Women’s GSA holds Faculty Spotlight with psychology professor

The Women’s Graduate Student Association, or WGSA for short, is turning the graduate sphere at UCLA on its head. WGSA has taken a traditionally spread-out group of people – graduate students – and given it a space for students of all fields to talk about their academic lives.

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RAFIQI: The Women’s Graduate Student Association, or WGSA for short, is turning the graduate sphere at UCLA on its head. WGSA has taken a traditionally spread-out group of people – graduate students – and given it a space for students of all fields to talk about their academic lives. The organization caters to female graduate students especially. I sat down with studentsMelanie Jones and Zoe Fox, co-founders of WGSA to talk about the association.
Jones makes it clear that …

JONES: One of the goals of our organization was not to establish ourselves as the only voice for women on the campus, or say we are the only ones who understand grad women, but to work with different organizations, to really reach across North and South campus, every department. And create a place where we could launch events and panels that would address issues for women in academia where women can go and just talk about the challenges they face.

RAFIQI: Jones and Fox, along with Allison Collins, Jennifer White, Susan Carrigan, Lianne Barnes and Emma Stansfield, created WGSA as an organization for graduate women to talk about their struggles in academia. Although WGSA is primarily targeted at female grad students, Jones makes it clear that the association does not discriminate based gender or level of college education.

JONES: This is not about shutting people out. This is about creating a space for people who are often shut out.

RAFIQI: On Thursday, WGSA held its first Faculty Spotlight. Professor Janet Tomiyama, the faculty advisor for WGSA, came to talk about her experiences as a woman in academia. Tomiyama is an assistant professor in UCLA’s psychology department, where she studies eating behavior and obesity.
Tomiyama enters the conference room with a warm and casual air. She immediately suggests readjusting the chairs in the room to create an intimate, circular setting. Her stories and explanations evoke attentive eyes, curious questions, and, often, a hearty laugh from her audience.
Although she appeals to her audience’s funny bone, Tomiyama is serious when she advises the women present to express confidence in their professional dealings. For instance, she encourages negotiating strongly for a good starting pay.

TOMIYAMA: Think about the people you’re negotiating for: your family, your spouse, your partner, you future graduate students, if you keep those people in mind, it makes it a lot easier to negotiate and go for those big asks.

RAFIQI: Tomiyama also discusses a topic that many women must consider when entering any career: maternity leave. Specifically, Tomiyama addresses the fact that women in academia face a stop on their tenure clock if they take maternity leave.

TOMIYAMA 2:There are schools where it’s mandatory to stop the clock. And then there are schools where it’s optional to stop the clock to have a baby or adopt a baby.
That’s dangerous and it’s fraught. Your choice to stop the clock or not, that in itself can be viewed negatively or positively. So it’s best to have the mandatory stopping of the clock, because there’s no question of “oh, you think you can’t hack it, so you’re gonna stop the clock” sort of thing.

RAFIQI: While Tomiyama is grateful to be in a field mostly comprised of women, such as psychology, she acknowledges the sexist attitudes that follow women in academia, and encourages those women to be strong.

TOMIYAMA: Regardless of what everyone’s explicit attitudes are, you’re going to be battling implicit attitudes, so you might as well stack the deck.

RAFIQI: WGSA looks forward to hosting more Faculty Spotlights in the future. But for now, one of WGSA’s main programs is weekly “coffee hours” which Fox describes as a space to allow all graduate students to share experiences and advice.

FOX: If you’ve had a bad week, come vent. If you’ve had a good week, come share. That’s kind of one of the more community oriented projects that we’ve been doing just to give people space to socialize because the grad programs are so disparate.

RAFIQI:  From Daily Bruin Radio, this is Sarah Rafiqi.