Committee on the Status of Women: minutes of meeting
Seattle, Washington
Saturday, November 2, 2004
7 -8:45 a.m.
Members in attendance
Heather Hadlock (Stanford U), chair
Daniel Beller-McKenna (U of New Hampshire)
Dorothea Link (U of Georgia)
Honey Meconi (Eastman School of Music, U of Rochester)
Judith Peraino (Cornell U)
Sindhu Revuluri (Princeton U), student member
Nina Treadwell (UC-Santa Cruz)
I. Our purpose as a Committee
The members checked in with brief reflections on why we had decided to serve on this Committee and what we see as the Committee’s purpose and mandate. In the course of this discussion, we reviewed and affirmed our Mission Statement (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/music/ams/csw/CSWhist.htm). We affirmed the need for a Committee on women’s issues, and agreed that we should also be pro-active in collaborating with groups whose aims intersect with ours, including the Gay-Lesbian Study Group, the Committee on Membership and Professional Development (CMPD), and Committee on Cultural Diversity, and the newly formed Disability Studies Group.
We agreed that we should raise the CSW’s profile by publicizing its existence, membership, and purpose through the AMS website, AMS-List, the student list, word of mouth, and local chapters. Honey Meconi volunteered to take on maintenance and improvement of the CSW webpage. We brainstormed strategies for connecting with local chapters; i.e. encouraging them to sponsor local forums/discussions on topics that will be addressed in our annual Open Meeting.
We discussed the ideal demographic for the CSW, including ratios of female:male and student:non-tenured:tenured members. (We didn’t come to any conclusions, but agreed that outgoing member Dan Beller-McKenna should be succeeded by another man.)
II. Post-mortem on 2004 Open Meeting
About 60 people attended our panel discussion on “Getting Published,” with special focus on feminist, queer, and gender scholarship. Panelists Suzanne Cusick (ed., Women and Music), Daniel Melamed (ed., Journal of Musicology), Judy McCulloh (Music Editor, U of Illinois Press), and Gayle Sherwood Magee (former Music Editor, Indiana U Press) discussed the roles and priorities of general and specialist journals; creating, proposing and marketing edited volumes; the peer-review process; and the larger network of feminist/gender scholarship, publishing and undergraduate curricula. We were very pleased by the turn-out and the lively discussion.
III. Plans for 2005 Open Meeting in Washington DC.
Our 2005 panel will address issues of gender in graduate pedagogy, with a double focus on “seminar culture” and mentoring. (We last sponsored a mentoring panel in 1997.)
We will invite a panel of faculty members and graduate students to share ideas about creating open and egalitarian discussion in seminars, colloquia, and reading groups. Judith Peraino expressed an interest in serving on this panel. We will invite 2 or 3 other panelists, with the goal of featuring both male and female teachers.
IV. Activities within the AMS
1. Honey Meconi shared with the CSW and the AMS Board the results of her survey past AMS programs and the male:female ratio in AMS session chairs. She discovered a trend toward gender parity over the last ten years and suggests that female Program Committee chairs have been instrumental to that progress.
2. Heather Hadlock served on the selection committee for the Committee on Membership and Professional Development (CMPD) Travel Grant, chaired by Naomi Andre of the Committee on Cultural Diversity. Grants ranging from $100- $500 were awarded to AMS members presenting papers, giving performances, and attending committee meetings here in Seattle.
V. CSW input to the planned AMS membership survey
Heather Hadlock reported that the Committee on Membership and Professional Development (CMPD) is planning a new survey of AMS members, with the goal of obtaining an accurate census of members’ gender, ethnicity, education level, employment level, and income. They asked the CSW for help in shaping questions for the survey. We agreed that the survey should measure three specific aspects of women’s status in the AMS and in the musicological profession:
1) The perceived “glass ceiling”: how true is it that women are roughly equal to men in the student and untenured ranks, but outnumbered at the tenured level?
2) Mentoring: are women better served by male or female mentors? How satisfied are men and women with the mentoring they receive as students and pre-tenured faculty?
3) Productivity: do women publish less than their male peers? if so, why?
The CSW will use the CMPD’s findings on these questions to plan our own projects and initiatives over the next five years.
Closing. The Committee thanked outgoing member Daniel Beller-McKenna for his service and particularly for his maintenance of the CSW webpage. |
