The UCSB Gender Equity Project: Taking Stock of Mentorship, Equity, and Harassment in California Archaeology Through Qualitative Survey Data

Abstract

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Gender Equity Project aims to assess the state of mentorship, equity, and sexual harassment within the California archaeological community. Using the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) as our target population, we administered two surveys in 2016 designed to address those themes. We frame the project in terms of research related to equity issues, outline our primary research questions, and present the demographic patterns from the surveys. Results include gender-based pay discrepancies, preference by women for cultural resource management (CRM) over academic jobs, history of inadequate mentorship for women and underrepresented minorities, and slightly higher rates of sexual harassment reported by women in CRM than in academia. We discuss how the impacts of these issues extend beyond the lives of individuals to affect the nature of the overall discipline.

El Proyecto de Equidad de Género de UCSB tiene como objetivo evaluar el estado actual de la mentoría, la equidad y el acoso sexual dentro de la comunidad arqueológica de California. Durante el año 2016, realizamos dos encuestas diseñadas para abordar esos temas, tomando como público objetivo la Society for California Archaeology (SCA). Enmarcamos este proyecto en términos de la investigación relevante y relacionada a cuestiones de equidad, delineamos nuestras principales preguntas de investigación y presentamos los patrones demográficos de las encuestas. Los resultados incluyen discrepancias salariales basadas en el género, una preferencia femenina por trabajos en manejo de recursos culturales (CRM) en lugar de puestos académicos, un historial de mentoría inadecuada para mujeres y minorías subrepresentadas, y tasas de acoso sexual reportadas por mujeres ligeramente más altas en el ámbito de CRM que en el ámbito académico. Discutimos cómo los impactos de estos temas se extienden más allá de la vida de las personas para afectar la naturaleza de la disciplina en general.

Acknowledgments

Foremost, we acknowledge all the SCA members who took extra time out of their schedules to take the surveys. We thank Sophia Farrulla for her assistance in writing the original survey (which we later divided into two surveys), and we thank Kristina Gill and Seetha Reddy for Beta-testing the original survey and providing feedback. We also thank Denise Wills for facilitating the use of SCA’s Survey Monkey account, and Jelmer Eerkins and the rest of the SCA Executive Board for approving the survey and allowing us to use the SCA membership as our target population. We acknowledge the UCSB Human Subjects Committee (HSC), who approved this research. Thanks also to journal editor Terry Jones for all his hard work in helping us get these articles published. We are grateful to Dana Bardolph and Maureen Meyers for their feedback at various stages of the project, in addition to two anonymous reviewers. Finally, we thank Patricia Chirinos Ogata for graciously translating our abstract into Spanish.

Notes

1. Both surveys and the resulting datasets will be shared with the SCA Executive Board, in addition to being posted on VanDerwarker’s laboratory website at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/vanderwarkerlab/research/databases.

2. This discrepancy is slightly less pronounced for the mentorship survey, with 25 percent of female private CRM employees self-identifying as principal investigator versus 34 percent of males employed in private CRM companies.

3. Current students were excluded from this statistic.