SPOTLIGHT: JENNIFER GANDHI

Jennifer Gandhi, assistant professor, political science, is using her position on the PCSW to help raise awareness of gender equality in the workplace. Due in part to her own experience as one of the few women in the political science department, Gandhi recognizes an immediate need to retain more women faculty and staff throughout the University.  

Introduced to commission work when asked to participate in the President’s Commission on Race and Ethnicity (PCORE), she came to PCSW to discover what kinds of options were available at the University level as far as addressing gender issues.

“I’m not sure how many we have [in our department] total, but on our website we have six women listed, and we’re a department of somewhere around thirty,” she says. “I’ve had discussions with colleagues about ways we as a department can remedy that.”

Gandhi says she is particularly interested in looking at the patterns of women on various levels as well as differences in pay, and would like to study other subsets within the University struggling with the same issues as her department. Although numbers show there are certain areas on campus where women serve in several senior positions and are on par with male colleagues, other units have some catching up to do.

“Part of my involvement is to help identify the variations across the University and make contact with other people to try and resolve those situations they’re facing.”

Gandhi received a BA in political science from Columbia University and a PhD from New York University, with a specialization in comparative politics and political economy. Her current research examines a range of topics regarding dictatorships, including their institutional design, modes of leadership succession, the role of ideology, and variations in their economic performance.

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