We’ve noticed some new readers around here in the last few months. If that’s you—welcome! We’re so glad you’re here and we want to hear from you. If you’re not new—we will want you to feel welcome. We’ve been running AEC for almost a year and a half and wanted to take the opportunity to re-introduce ourselves. You’ll hear from Lauren this month and from Amy next month.

I vividly recall a conversation at an academic conference in which I sat with a group of men who discussed several women at the same conference. This conversation did not address the women’s well-reputed scholarship, innovative methodological approaches, or successful mentoring of graduate students. Instead, the conversation centered on how these women looked and spoke. The men are colleagues; in some cases, I still learn from them and work with them. I imagine that, should I ever ask about what I overheard that day, they might suggest that they were joking or that the comments were benign, rather than derogatory. After all, they were simply commenting and not deriding. Nevertheless, I received a message that day as a graduate student and as an emerging scholar: the value of my contributions was inextricably linked to the way my appearance was perceived—and accepted—by men.

Until that point, I thought that kind of thing did not happen anymore. Surely not within the academy, and not among some of the brightest and most prolific in my field. Yet I began to see the hurdles women leapt in order to achieve academic success that were not there for many of my male colleagues. Women are accountable for the way they look and sound, walking the precarious lines between stylish and serious, or shrill and authoritative. I have also known women who cram their job interviews into a few short months before they look “too pregnant” to the interviewers, who negotiate physical space in order to avoid roaming hands or parental pats on the head, and who are extraordinarily cautious about open doors in meetings in order to avoid allegations that their positions or publications are unearned.

Nearly every one of my female colleagues, friends, and mentors has a story not just of being passed up for a promotion or interrupted in a meeting but of being aggressed, abused, or assaulted—many by people in their workplaces. These experiences actively keep women out of influential positions, be they principalships or the presidency. What is too often passed off as benign is actually backwards. Moreover, what we excuse in the workplace is the grown up version of what we excuse too often in schools. Our female students know the breaks that we cut their male peers—the jokes, the ways in which they are allowed to dominate physical space and bodies not their own, and the privileged status conferred upon them. Make no mistake—these are not benign. They are not morally or socially neutral preferences; they are systems of oppression that continue to marginalize and minimize the importance of women, trans, and non-binary people.

I am a proud cofounder of Aequitas Educational Consulting because I’m convinced that it is my responsibility to help schools and educational systems elevate students, teachers, and leaders of all genders. I am equally convinced that the capacity to enact this change exists. Writer Arundhati Roy captures this idea well: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Let’s listen in and then let’s usher in the new world.

-Lauren