Crafting the Conditions for Professional Membership: Women of Color Navigating Inclusion into Academia

ABSTRACT

Previous scholarship has documented women of color’s experiences in professions such as law and medicine, but less research has explored how women of color experience the process of becoming members of professions. Using academia as a case I draw from interviews with thirty women at a single research-intensive university to demonstrate that women of color have different orientations to professional membership as compared to white women. These differences are made evident by women of color’s extra work to justify and make sense of inclusion in the profession, their beliefs about research, and their participation strategies. I argue women of color differentiate themselves from their white peers by crafting a moralized version of the profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Women of color
• professions
• academia
• moral identities

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The data used to calculate this statistic were downloaded from the National Center for Education Statistics and can be provided upon request.

2. Social science disciplines differ substantially from STEM fields in how students work with faculty advisors and in how program milestones are structured. Though variation between disciplines and individual departments in the present study undoubtedly exist, the sample is not large enough to make generalized claims about such variation.

3. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelly Marie Ward

Kelly Marie Ward is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her work focuses on how marginalized groups navigate institutional life in higher education and reproductive healthcare.