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REWRITING THE MYTHS:TAKING ON THE ENTRENCHED STEREOTYPES OF ACADEMIAby Sadia LatifiWomen are having a bit of a moment.A flurry of events in the first half of the year have madewomen the subject of a new popular discourse examiningevery aspect of their lives: their reproductive rights,their parenting styles, their work lives, and their statusaround the world.Legislators have recently tried to limit access to andfunding for reproductive services, domestic violence protections,and fair pay. Two separate covers of TheAtlantic investigated the lives of single women andwomen in the workplace struggling to “have it all.” Timeraised eyebrows for its cover featuring a woman breastfeedingher three-year-old son and a headline questioningwhether readers were “mom enough.”Women in academia have also received some extraattention.The controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh’s remarksabout Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke beganwhen she was invited to appear before a Congressionalcommittee to discuss the lack of contraceptive coveragein the university’s student insurance plan, and thebizarre and abrupt removal and reinstatement of TeresaSullivan, the first female president of the University ofVirginia, garnered national attention and cast a light onthe politics of academe.A 2008 longitudinal study of chemistry Ph.D. candidatesin the UK revealed that young women leave academia infar greater numbers than men, while a 2011 U.S. paperreported similar findings and suggested that women inSTEM fields leave academia primarily due to interpersonaland family concerns, while men most often citesalary as the reason for their departure. “Departmentalclimate” was another major factor in women’s decisionsto leave.This year, a group of graduate students in the MiddleEast, South Asian, and African Studies department createdan organization to address these academic gaps andother issues associated with being a woman studyingthose regions. The Women’s Allied Forum in Academics(WAFA), according to its mission statement, aims toprovide “a comfortable forum where women can discussthe particular challenges that confront them as recentmembers of public intellectual discourse.”“I was talking to women in small groups, and the sametypes of concerns kept coming up,” said Lakshmi Gopal,an M.A. student and co-founder of the group. “WeSuperscript 3Link back to contents page