COSWA Mission Statement

Preamble: COSWA was created 25 years ago to monitor gender discrimination within our discipline. Since that time it has produced surveys, introduced resolutions at AAA business meetings, set up a system for censuring departments that failed to make good-faith efforts to hire in gender-neutral ways, and kept the discipline informed about progress in gender parity within academic employment. As a recent AAA survey indicated, employment of women at the level of assistant professor is now approximately equal to that of men, and proportional to the representation of each in the available PhD pool. At the same time, however, surveys show that gender parity has not yet been attained. Discrepancies still exist in such variables as rank, length of time in rank (i.e., speed of promotion), citation patterns and stand measures of "productivity" (e.g., publication rates). These indicators of ongoing gender bias, together with changes in the pattern of anthropological employment toward more professional and part-time careers, have led the Committee's members to modify COSWA's mission.

The Committee will pursue greater parity for women in the discipline by means of three activities: (1) monitoring, (2)advocating, and (3) educating.

• Parity is understood to mean not just percentages of anthropologists employed in academic settings, but also indicators of career success and quality of work, among anthropologists employed in both academic and professional settings and within the student population. This also includes salary equity between male and female academic faculty and professional staff.
  
  
• Monitoring will include gathering information that illuminates issues that affect the diverse women in anthropology.
  
  
• Advocating will include bringing our findings before the Association's members, in the form of resolutions, when appropriate.
  
  
• Educating will include distributing brochures, meeting with department chairs, setting up an interactive presence on the Internet/World Wide Web and writing periodic updates for the Anthropology News. In addition, COSWA will identify forms of sexual harassment in all settings where anthropologists and students work and learn. Our gaze on gender parity includes the varieties of biases that complicate issues regarding race/ethnicity, gender stereotyping and preferences, class and disabilities. Finally, the Committee will interact on an ongoing basis with the Association's long-range planning process on issues of gender parity.