Erny and Godsey’s compelling analysis clearly demonstrates that survey archaeology and excavation in the Aegean are—in terms of the directorship of individual projects—male-dominated. Sober reflection on the field of Aegean prehistory and Aegean-centered classical archaeology would probably lead one to intuit this state of affairs in any case. Erny and Godsey’s empirically grounded study, however—a response to Loy’s (2020) observations regarding mentor-mentee networks—underscores just how egregious is this lop-sidedness toward male scholars, often male scholars with clear intellectual-genealogical connections. From a number of perspectives, this cannot be healthy: whether considering issues of basic equity and justice in how power is distributed in the academy, or the desirability of building diverse voices and knowledges into how survey (and excavation, although I will focus on survey archaeology in this response) is conducted. Here I offer some reflections on Erny and Godsey’s findings. These reflections are inevitably personal, not least as I am keenly aware that—as a former doctoral student of one half of the Cherry-Davis dyad and co-editor of that scholar’s Festschrift (Knodell and Leppard 2018; see Gori 2020)—I am implicated in the male-dominated, mentor-structured networks in question (although, unlike some of the other respondents, I have never directed a project in the Aegean area).Anglophone Aegean survey archaeology is, at the directorial level, biased in terms of gender in that men occupy a disproportionate number of directorial positions (usually white, cisgender men, as per Erny and Godsey’s analysis; although one might have concerns regarding a method in which public self-identification is used as a means to group individuals; cf. Heath-Stout 2020: 410–11). This reflects wider gender bias in how power is distributed and exercised, both within Aegean archaeology (noted earlier by Cullen 2005) and across the wider discipline (e.g., Gero 1983; Gero and Conkey 1991; Conkey and Gero 1997). The overrepresentation of white, cisgender males at the apices of the discipline can be seen in a range of dimensions—whether in the greater ‘survival rate’ of white cisgender males through academic career trajectories or in the greater representation of the same group in higher-impact journals (Bardolph 2014; Heath-Stout 2020; Cullen 2005). Metrics such as these capture differing aspects of a unified phenomenon: inequitable accumulation of disciplinary power based on factors divorced from pure intellectual capacity.Erny and Godsey’s key contribution is to stress that mentorship dynamics drive and iterate inequity. Mentorship as a structuring factor in how archaeology militates against women (and indigenous scholars, scholars of color, queer scholars, transgender scholars, subaltern scholars) has previously been an object of study (e.g., Brown 2018), but Erny and Godsey chart in detail how male mentor-mentee networks can come to exercise undue influence in subdisciplines. In my view this is a structurally sexist process (sensu Homan 2019), rather than one that necessarily implicates individual decisions regarding mentorship (although I will suggest that these latter could provide a useful locus for meaningful change; and, evidently, archaeology has its fair share of bad actors and cultures of harassment [Voss 2021]). The situation is obviously complex, but I suggest that individual decisions, innocuous enough at that scale, in amalgamation ultimately pattern at larger scales to introduce bias into how academic power structures are built.In explaining how this might happen, I wish to turn to another, subsidiary point made by Erny and Godsey that relates to gender, research focus, and how the field places value on certain types of research output. Erny and Godsey highlight patterns in how research orientation can reflect gender, at least in the context of Aegean survey. To take their example, they show that male directors tend to contribute expertise on survey methods; female non-directors, by contrast, are overrepresented in terms of the authorship of finds chapters. This pattern probably recurs across much of world archaeology. For example, Dempsey (2019) shows how certain themes exhibit structural bias within medieval archaeology. The most obvious source of this bias is the institutionalized assumption that past activities were gendered in ways comparable to our own context—that is, stereotyping activities to gender (e.g., Gero 1991; now Coltofean-Arizancu, Gaydarska, and Matić 2021; Moen 2019). Thus, the archaeology of childhood and child-rearing, of sex (including prostitution), of household craft production (especially weaving), to the extent that these are often tacitly assumed to have been gendered activities, are research areas in which women are better represented. A secondary source of bias may be the wider societal restrictions regarding gender and perceptions of intrinsic suitability for quantitative versus qualitative analysis (Kuchynka et al. 2018; Starr 2018).This is problematic if we also assume that funding bodies, journal editors, and tenure/promotion committees do not reward different research questions equally (Currie, Thiele, and Harris 2002). It is only a minor leap of faith to suppose that certain types of questions tend to be disproportionally rewarded based on a funder’s or publisher’s or committee’s goals, institutional setting, and personnel composition. If we assume that the relationship between gender and research focus is not randomized and that scholars recruit and train students in those areas in which they hold expertise, then self-evidently fuzzy gender/research theme patterns will develop and persist. The publishing-funding-impact-mentoring feedback, instantiated in male-dominated networks of power, contributes directly to this structural sexism. This feedback must be disrupted if we want to change the organization of the field.If we as a discipline do not like inequitable distributions of power in the structures within which we work, then positive action should be taken to mitigate that. This certainly is the case with regard to fieldwork and project management, as Erny and Godsey show; not only in terms of greater collaboration and relaxed hierarchies, however, but also in terms of challenging extant behavioral and social norms in an area of knowledge production that has historically been deeply hostile to women (Nelson et al. 2017; King et al. 2020). Beyond this, whether retaining more female graduate students (and indigenous students, students of color, queer students, transgender students, subaltern students, and so on) through their progression upward in academic hierarchies or changing publishing models, such that periodicals take active steps to publish scholars with identities that have historically been underrepresented, this logically can only involve more effective mentorship to junior individuals within these groups. Positive action of this sort has been shown to be a potentially effective method for redressing gender biases; when not opposed by discursive resistance within power structures (e.g., Powell 2018; Roos et al. 2020), and recognizing that such steps represent part, but certainly not all, of a solution to intrinsic bias.I should stress that I do not view the types of questions that Erny and Godsey show to be associated more closely with male scholars in Aegean survey archaeology as the problem—methodological, comparative questions, or indeed those oriented around issues of emergent social complexity. It is impossible to interpret survey data without an appreciation of the methods used to generate those data (see Given 2004), so a concern with the most efficient method to answer the most compelling questions at a given scale seems to me to be laudable. This is not least the case as the “get on with it” approach to finding sites (e.g., Fentress 2000) runs into trouble when plowzone assemblages disappear, or migrate, or change their size (e.g., Garcia Sanchez, Pelgrom, and Stek 2017), demonstrating once again that “site” is an artifact of categorization we impose on otherwise continuous data. We can presumably imagine a universe in which data are qualitatively better or worse; as such, we should then presumably seek to improve and finesse method. The problem instead involves dissociating research questions of this type from gendered power structures.Erny and Godsey highlight other dimensions of inequity in how power is organized in Aegean archaeology. Some are more obvious; Aegean survey archaeology, an overwhelmingly white discipline, has deep ties to classical archaeology more broadly, and the vexed relationship between “classics,” notions of canon, and racism is increasingly exposed to public scrutiny (e.g., Bond 2017; Poser 2021). Less attention has been paid to socioeconomic context. The pervasive influence of what Shanks called “infrastructures of privilege” (Shanks 1999: xv) has only rarely been subject to detailed investigation. Aegean archaeology has not, historically, been a remunerative pursuit. The socioeconomic context of its practitioners, and how that context informs scholarship and importantly attitudes to issues of wealth disparities in the past, would surely benefit from some substantive attention. Assessing differences across Mediterranean survey archaeology more broadly, beyond the Aegean (with its very particular disciplinary history) is also likely to reveal informative planes of variation.In the final analysis, much directorial control in Aegean and eastern Mediterranean survey archaeology rests, and historically has rested, with people who look, sound, behave, and were educated (in some respects, but not all) much like me. This is by no means a problem specific to Aegean archaeology, and it would behoove all archaeologists to modify our behavior—but particularly so in the case of those of us who have benefited from intrinsic biases in and unjustifiable inequalities of disciplinary power.I would like to thank Grace and Melanie for inviting me to respond to their paper; and the editor, Ann Killebrew, for facilitating this response. I should also like to thank Miriam Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murphy, Katherine Harrington, Sarah Murray, John Cherry, Alex Knodell, and Aubrey Farrell for reading and commenting on a draft of this paper. Some of the comments I have acted upon, and others I have not; none of these scholars, then, should be held responsible for the content of my response.