Newsletter, report

Report on the Culture Section Mentoring Program – Marshall A. Taylor

We are well under way with the fourth annual ASA Culture Section Mentor Program. The best way I can think of to summarize the program so far is this: consistent, but a little down.

Before I elaborate on that summary, though, I’ll quickly recap the structure of the program.

The program is following the same structure as it has in previous years, with multiple mentees assigned to individual mentors (creating “mentor pods”) and the mentorship happening over the course of the year—starting at or just before the 2023 ASA annual meeting and ending before the 2024 meeting. The mentorship specifics and schedules are at the collective discretion of each mentor pod, and the meetings are (mostly) remote with each pod deciding whether or not they would like to meet up at the ASA meeting. We retained the well-received anonymous mentor ranking system that we implemented last year—see pages 10 and 11 of volume 8, issue 2 of the section newsletter for more details on this—and used the mentees’ preferences to help us form pods that maximized the extent to which mentee needs aligned with mentor experiences.

The mentor application opened on February 28th and closed on April 4th; the mentee application opened on April 17th and closed on May 8th. Pods were then emailed at the end of May and are now in progress.

The Membership Committee—consisting of Asia Friedman, Thomas Davidson, Samantha Leonard, Amy Zhang, and myself—put together 17 pods, each with one mentor and three to five mentees. A breakdown of the mentors and mentees by position and type of institution is provided in Table 1.

Now, back to what I mean by that summary.
Table 1. Summary Statistics of Program Participants, 2023 Program 
  PositionType of Institution
 Pre-UniPre-ABDABDNTT AcP1Asst ProfAssoc ProfFull ProfApp2IndR1/R23Liberal ArtsPublic/StateCCPrim / Sec4Res Inst5Alt-AC 
Mentor002153510 12111011 
Mentee11737640000 61210100 
1This position includes postdocs, visiting professors, lecturers, and other non-tenured academic positions. 2This position includes applied sociologists, professionals, or other members outside of the academy. 3This category includes international equivalents. 4This category is primary/secondary schools (pre-higher education). 5This category is research institutes with academic affiliations (unlike alt-ac research institutes/centers). 
  The 17 pods from this year is down from 21 pods last year. A four-pod difference may not sound like a lot, but that is the difference between pods with three mentees, on the one hand, and four or even five mentees, on the other. We don’t want to let this become a downward trend, since (1) large pods strain the committee’s ability to form groups with consistent mentorship needs, and (2) we risk developing a reputation where mentors in this program are overburdened—thus compounding the issue. So, in short, we need to get more mentors signing up.

The number of mentees was also down a bit from 2022, from 70 to 65. This isn’t too bad, but that combined with the smaller number of mentors led to a general decrease in representation across position and institution type for both mentors and mentees. Table 2 shows the percent change from the 2022 numbers to the 2023 numbers. As the table shows, we had lower turnout across most categories. The exceptions here are full professor mentors—who went from 3 to 5 for a 67% increase—and applied sociologist mentors, mentors from state schools, and mentees from liberal arts colleges, all of whom saw an increase from zero last year. We also had mentors and mentees from new types of institutions—namely, high schools, community colleges, and academically-affiliated research institutes. These are great new additions that I hope we continue to see in future iterations of the program.    
Table 2. Percent Change from 2022 Program to 2023 Program 
 PositionType of Institution
 Pre-UniPreABDABDNTT AcPAsst ProfAssoc ProfFull ProfAppIndR1/R2Liberal ArtsPublic/StateCCPrim / SecRes InstAlt-AC 
Mentor–0↑-100-29-6767↑0 -33-67↑–––↑ 
Mentee–-5-3100-5600-100-100 -9↑-50–––-100 
Note: Cell entries are percentages. Dashes are in cells where the category does not exist in both program years. Upward-facing arrows (↑) are in cells where the cell count for the 2022 program is 0 but there was at least one count for that same cell in 2023. 
It is also worth pointing out that the two groups who we ostensibly expect to see in the largest quantities as mentees—pre-ABD and ABD students—had essentially the same turnouts from 2022 to 2023 (from 18 in 2022 to 17 in 2023 for pre-ABDs; 38 to 37 for ABDs). That’s a good sign.

All in all, then, the 2023 numbers look similar to the numbers from the 2022 program—though admittedly a bit low. The natural follow-up question is: Why are the numbers a little low? There could be (and probably are) several explanatory factors, but my hunch is that ASA Connect’s alternative to the listserv method of section communications played a significant role. We’ll get a better sense of this possibility with next year’s mentor program when ASA Connect is phased out.

Lastly, the BIPOC Resource Sharing Network is now going to be a joint venture between the Membership Committee and the D&I Committee. This collaboration is still in development, but I look forward to sharing news and details as they arise.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing everyone in Philadelphia!