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SPEAKER: Women with disabilities in academic careers.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: I'm Sheryl Burgstahler, PI and director
of Access Advance, a project hosted
by the University of Washington where
we are working to increase the participation
and advancement of women with disabilities in academic STEM
careers.
CECILIA ARAGON: My name is Cecilia Aragon.
I'm a faculty member at the University
of Washington in Seattle.
And I am a Latina and the first Latina full professor
in the College of Engineering.
My disability occurred after I had already been a professor.
SHIRI AZENKOT: My name is Shiri Azenkot,
and I'm an associate professor at Cornell Tech.
Having a disability has given me a unique perspective
on problem solving.
I've had to learn how to communicate
my needs to other people in a way that is not intimidating.
I have a visual impairment.
It would really help me if you could do the following.
ELAINE SHORT: My name is Elaine Short.
I'm an assistant professor at Tufts University
in the Computer Science Department.
I have a rare form of muscular dystrophy, an adult onset
form of muscular dystrophy, which means
I have a mobility impairment.
For me right now, the big challenges
are around travel and also just generally sort
of physical inaccessibility of spaces.
Do the automatic door openers work on all the buildings?
Really being strategic around what travel I do,
where I travel to, and how I do travel so that I
am involved in my community.
One of the best places to network is at grant meetings,
because it's all faculty and it's often much easier
to get to DC for a grant meeting than it
is to travel internationally for a conference.
SHERYL: How can departments
get started in welcoming women with disabilities?
SHIRI : Step number one is just education and awareness
and realizing that there might be
faculty who have disabilities, who have specific needs.
CECILIA: The department chair
has to make a special effort to make assistant professors feel
welcome, especially if they have an invisible disability.
They often end up putting in hours of extra work
just to be able to create the illusion that they
are fully-abled.
If the disability services office is funded centrally
and there is no cost to the department,
then the department chair thinks,
oh, I want my staff to be as productive as possible
and there's no cost to me.
SHERYL: Explore practices that can make faculty
careers more equitable for women with disabilities
at uw.edu/doit/programs/advance.
SPEAKER: Access advance is funded by the National Science
Foundation, grant numbers HRD-2017017 and HRD-2017054.
Any questions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the federal government.
Copyright 2022.
Permission is granted to copy these materials
for educational non-commercial purposes
provided the source is acknowledged.
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