Beyond Madonna and Thelma

Around this time every year, I begin to think about role models. I arrive home for winter vacation after spending a semester learning from mostly inaccessible professors and preoccupied teaching fellows. Every year at the end of December, I think to myself that many have been wonderful and some have been less than wonderful, but all have been, well, male. I vow that the next semester I will pick some classes taught by women.

After thinking these thoughts on my way home, I get back to my hometown and talk to my sister, who is a fifth-grader at my old all-girls' school. She has all women teachers and goes to class with all girls. Talking to her, I begin to forget my grumbles, as I also begin to remember why I was so anxious to leave my all-female high school environment and come here: Armed with the confidence that I had just as much to offer as anyone else, I could now learn from--and alongside--men.

The problem is, however, that for the past few years, I have seen men and women playing very different roles in my department. In large part, the professors and teaching fellows are men; the women I run into in the department's offices are their assistants. Among the students, not only are more of the concentrators men, an even larger proportion of the thesis-writers are also male. The only problem is that most of them are also wonderful and inspirational economists. I love my department, and so I often think that I should complain. Still, while I know that gender does not necessarily make any difference in accessibility and interest level, it is a little strange to envision myself as a blossoming academic when every single one of the academic role models I have is different from me in a fundamental way.

I recently e-mailed one of the only female professors in my department asking for advice about a final paper I was writing for another class. I was sincerely tempted to write at the bottom of the e-mail something along the lines of, "I'm so glad to have a female professor in my field to talk to!" But I kept deleting and rewriting that sentence because it never seemed to come out right. After all, I was e-mailing her because of her expertise in the subject. I should be wanting to write, "I'm so glad to have such a great professor in my field to talk to!" and not even be thinking about gender. Sadly, it was a new experience for me to be discussing economics with a female professor.

This semester, for the first time--using some of my electives--I took half of my classes from female professors and teaching fellows, including one course in the Women's Studies department taught by two women in which we spent a lot of time talking about heroines and role models, especially in popular culture. Thelma and Louise were an option, but aside from the fact that they are fictional characters, I'm not sure I'm so fond of all the choices they made. Madonna is another possibility, but as much as I adore "Evita," I still can't get past envisioning her in her "Like a Virgin" phase. Looking out for a better option, over vacation I even watched the "Ladies Home Journal" salute to the "Women of 1996." But they all seemed to be bestowed with this honor because they were somebody's wife or had a fabulous physical endowment. I would prefer my role models to come to their success a little more through hard work and other talents.

For now, I think I will be content with finding my female role models in the ordinary places--in my family and among my roommates and friends. If I need a female role model in my field, I can always go back and visit my high school economics teacher. Otherwise, I will keep doing what I have always done here at college: enjoying all that my male professors have to offer while making sure I sift through the course catalog to find a class taught by a woman, and pushing for more women faculty hiring. I am mostly optimistic--I do always, and will always, have wonderful role models here who are men, and I know that slowly but surely the faculty will become more than 11 percent female. I just wish that I had been able to learn from more women during my time here; after all, seeing what they have become makes it easier for me to envision what I could become.

Corinne E. Funk's column will resume next semester.