OS Professor Sara Soderstrom who, along with Maria Farkas at Imperial College, organized an amazing and inspirational, standing room only, professional development workshop at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Chicago August 12 2018, titled And Yet She Persisted.

Sara pulled together an outstanding group of panelists including Emily Block, Donna Blancero, Annabelle Gawer, Aparna Joshi, Xioawei Rose Luo, Margaret Neale, Kathleen Sutcliffe and Sarah Kaplan who reflected on what it means to persist in academia.

And Yet She Persisted: Tools for Succeeding as a Woman Academic

Women academics face challenging circumstances in their professional lives. Relative to their male colleagues, they can expect longer review times (Hengel, 2016), less credit for their research contributions when working in a team (Sarsons, 2017), biased evaluations of their teaching from students (Mengel, et al., 2017, Boring, et al., 2016), and cultures that are more likely to frame men through a professional lens and women through personal and physical lenses (Wu, 2017; Wolfers, 2017; Rivera, 2017). Despite the growing body of research demonstrating the rough terrain facing women in academia, little training is offered to help them be aware of the challenges or to provision them with tools to succeed. Research into resilience suggests that key determinants of successfully navigating harsh environments include a strong sense of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1994), positive emotions (Ong, et al., 2006; Fredrickson, 2003), and social support (Karademas, 2006). In this PDW, we offer a three-pronged approach to helping develop a feeling of self-efficacy, a sense of optimism, and a set of concrete tools among women academics.

The Academy of Management is the preeminent professional association for management and organization scholars. The 78th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management was held August 10-14, 20198 in Chicago, Illinois. The program theme was Improving Lives.