Five-Year Study on Hiring Trends in Gender, Women's, and Feminist Studies

Abstract

Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 253 Jennifer Musial and Christina Holmes Five-Year Study on Hiring Trends in Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies Given that there are so few PhD programs, and thus few Women’s Studies PhDs, how have they fared on the job market? . . . Would it be easier for me to get a Women’s Studies job if I had a PhD in Sociology (for example)? I think the time has come for us as a Women’s Studies academic community to assess these questions very seriously—it’s almost criminal for us to turn out Women ’s Studies academics if no one—not even Women’s Studies programs —will hire us.1 The question in the epigraph above was posted in 1997 by Lauraine Leblanc, a then-recent graduate of Emory University’s women’s studies PhD program, in reply to a thread on WMST-L (the women’s studies listserv established in 1991) titled “Graduate Degrees in Women’s Studies.” Two decades later, gender, women’s, and feminist studies (GWFS) faculty lines are at an all-time high because there are 336 departments or programs in the United States alone that have at least one full-time faculty line in GWFS.2 There has never been a greater opportunity to advance 1. Lauraine Leblanc, query to WMST-L listserv, April 11, 1997, http://userpages .umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/phd_ws.html. 2. Laura Briggs, “Precarious Value? Critical Reflections on the PhD in Gender, Women’s and Feminist Studies,” roundtable discussion, National Women’s Studies Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 14, 2015. 254 Jennifer Musial and Christina Holmes one’s study in the field: as of 2017, there were twenty-five freestanding PhD programs in GWFS between the United States and Canada.3 This reflects a doubling of doctoral programs since 2008, and we are aware of at least two additional PhD programs that are currently in development. This expansion is remarkable during a period of economic austerity marked by limited budgets, hiring freezes, and program closures.4 Yet, even in a presumably auspicious time for the field, Leblanc’s questions plague job seekers who hold a PhD in GWFS. Employment concerns surfaced at the first meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) PhD Interest Group in 2014, where many sensed that GWFS PhD holders were uniquely disadvantaged when applying for jobs in our field, especially when we realized positions that we applied for were going to those without the GWFS PhD.5 This reignited a long-standing conversation about epistemological authority, and now labor power, within and across the disciplines.6 We asked ourselves, with unprecedented 3. We chose to focus on freestanding PhD programs because it is beyond the scope of this essay to analyze the motivations of joint programs (such as those offered by the University of Michigan, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Cincinnati) that train PhD students in a traditional discipline as a complement to the GWFS PhD. One can assume these schools set up their programs based on factors such as employability, the valuation of disciplinary knowledge, available institutional resources, etc. 4. See Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto, “Affective Activism: Answering Institutional Productions of Precarity in the Corporate University,” Feminist Formations 27, no. 3 (2015): 21–48; Laura Briggs, “Whither Feminism in Higher Education in the Current Crisis,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 502–6. 5. Details on the formation of the NWSA PhD Interest Group are described in Melissa Autumn White, Carly Thomsen, and Stina Soderling’s “Critical Mass, Precarious Value? Reflections on the Gender, Women’s and Feminist Studies PhD in Austere Times,” published in this special issue. 6. See Marilyn J. Boxer, “Remapping the University: The Promise of the Women ’s Studies PhD,” Feminist Studies 24, no. 2 (1998): 387–402; Katherine Side, “Rethinking the Women’s Studies PhD in Canadian Universities,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 267–88; Eloise Buker, “Is Women’s Studies a Disciplinary or Interdisciplinary Field of Inquiry?” NWSA Journal 15, no. 1 (2003): 73–93; Vivian May, “Disciplining Feminist Futures?: ‘Undisciplined’ Reflections about the Women...