The Women Change Worlds blog of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) encourages WCW scholars and colleagues to respond to current news and events; disseminate research findings, expertise, and commentary; and both pose and answer questions about issues that put women's perspectives and concerns at the center of the discussion.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office. Photo courtesy of iStock.com/Andrei StanescuLast week, President Trump suspended new work visas for foreigners seeking employment in the United ...
The callous killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 by a uniformed police officer while on duty and while being filmed by bystanders was arguably the most brazen act of police brutality involving an unarmed Black civilian since the Black Lives Matter ...
Sage Carson was raped by a graduate student in her sophomore year of college. In an article for VICE in 2018, she recounts the grave trauma she endured as a result. Unable to transfer schools and experiencing a steady decline in her GPA, Carson ...
I never knew that I would have the opportunity to do social science research as an undergraduate until I got to Wellesley College. Towards the end of my first year, with my academic interests starting to gravitate toward Sociology and South Asia Studies, I knew I wanted to connect the concepts I was learning in the classroom to action-oriented research that produced tangible results for ...
The challenges of isolation and loneliness have become apparent over the past several months of social distancing. Not only are we physically separated from our friends and extended families, but we’re concerned about their health and wellbeing as well as our own. We may be juggling childcare, homeschooling, and our own work. Or we may be wondering how we’ll support ourselves ...
Last year on Mother's Day, I was driving through the Rocky Mountains, on my way from Oregon to Maine where my life was about to change forever. It was the first Mother's Day I had spent without my kids since they were born, and the first Mother's Day since my own mother had passed away. I yearned to call her to share the news of my latest adventure, as I always had during our frequent long...
It is the spring of 2020, and my senior year at Wellesley College is not at all what I imagined it would be like. Before concerns about COVID-19 led schools around the country to close their doors, I was student teaching at a nearby ...
Hospitals and universities are facing challenges that many have never seen before as they respond to COVID-19. Universities are closing their campuses and transitioning to remote learning in order to protect the health of ...
A woman graduates from college and starts her first job, earning about the same as the male colleague who sits next to her. She gets promoted a few times, her salary increases, and in her late 20s, she gets married. Her husband gets a job offer in a new city, they move, and she takes a slightly lower-paying job. In her early 30s, she has a baby, and then another baby in her mid-30s. She ...
During this unprecedented time, our work at the Wellesley Centers for Women towards gender equality, social justice, and human wellbeing has taken on new meaning. As a society, we have become newly aware of just how fragile and precious human wellbeing is. And as an organization, we have been reminded of how deeply we care about the physical and mental wellbeing of our community — ...
If conventional wisdom is to be believed, women are notoriously good at getting along. Cultural pundits, from scholarly theorists to political wags, suggest that women are better suited and somehow more prone ...
Happy New Year from the Wellesley Centers for Women!
We’ve just wrapped up a decade of shaping a better world through research and action, and we’re about to start a new one. What a time to look back over the last 10 years and see the big picture.
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Here are our top 10 highlights of the past decade:
1. Evaluating and growing an ...
A recent study out of University College London confirmed a very strong connection between social media use and depressive symptoms in teenagers. And this connection was much stronger in girls than in boys. (This does not mean that social media ...
A recent family conversation reminded me of my (long-ago!) elementary school experience of learning who my teacher would be in the coming school year. I remember the sense of anticipation – who will be my teacher?.
Now, decades later, I am a college professor, and with each new semester, I begin working with new groups of students. I have related anticipation (not as intense, for ...
Yesterday on route to work my phone exploded with messages from friends and colleagues urging me to, "Turn on NPR right now,” to hear their story about student parents. I was a ...
Video games are on my mind these days. Especially violent ones, like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. But special recognition goes to Fortnite, since as a mother and pediatrician, my interests lie in what is most popular among the children. What is Fortnite? It’s an online ...
My name is Anmol Nagar and I’m a junior at Wellesley College, originally from the California Bay Area. Over the past year I’ve done research at the Wellesley Centers for Women with Jennifer Grossman, Ph.D., through The Class of 1967 Internship Program. Our ...
The long march towards progress is often one that extends across generations. The U.S. woman suffrage movement, which resulted in women’s right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920 – took 75 years to produce the desired result. That’s three ...
This week, Canada launched the Equality Fund, the world’s largest global fund for women’s and trans* equality movements. Its tagline, “Funding Feminist Futures,” clearly conveys the fund’s purpose. Having already mobilized $100 million worth of initial investments to accompany a $...
The teen sitting across from me avoided making eye contact as he responded to my questions. He provided thoughtful answers in a soft voice as he looked down at the rubber band in his hands, stretching and turning it repeatedly. Clearly this young man was struggling with symptoms of depression such that he was disengaged from his friends, skipping track practices, missing homework ...
Close to half a century has passed since I lived in Bogota, Colombia. In the early 1970s my husband, Jerry, and I had conducted research for our dissertations in there. Jerry’s work explored training pharmacists to provide birth control pills to women in countries where medical ...
Recently I returned from Liberia, which USA Today just rated as the poorest nation in the world. It was a bittersweet trip, because Liberia is a land I love, and it wasn’t always at the bottom of this list. And yet, over the ten years I have ...
Why Racialized Exclusion Hurts and How We Can Remain Resilient
Going into your home while Black, waiting in a coffee shop, playing with your child, styling your hair, swimming, cooking, flying as a doctor while Black…living while Black. And as such, being ...
No one looks for a job in a newspaper’s “Help Wanted” section anymore. But some 50 years after the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions in 1968 said that listing jobs under “male” and “female” headings was illegal, the psychological divide lingers – in sports.
Women remain underrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, and despite ...
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Happy New Year! This year we are celebrating something very special, WCW’s 45th anniversary!
It was 1974 when we first began as the Wellesley Center for Research on Women in Higher Education and the Professions—a feminist think tank on a Seven ...
Today, it is almost impossible not to talk about immigration and what that represents to every single individual in our nation. As an immigrant transgender woman who was granted asylum during the Obama administration, it breaks my heart to see many people seeking help at the ...
In January 2018, President Trump famously raised his concerns regarding the “lack of Norwegians” and the excess of immigrants from low-income countries entering the United States – and international media took swift notice. The concern over the composition of U.S. ...
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967, famously characterized the human mind as a storehouse filled with two kinds of seeds: good and bad. Humans have the capacity to be both good and evil, he pointed out, and it’s the seeds we water that ultimately grow. Think about that. When we look around the ...
About twenty years ago, I received some unbearable news about a dear friend. A highly intelligent, strong, and beautiful woman of African-descent revealed to me that she contracted HIV as a result of having unprotected sex with a man who had the virus. Twenty years ago, I was convinced that the virus was an automatic death sentence for my friend. Thankfully, with advances in medical ...
“Someday you will go to college, too,” a young mother tells her eight year old son at her baccalaureate graduation ceremony.
“Mom. You're silly,” he replies with a grin. “I already went to college with you!”
Walking hand in hand in cap and gown with their children at graduation is a culminating moment for nearly all of the student parents who I ...
I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about our research on sexual violence case attrition and why most rape cases do not go forward to prosecution. The way that cases move through the criminal justice system has been a concern to victims, practitioners, and researchers for the last 40 ...
In the “New World Order,” nations are becoming multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-“colorful.” The act of embracing our common humanity remains a task for all to strive toward. Embracing the right of everyone to be different without judgment, is something we each can ...
This article was originally posted by Dana Rudolph on the Mombian blog, on October 30, 2018. This weeks marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
This landscape is familiar, strewn with ash and blood. We’ve been here before, too often, seeking the living, counting our dead. I know the terrain, can pick my way stumbling over the bodies, the stench of ...
At the Wellesley Centers for Women, we envision a world of justice, peace, and wellbeing for women and girls, children and youth, families and communities, in all their diversity around the world. Like so many, our will and spirits have been tested by recent events, but our resolve has been strengthened. The fatal shooting of two African Americans in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky, ...
This commentary by Nan Stein and Bruce Taylor was originally published by Education Week on October 4, 2018. The sexual assault allegations leveled by psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford against U.S. Supreme Court ...
Emily Style’s beautiful phrase “curriculum as window and mirror” has had an enormous impact on my work as a teacher and teacher educator over the last 30 years. Other proponents of multicultural education have, over those years, deployed many more words to assert what curriculum ought to be and do. Emily’s lyrical imagery is testament to her skills as both poet and ...
This article was posted by Amy Banks, M.D., on September 18, 2018 in her Wired for Love blog on Psychology Today.
A number of years ago, a 15 year-old child hung herself after repeated, prolonged bullying by a group of peers. Phoebe Prince was different, but not that different. She had recently moved from a small town in Ireland to a small town in Massachusetts. In Phoebe’s case, ...
About 20 tweens pile into the unassuming studio space of their ballet school in mid-July. There are no frills here. The waiting area is small and a bit disheveled; the cinder block building has seen its share of life. But look closer: there’s magic inside.
The dancers are not exactly sure what to expect from this week of “choreography camp,” but are glad to be there ...
This article was originally posted by Natália Marques on her Medium blog on June 4, 2018. I landed in Cape Verde on June 17th. I’ve been here for a while already, but as someone who has just spent the last four months ...
As a country we seem to be moving far away from the nurturing and sustaining activity of the settlement houses of our past. The first settlement house, established in New York City’s Lower East Side – Neighborhood Guild – was founded by Stanton Coit, and just a few years later came Hull House in Chicago, materializing through the passionate vision of Jane Addams. ...
This article was posted by Amy Banks, M.D., on June 19, 2018 in her Wired for Love blog on Psychology Today.
Like many, I have been watching in horror the images of children taken from their parents, housed in caged containers, huddled under silver blankets. As the intellectual ...
We don’t live in an “either/or” world. Most non-sport institutions get this. It’s why Starbucks has unisex bathrooms, why there are forms to change your gender on government documents, why there is even a concept of “preferred pronouns.”
But athletics remains stubbornly committed to a male-female dichotomy. Enforcement of that rigid divide is again ...
The Wellesley Centers for Women is mourning the death of Deborah Holmes, Chair of the WCW Council of Advisors and a passionate activist committed to the lives of women, people of color, equity, and social justice across the world.
“Deborah understood the intersectionality of social justice causes as well as the necessity of making change on multiple fronts at once, and she lived ...
A few days ago, my eyes fell upon an online post discussing recent studies that showed how unpredictable work schedules in low-wage industries, especially food and retail, are really bad for families. The article ...
Views expressed on the Women Change Worlds blog are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Wellesley Centers for Women or Wellesley College nor have they been authorized or endorsed by Wellesley College.
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