Advice for Women Starting Out a Career in Social Sciences

"This is something you're going to be doing for the rest of your life," Dr. Taylor says to me as I ask her for advice for women who could be pursuing careers in her kind of field, "follow your passion, study what's important to you, it's going to change if you help change it." She is perhaps one of the greatest case studies of this; just looking at all the obstacles she had where she was told she shouldn't follow her passion, she should stay away from the field of sexuality because it was not going to get her tenure. And yet she continued on, pushed past her obstacles and began publishing research on it anyway. "If you stick to it, and do the best work you can do, you can make a change," she says, advising anyone looking for a career as an academic to make sure that is what you want to do. "You're going to spend a lot of time teaching, writing, researching, and advising, so make sure it's something you really want to do!"

Resources provided from a phone interview between Dr. Verta Taylor and myself.