Summer Sherburne Hawkins. Photo by Caitlin Cunningham for BC Photography.
Summer Sherburne Hawkins, a professor at the Boston College School of Social Work, is leading the development of an international mentoring program to support the promotion of women into higher ranks of academia.
The program—part of the Strategic Alliance of Catholic Research Universities, a global network of research-intensive universities that facilitates cross-cultural collaboration—aims to address key drivers of the decline in women’s representation at every step up the academic ladder, including workload imbalance, structural gaps in support, and uneven access to advancement opportunities.
“It doesn’t matter where you are, where you live, or what your culture is,” says Hawkins, who chairs the SACRU gender equity working group, which also includes BCSSW Associate Dean for Research Kirsten Davison. “Things like work-life balance, communication challenges, and lack of leadership opportunities transcend all places.”
The mentoring program will consist of nine online group sessions, guided by senior female faculty from eight participating universities, including Boston College, Ramon Llull University in Spain, and Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy.
The sessions, starting in September, will build upon one another across three overarching themes: professional identity, goals, and priorities; work-life balance, resilience, and communication; and mission, leadership, and institutional transformation.
Topics will range from setting goals to managing research responsibilities, preventing burnout, and building communication skills. For the final session, participants will interview a female leader at their university and reflect on how they can apply what they learn to their own professional goals.
Participants will be selected through an application process open to pre-tenure female faculty across the participating universities. They will be paired across institutions and countries to create mentoring relationships that expose junior faculty to different academic systems.
“ It doesn’t matter where you are, where you live, or what your culture is. Things like work-life balance, communication challenges, and lack of leadership opportunities transcend all places. ”
“To me, this is a huge strength,” says Hawkins, who has participated in mentoring programs across the U.S. “We often realize that some universities are doing things better than others, which can help us learn from each other as well as generate new ideas for tackling problems.”
Hawkins and her colleagues will evaluate the program through both quantitative and qualitative measures, including surveys before and after participation and follow-ups at six and twelve months, to assess its impact on career development and institutional change. They also plan to produce a webinar to disseminate results and present best practices to support gender equity across institutions.
Right now, approximately 50 percent of assistant professors in SACRU are women. But only 40 percent of associate professors are women and 30 percent are full professors.
Hawkins hopes the pilot program will train faculty to become leaders and help them shape institutional structures that better support female faculty.
“I’ve always looked to strong female leaders during all of my graduate training. One colleague in particular said, ‘I’m doing it because I want to show you all that we can do it,’” says Hawkins. “It’s that idea that we really need to show those who are training below us that this is attainable, that this is important, that we have a seat at the table.”