The Leak in the Academic Pipeline: on Black Women Sociologists
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The Leak in the Academic Pipeline: on Black Women Sociologists Dari Green 1 & Melinda Jackson-Jefferson 1 Received: 5 February 2020 / Revised: 31 October 2020 / Accepted: 3 November 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract There exists a “leak” in the academic pipeline centered on Black women sociologists. This leak exists in large part due to gatekeepers, who have attempted to protect the hidden curricula used to preserve predominantly male, White, old, conservative spaces (Romero 2017). Victim blaming, stigmatizing, exclusion, and tracking begin during the professionalization process in graduate school for many women of color and continue into their academic career (Margolis and Romero 1998). Mentoring in academia has been cited as a major contributing factor to professional success and career advancement; yet, access and quality of mentoring remain an issue for women of color (Pitt 2016). After moving from graduate school, salary differentials are cited as another contributor, leading to job dissatisfaction, decreased retention, higher rates of battle fatigue, and workplace stress (Pitt 2016). The state of Black women sociologists in the twenty-first century oddly has not changed much over the past century (Wilson 2012). This piece identifies structures of oppression that act as barriers to the incorporation of Black women sociologists in academic spaces, causing the leak. We then mitigate these entities by offering strategies to develop spaces of equity to combat the multiple jeopardies faced by Black women sociologists (Collins 2000). Keywords Black faculty . Retention . Mentoring . Academic pipeline
Introduction In today’s quickly changing society, higher education has become the primary tool through which one is permitted to participate in civilization. In its origin, the education system only permitted 20% of American citizens to enter into colleges and universities, most of whom were White males. Through many political wars resulting in small victories, access has now been granted, with an overemphasis being given to “diversity and inclusion” for the student population, without giving proper attention to the conceptualization of such terms. Representation matters. Students of color are often stigmatized with notions of under-preparedness and having a lack of motivation. In this paper, we contend that the issues that currently face the higher education institution both begin and end at the foundation of * Melinda Jackson-Jefferson [email protected]; [email protected] Dari Green [email protected] 1
Department of Social Sciences, Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA, USA
the structure itself, administration. Students of color make up approximately 45% of the population of predominantly White institutions (PWIs); of those, approximately three-fourths are Black college students (Allen 1992; Fleming 1984). Since the 1960s, the enrollment of Black students at PWIs has improved considerably (Fleming 1984; Thomas 1991). Black women are the largest gr
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