women at emory: the future
Gina Helfrich

Being asked to write about the future is a bit like being asked to look into a crystal ball. Given that I’ve never noticed any innate psychic abilities in myself, I’m mostly just seeing my own distorted reflection. I can’t speak about what the future holds for anyone else, but I can see—dimly—what it might look like for me. Right now, I spend my days at the Center for Women working to promote feminist values and my evenings reading and writing as I work on my dissertation. In the future, I hope to spend my days teaching feminist values and critical thinking to a class room of students and my evenings reading and writing as I work on getting published. (Today I can wear jeans and a T-shirt to work, but I don’t think that is going to fly once I’m a professor.)

The truth is, I’m really excited about my future as an academic. I love teaching. I love my work in philosophy and feminist theory. I love the vibrant community and the intel lectual exchange at the University. Luckily for me, it looks like I am heading toward joining the ranks of university faculty at an opportune time. Faculty composition is increasingly becoming more gender balanced, as large numbers of graduate women finish their degrees and become professors. The work environment continues to improve as universities focus their energies on achieving work/life balance for staff and faculty members. I will have a better shot at getting tenured, as current professors of the baby-boomer generation become eligible to retire in the course of the next eight years or so. I even may have better job prospects, as Women’s Studies programs continue to pop up across the country and master’s programs expand into PhD programs.

But as excited as I am about my prospects for the future, I know that there are still plenty of obstacles awaiting me. Although about 50 percent of graduate degrees are granted to women, as one moves up in seniority, there are ever-shrinking numbers of women represented. Opportunities for mentoring by senior women faculty are frustratingly scarce. Looking at my own discipline, only 19 percent of faculty members in the top twenty graduate philosophy departments are women. Despite increased attention to the problem, academic culture and the tenure clock continue to place heavy burdens on female professors who have children, and university provisions for childcare are notoriously lacking. That’s a pretty daunting prospect for someone like me, who plans to have children someday. It’s still a mystery to me what it would be like to earn more than $16,000 a year, much less afford to take care of another human being.

Many of the problems I have mentioned do not seem to stem from overt bias against women but from entrenched cultures of promotion and hiring that privilege men over women. A national study has shown that, given the exact same resume randomly assigned a male or female name, both men and women are more likely to hire the male than the female applicant. So, it’s pretty scary and intimidating to see that, more than once in my lifetime, I’m going to be judged not on my merits and abili ties but on entrenched stereotypes about my gender.

These issues, while daunting, only reinforce my commitment to promot ing feminist values, now and in the future. If entrenched culture causes the most harm to women’s progress (and men’s progress, for that matter), then we need to change the culture. I value feminism because it tells women and girls that they are powerful, that they do not have to be controlled by the harmful and mixed messages of our culture, that women deserve a broad range of choices in life. Although I see the devaluation of and violence against women and evidence of sexism in our culture and media every day, I also know that there are others like me out there doing the transformative work that will make positive change.

That’s why I’ve been so happy to have a fellowship with the Center for Women this year and to work on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women at Emory, not to mention witnessing the great activist work that our undergraduate students do on campus all the time. I’m glad to be a part of a feminist community on this campus that is composed of undergrads, my fellow graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators. I’m especially grateful for the mentoring I’ve received from many women here at Emory and plan to carry that practice forward when I am in a position to be a mentor myself. I’m further encouraged by the strong support I see from many men for feminist values. From my partner to my professors to the undergraduate men on the Student Advocacy Committee, these guys are standing up for women’s equality and respect, and I know that cultural change can’t happen without them.

The best thing we can do to shape a better future is to have hope and a vision of what we want the world to be like, then work to make that a reality. It pains me to see those who say that they can’t change an unconscious bias. To my mind, all it takes is an expansion of your consciousness.

Gina Helfrich 09G is a fifth-year PhD student in philosophy who also will earn a graduate certificate in women’s studies. She is currently serving as the first graduate fellow of the Center for Women at Emory, a member of its editorial board, and co-chair of its Student Advocacy Committee.