a graduate research assistant (to be hired) will work with the Mary McDowell Settlement House project staff to evaluate this project's process and outcome. If you are interested in this project or related issues please contact Dr. Wenzel at 312-413-7342.
New grant awards support the Voices for Girls project
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Girl's Best Friend Foundation awarded grant funding to the Voices for Girls project in December, 1997. The Girl's Best Friend grant will support the planning of a 1998 symposium that will inform City of Chicago and Cook County departments about how best to support programs and policies that benefit girls. A group of girls will work with adult women to plan this symposium. The MacArthur Foundation funding will support efforts to provide more in depth technical assistance to a sample of city and county departments that are ready to develop and implement specific plans to serve girls better. Portions of both grants will fund the Center for Research on Women and Gender's evaluation and research work with the Voices for Girls project. Previous research on this project was funded by a grant from the UIC Great Cities Institute.
Voices for Girls is a project of the Task Force on Girls (sponsored by the Chicago Human Relations Commission's advisory Committee on Women). The Task Force is a consortium of mayoral appointees and voluntary members working to encourage and support system-wide changes in city and county departments to focus attention on girls and to create and enhance girl-centered programming, curricula, policies, and funding. CRWG is represented on the Task Force by Cecile Lardon and Stacy Wenzel. Other collaborators on the Task Force and on these two new grants include the Illinois Caucus on Adolescent Health and the Center for Research on Women at DePaul University's Egan Urban Center.
Women in Science and Engineering Student Conference Leads to New UIC Organization
A group of thirteen women science and engineering students from the University of Illinois at Chicago attended a Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Women in Science and Engineering Student Conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign from November 14 to 16. More than 200 women attended from the Big 10 institutions and other research universities in the Midwest.
The Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Program of the CIC represents an important initiative for women. Currently, women constitute 55 percent of the United States population and 46 percent of the labor force; however, only 22 percent of scientists and engineers in the labor force are women. The purposes of the WISE initiative are to increase the number of women in the sciences and to develop a comprehensive set of collaborative activities designed to achieve gender equity at each step along the science, engineering, and mathematics pipeline. The WISE conference focused on topics including leadership skills, technology, mentoring and networking, balancing personal and professional lives, and understanding the culture of science.
From this conference a new student organization for women in science at UIC is being created by the students who participated. The new student organization will focus on creating a network of women science students as well as sponsoring speakers to come to UIC. Anyone interested in the organization can contact Veronica Arreola at 413-9434 or varreo1@uic.edu. All undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty are invited to join.
CRWG People
Alice J. Dan, Ph.D., returns from sabbatical to take up her position as Center director, January 1, 1998. Sylvia Vatuk, Ph.D., leaves the Acting Directorship of the Center. During her time at the Center, Dr. Vatuk completed the task of fund raising to support the visit of Nawal El Saadawi and organized the Center's faculty seed grant program. Patricia Newton, from the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, joins the staff as Program Services Aide. Anne S. Kasper, Ph.D., joins the Center as Senior Research Scientist; Frances Aranda, Visiting Project Coordinator, will work with Dr. Kasper.
Congratulations to Peggy McCracken, Ph.D., and Esther Parada, M.F.A., who have been named University Scholars at UIC. Both have been recipients of CRWG seed grant funds.