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SWS Feminist Mentoring Award
Deadline: April 1 of calendar year

History and Overview

The SWS Feminist Mentoring Award was established in 1990 to honor an SWS member who is an outstanding feminist mentor. While the word “mentoring” is commonly used to describe a faculty-student relationship, this award has shown the breadth of ways that feminists do mentoring. In establishing the award, SWS recognized that feminist mentoring is an important and concrete way to encourage feminist scholarship and community.

Feminist mentoring includes not only anticipating needs and providing concrete guidance and feedback for students and colleagues, but also:

  • compassion and guidance with regard to feminist concerns,

  • helping students and colleagues (early career and advanced) to write and effectively communicate as authors, activists and teachers;

  • providing support, strategies and models for balancing family and work;

  • offering gendered understandings of institutional biases and strategies for overcoming them;

  • building formal and informal institutions that support feminist interests (personal, career research, and teaching);

  • a philosophy and practice of inclusion inside academia, especially with those most marginalized.

Award Benefits

The awardee will be celebrated at the annual SWS Winter Meeting. Additional benefits associated with this award include:

  • $250 award check

  • Up to $500 travel stipend to attend the annual Winter Meeting

  • Granted up to 3 “early career” SWS memberships to new members (students, recent graduates, assistant professors).

  • SWS lifetime membership for the award recipient

Eligibility and Application Submission

An SWS member can nominate someone who has been an SWS member for at least 3 years. 

Current officers and officers-elect of SWS are not eligible for nomination for this award, nor are any Gender & Society editors.

A complete application includes:

  • Candidate’s CV 

  • A nomination letter from the nominator(s) highlighting and summarizing the supporting materials and other evidence of exemplary feminist mentoring deemed important for consideration of this recognition. The letter should not exceed 5 pages. 

  • A maximum of 10 support letters of the nomination can be included in the nomination packet. A group of people can write one nomination letter and all sign it collectively.

  • The nominator(s) is/are welcome to update or resubmit the original nomination packet in subsequent application cycles.. 

All submissions are via the Member Portal: sws.memberclicks.net.

Reporting Requirements and Timeline

This SWS award is recognition and therefore, no final report is required. Awardees are notified by late summer if they are the recipient.