Working Against the Grain: Rewards and Consequences of Developing a Personal Voice in Academia

Abstract

As a topic for my dissertation, I conducted a two-year study toexplore the experiences of women who achieved highly inacademics and who were also disadvantaged as children(LePage-Lees, 1997a). The women were considered highachievers since they had earned advanced degrees or werecurrently enrolled as advanced graduate students with at leasttwo years of graduate work completed. Women wereconsidered disadvantaged if they were raised in low-incomehomes, were first-generation college students, and had facedstress as children (e.g., family dysfunction or instability, illness,or death, etc.). From this definition, the women's resources hadbeen limited in three categories: financial, informational, andemotional.