UW-Madison’s Rachelle Winkle-Wagner and the University of Texas, Austin’s Bridget Goosby were recently awarded a $50,000 Spencer Foundation grant for a project, “Health profiles of African American Women on the Tenure Track and Beyond.”
Winkle-Wagner is a professor with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis.
Winkle-Wagner and Goosby aim to understand whether and how racial stress within higher education institutions relate to health outcomes for black women academics, who constitute just 3.6 percent of all tenure-line faculty in the country.
Their study will employ a mixed methods research design with a national survey and interviews. These efforts will allow the researchers to closely examine the conditions under which black women academics experience racial stress, how they cope, and the degree to which stressors relate to their health profile during tenure and beyond.
Previous research has indicated that black women are at a disproportionate risk for adverse health — including higher rates of chronic illness — relative to their white counterparts. Similarly, research indicates that black women with terminal degrees remain at high risk for racialized stress exposure and the associated health risks, and that higher education, in particular, can be a location of significant racial stress.