The anniversary is a time not only to mark progress for women in political science but also to retool in order to clear barriers in the future. Duerst-Lahti laments lingering Darwinian graduate school programs and the Byzantine structure for advancing faculty, especially women, at many universities and colleges. She points out encouraging evidence that half of the graduate students who enter political science programs today are women, but she remains frustrated that the numbers diminish as women try to advance through Ph.D. degree programs to junior tenure-track positions to associate professors to full professors. Success even in academic settings remains a gender issue. All the assumptions are very masculine, Prof. Duerst-Lahti says of the rungs on the academic ladder.
Competition is the assumption.
You can look at the way masculinity is structured and the way femininity is structured and have some good ideas. Prof. Duerst-Lahti knows the challenges women face in achieving academic success and professional parity. She credits Beloit College and her early academic background in the University of Wisconsin System as positive experiences where others may have faced adversity. With a dissertation titled Gender Power Relations in Public Bureaucracies, she received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and joined the Beloit College political science faculty in 1986. She was granted tenure in 1992, served as associate dean of the College from 1993 to 97, and was promoted to full professor in 1998.