Music professor gives lecture on gender bias
By Ford Rasmussen
A professor at the Cain College of the Arts gave a lecture today on her career in music and the challenges she had to overcome, saying she almost dropped out of college during her postgraduate studies.
Sara Bakker, who has a doctorate in music theory, said there are multiple “barriers” for women to pass to succeed in education. The first step is applying for college, but “the biggest hurdle of them all is the Ph.D. level,” Bakker said.
After becoming a wife and a mother, Bakker found it difficult to continue her education but said she knew it was important.
“I felt like the kinds of contributions that I could make to society would be different if I completed this degree and went through with it, even if I didn’t think I wanted to at the time,” she said.
After graduation “job applications were one area where I really felt gender made a big difference in my life,” Bakker said.
Bakker and her husband, who is also a music theorist, applied for the same jobs in the same areas but he “always got more bites in the job market than I did,” she said.
“We don’t really ever know if we are experiencing gender bias,” Bakker said. “The best thing we can do is to become aware of it.”
Jenny Thompson who is the vice president of Tau Beta Sigma was the organizer of this "Woman in Music" lecture, a series, she said, is carried out all across the country. Gender discrimination is “kind of uncomfortable” so people don’t want to talk about it, but "it should be talked about,” Thompson said.
“I think this is everywhere. I think all people experience this. It’s not just a gender thing,” she said.
