'Speaking Out': Public Speaking Made Easy - 10th February 2010 Sense Loft, Soho, London. 6.30pm-8.30pm, followed by drinks. £5, including free drinks. Email: laura.north@rocketmail.com and you'll receive an email when booking opens. Women-friendly training on public speaking. Three experts will show you how to feel comfortable speaking in public. Whether you want to contribute to a group discussion or just ask a question at a conference, we'll give you some easy ways to help you share your thoughts and ideas effectively.
TAG - 17th-19th December 2009: http://www.dur.ac.uk/tag.2009/ The BWA will be at Durham TAG with our membership stall, look out for news on BabyTAG.
UCU Women Members Conference 14th November 2009 http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2701 We're going along to see what the University and College Union has to say about gender issues.
Girls in Antiquity - 8th-10th October 2010 Interdisciplinary Conference at the DAI Berlin: http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/2009/07/cfp-girls-in-antiquity-german.html This conference may be of interest to BWA members.. it is about girls, from early Neolithic times to Late Antiquity, within the geographical limits of Europe, Egypt, and the Ancient Near East.
Abstract: Women failing ARCHAEOLOGY failing women?
Gender archaeology in Britain is largely practiced by female academics, is marginalised and still fighting mainstream structuralist interpretation. We see this as having a fundamental link to the gender politics of the discipline, namely a lack of women practitioners, itself the result of a peculiar historical trajectory.
Women were very active participants in British archaeology during the inter-war period and throughout the 1940s. During the 1950s, however, they were largely excluded during a societal domestication drive. This was also the era of professionalisation, leaving the growth of the discipline largely in the hands of male archaeologists during the 1960s and 1970s. The legacy today is that only 13% of our professors are women, despite the fact that the majority of our students are female.
Surveys by the IfA (Institute for Archaeologists) and the BWA (British Women Archaeologists) find many problems with the professional situation of women archaeologists. Women are found to be under-represented, under-promoted and under-paid compared with their male peers, and are leaving the profession in their 30s. Major concerns from women respondents include: the ‘invisibility’ of senior role models and a lack of mentoring; slow employment and promotion coupled with fast redundancy; and discriminatory comments (on the increase since the 1990s). A major concern is a perceived inability to have children and sustain a career in archaeology.
We argue that the only way to disseminate gender archaeology to a wider public is to urgently improve the working conditions for women in archaeology. Our aim is to challenge a maladjusted employment framework by: 1) educating managers regarding the female experience; and 2) campaigning nationally for equal parenting legislation.
Report: The session went very well: about 40 were in attendance; a no. of other got under 10, so not bad. The Norwegian and Swedish speakers presented on how things have been improving socially for women in Scandinavia since the 1950s (when British women went back into the home): all parents get 1 year shared parental leave on full pay. The result is that Norwegian Archaeology now has 40% female professors (although this is not typical in the university as a whole) and there are women in prominent positions across the profession. Gender archaeology is taught across the board, as a subject in its own right.
The German women's network is well-established, strongly feminist and has c. 90 members: http://www.femarc.de/Netzwerk/text/naafweb1.html. Spain, Poland, Russia etc. are beginning to recognise that both the past and the profession are gendered male, but have little resources to do anything about it.
Across Europe, everyone was reporting very similar trends re. female involvement and promotion in archaeology and the Scandinavians too recognised the principle of the 'leaky pipeline'. A couple of women in the audience reported the same in History/Art History. A clear link exists between the status of professional women and an antiquated employment framework failing to catch up with the theory of equality.
The Norwegian was asked by an older woman in the audience "if this is everywhere, then how do we change archaeology, do we change the world?" She said "Yes, we have to change the world!" :)
