Susan Heck Interns present summer gender research projects

Susan Heck, one of the founders of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and former Clayman Institute Advisory Council member, had a keen interest in two particular issues. One was the importance of including undergraduates in the Institute’s work and providing them with mentorship. The other was assisting underserved populations, such as low-income individuals and women of color.

The internship combines the two issues Susan Heck was most passionate about by enhancing our training and mentorship of undergraduates while they work on a project of their choosing that focuses on an underserved population.  Susan Heck interns must be Stanford undergraduates, and must be prepared to make a full-time commitment to their research. Humanities Research Intensive Fellow Jessica Susanto, pictured third from right, worked alongside the interns this summer as well.

Below, our most recent group of Susan Heck interns describe the research projects they conducted this summer and offer comments on the internship and mentorship experience.

Pay Transparency: Advancing Gender Equity and Equality

By Dakota Lawlar
 

According to economic experts, 131 years from now will be the first time male and female employees achieve pay equality globally. Unwilling to accept this timeline, I chose exploring the newest initiative in the equal pay movement: pay transparency. By clearly understanding the legal context of pay transparency, how can we thoughtfully shape society’s path toward pay equality and the complex factors contributing to it?

One of the biggest factors behind the ongoing pay gap is pay secrecy. Employees don’t know what their colleagues are paid or how their pay compares to others with similar experience and work. Historically, equal pay legislation has notoriously failed to be enforced though the first of such laws soon will celebrate its 90-year anniversary on the books. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 prohibited employers from requiring employees to keep their wages secret, even from fellow employees. Yet, almost a century later, a majority of employees report being prevented or discouraged by their employer from talking about their salaries with colleagues. The U.S. has long been subject to a culture of pay secrecy, which leaves unequal pay undetected for employees, who lack both the networks and the resources to identify as well as fight against pay discrimination.

However, with the rise of social media and a new generation entering the workforce, the culture of pay secrecy appears to be changing. Fearful of retaliation, people, especially women, have long used whisper networks, informal gossip among friends and colleagues, to share important information on everything from their salaries to where to find promotional opportunities and who they should avoid in the workplace. With the goal of spreading information quickly and informally, it was no surprise whisper networks thrived with the rise of social media. Soon spreadsheets and online databases arose with thousands of women sharing their pay data. At the same time, as Gen Z has grown older and entered the workforce, they have proven a willingness and eagerness to break the taboo of talking about pay. More than 74 percent of Gen Z employees report being comfortable talking about pay with their coworkers, compared with 41 percent of baby boomers. Companies dedicated to sharing pay data have arisen as well, like Glassdoor and Payscale, which give their customers access to salary information from a variety of businesses.

This rise in pay transparency is now moving from the culture to the legislature. In just the past four years, 11 states and counting have enacted pay transparency laws requiring companies to disclose their salary ranges to applicants and banning the use of an applicant’s salary history. These laws break the cycle of unequal pay for women and marginalized employees who are more likely to have been unfairly paid in the past. Ever-growing data from these states show the pay gap is closing faster than the national average.

However, it became clear in my research that there are many factors at play that ensure the pervasiveness of the pay gap, such as mixed results from lawsuits fighting for equal pay and the individual biases employees face. Female employees face pay discrimination not only on the basis of sex, but due to age and race as well. Additionally, female and marginalized employees often receive fewer promotional opportunities and less tangible benefits like bonuses or paid leave than their white male colleagues. Each of these factors add up to a staggering pay gap costing Black, Native, and Hispanic women each up to $1.2 million in lost wages across the span of their careers. This affects our global economy as well, with estimated global wealth losses standing at over $160 trillion annually as half of the world population is stunted with what they can put back into the economy. 

In order to combat all these biases and factors, it’s clear that individual workers and the legal system will have to work together to close the pay gap. My research emphasized the need for accessible educational resources to bridge the gap between the structure and the individual. Next summer, I will expand on my research by doing just that with an open-access educational website empowering employees from all backgrounds and companies to engage and fight for pay transparency, as well as resources for women to aid in negotiating equitable salaries.

I’m immensely grateful to my mentor Dr. Alison Dahl Crossley for her wise guidance throughout my research this summer and her future mentorship. It has been amazing to meet so many incredible people at the Clayman Institute and learn so much from them. I can truly say that this has been one of the most fulfilling experiences that will shape my life going forward.

Persecution of the Black mother

My name is Alisha Magalhães Service (she/her), and I am a rising junior studying international relations. My personal and academic interests follow a line of decolonial thought. Histories of the marginalized and the powerful institutions that work to maintain inequality are my greatest concern.

My research this summer sought to examine the persecution of the Black mother as the intent of American empire–purposeful in bolstering a citizenship of white supremacy. The Black mother is uniquely situated in a position that is thrice disenfranchised: once through race, twice through sex, and thrice through a denial of motherhood. Dred Scott explicitly marked the exclusion of all Black people, free or enslaved, at least until 1865, from any status as a citizen. White women, also disenfranchised before the 19th amendment, were still carved into the national ideal. It was through their motherhood, as celebrated in the phenomena of Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity, that the white woman was offered an alternative place as an authority of the state. The enslaved mother had no such path, and instead they were denied legitimacy in their motherhood. By auction, medical experimentation, and a distortion of their labor, Black women were left completely unprotected. Upon emancipation, this exclusion continued with the rising tide of eugenics with the very existence of the Black mother posed as a threat to white America. This is just one of many stories that use a celebration of white motherhood (to the purposeful exclusion of others) in an arc of imperialism.

It has been a true pleasure to have the opportunity to singularly dedicate myself to not just an academic venture, but to something of deep personal meaning to me. Never before have I been in a position to sit and read, freed from other classes or outside job expectations. There is genuine fun in trying to decode the grainest image of a 19th century news clipping. I don’t think I have ever seen a space for myself in academia, beyond my studies for a degree at least. I am still unsure if it is in my future, but I can say that I can understand the intrigue. What a privilege it is to jump into every rabbit hole, and I’ll try my best to keep doing so.

The tension between choice feminism and embodied feminist knowledges

My name is Eva Jones (they + she), and I am a rising senior studying feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and environmental systems engineering. This summer, thanks to the Susan Heck Internship program, I worked with Dr. Angelica Ferrara to try and trace back the principle appeals of choice feminism back through historical traditions of embodied feminist knowledges. This experience was a wonderful way to get a taste of academia and wrap my head around independent research before I conduct my thesis. 

I began my studies in FGSS seeing it as a passion of mine, but today I understand it as a profound framework to untangle the modern and historical makings of family, nations, race, and reproduction. This summer, our cohort spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to do feminism. In my studies of FGSS, I have paid particular attention to the co-optation and appropriation of feminist aesthetics. These conversations led me to my research question: how can we levy ideas of false consciousness in the face of choice feminism without violating older feminist traditions of embodied knowledge? I was interested in the ways that feminist goals have been flattened to the expression of individual choice. I understood that the rhetoric of "choice" as a natural entry point into feminist radicalization for women living within a patriarchal system. Its promise is simple and alluring: those who have been stripped of agency will gain it through feminism. This is a promise that many feminists would champion—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this framework limits our potential to bring about a feminist reality. I wanted to dig into feminist intellectual histories, specifically practices of embodied feminist knowledges, to find ideological roots to this appeal of choice. This retrospective proved to be a rich trove of dialogical practices between feminist collectivism and relationally situated knowledge. During my project, Dr. Ferrara pushed to expand my ability to articulate contradictions within the feminist movement without resolving their tension. More than ever, I was challenged to move slowly, trusting my curiosity, to build evidential and lucid articulations of my vision for a feminist future.

My mentors engaged with my ideas with the utmost sincerity. I will take this trust with me. The opportunities at the Clayman Institute to be a part of creating the sort of feminist discourse and research that I voraciously study, have been unparalleled.