In recent years the APT leadership has focused
especially on achieving gender parity at the conferences. The plenary sessions
and other special events have regularly featured women, but paper authors in particular
have been disproportionately male. Historically, the problem has resided in
unequal rates of submission. In 2011, a particularly unbalanced conference, the
Governance Committee spent a great deal of time discussing how
APT might increase the number of women who submit proposals. At their annual dinner meeting, each member agreed to encourage 10 women to submit proposals
for the following year. Though it’s not clear if that happened or if it tipped
the balance, 48% of the presenters at the 2012 conference were women. But APT
continues to struggle each year with an imbalance in paper submissions, and APT
leadership has long suspected that the main issue is the underrepresentation of
women in political theory and especially in philosophy, the other discipline
from which APT draws most of its membership. But we haven't had the data to
back up that claim.
As APT co-president, inspired by the “Gendered
Conference Campaign,” Melissa launched an initiative to offer to
help facilitate childcare at the conference. Neither the GC nor Melissa
was confident that it would make a difference – we all agreed that offering
childcare was an important symbolic gesture and certainly worth trying, and a survey indicated support for the
initiative among APT members. But ultimately no participant chose to take advantage of the offer of assistance. Part of the explanation may be that APT conferences are unusually demanding,
since participants are expected to attend panels most sessions, and to share
communal meals. Whereas part-time childcare at APSA may help parents who want
to attend a few panels, part-time childcare at APT wouldn’t help parents who
would want to be fully engaged in the conference. Our informal
sense is that participants are increasingly choosing to bring their entire
families to the conference, which may bode well for the future.
Using the same categories Ms. Perestroika applies to
this year's WPSA, then, the 2013 APT looks like this. Of course this kind of measure is quite
limited, since we are not taking account of gender balance in submissions or
anything else. We present this chart for
comparison, with the main take-home message being that APT's relative success
at promoting gender balance means that a sustained commitment can in fact pay
off.
Signed,
Lisa Ellis, APT Co-President
Andrew Murphy, APT Co-President
Melissa Schwartzberg, immediate past president, APT
No comments:
Post a Comment