A delegation of several members participated in the March 11 NC Women United “Member Showcase,” and event designed to help members of the public and the members of individual organizations learn more about the programs and priorities of the “membership” organizations that are part of the NCWU coalition.

AAUW’s table highlighted:

• Advocacy  - we used the national public policy brochure with an insert giving the status of AAUW NC priorities for the 2009-2010 legislative session.
• Research - we had a summary of AAUW research and pre-release information on the new report Why So Few?
• Membership - Join us! as a national member or through AAUW NC and its Tar Heel Branch that serves the entire state

Another table highlighted the National Girls Collaborative Project.

The panelists included

• Barbara Osborne, J.D., of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science who gave some additional background on Title IX.
• Jeff Sackaroff, Career Services who brought his experience counseling recent graduates
• Kevin Hill, Visiting Instructor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business who contributed his insights on negotiation in general, and salary negotiations in particular.

A lively discussion covered issues in negotiating for salaries — either in entering the workforce or in negotiating raises — and a recurring theme was to be prepared (know as much as you can about the other side’s options) and to approach negotiation as an expected part of the hiring process. Negotiation is a skill that applies in almost all areas of life, and while AAUW, especially through its partnership with the WAGE Project, emphasizes its value in narrowing the gender pay gap, the attendees were urged to look at it in broader terms.

AAUW resources available at the event included:

• Pay Equity Resources including
  • Advocacy: Position papers on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (passed in January 2009) and the Paycheck Fairness Act (passed by the House, but still under consideration in the Senate)
  • Education: Pay Equity Resource Kit (download request) with information on projects and background on gender pay equity.
  • Research: Behind the Pay Gap, the 2007 research report documenting pay inequities for college graduates one year out of school
• Title IX Resources including
  • Advocacy: Position paper on Title IX public policy
  • Education: Title IX Resource Kit (download request)
  • Research: Where the Girls Are: The Facts about Gender Equity in Education, a 2008 research report
• More general AAUW information
  • Brochures on membership, public policy, the Legal Advocacy Fund, and Fellowships and Grants
  • Membership insert on the joining the Tar Heel Branch, a branch serving the entire state that connects
  • AAUW NC Questions and Answers

Other campuses interested in sponsoring similar programs are encouraged to review the information about the $tart $mart workshops delivered through the AAUW partnership with the WAGE project, wageproject.org and NC resources. See also the information on the AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund Campus Outreach Programs that provide funding up to $750 for campus programs that educate college/university students and faculty about sex discrimination in higher education and the wider workplace. [See also information on a 2008 LAF event at NC Central Univ.]

On Friday, April 3, contacts from campuses across the state gathered at the UNC Chapel Hill Friday Center to hear about options for connecting AAUW to their campuses. This event was hosted by Elmira Mangum, UNC Chapel Hill Senior Associate Provost, AAUW College/University Representative for UNC-CH, and AAUW NC College/University Chair. About 35 attendees representing about a dozen campuses heard more about AAUW and its college/university program and how AAUW membership can benefit faculty, staff and students on campus.

Presentations

1. AAUW Overview - Sheila Bassoppo-Moyo, AAUW NC Membership VP

2. AAUW College/University Partnerships — Elmira Mangum, AAUW NC College/University Chair

3. AAUW Individual Membership Options - Nancy Shoemaker, AAUW NC Past President

4. AAUW Branch Connections — Mary Fran Schickedantz, AAUW NC Past President

5. AAUW Chapel Hill Branch - an example — Kay White, AAUW Chapel Hill President

Links for more information

• AAUW information on College/University partnerships
  • Benefits of Membership
  • Current C/U partners in NC
  • Brochure
• More links for campus info
  • National Conference for College Women Student Leaders
  • Fellowships and grants (4/7/09 presentation at Duke)
  • Campus Action Projects
  • Research reports (handout)
  • Even more links and connections
• Links for individuals
  • Member benefits
  • Join the national organization
  • Join the AAUW Tar Heel Branch -serving all of North Carolina
  • Map of community branches in NC
  • More about AAUW North Carolina: www.aauwnc.org

First, she gave highlights of a booklet produced by AAUW Fremont (CA): From Near Disbandment to Success: The Fremont AAUW Story.

Learn how Fremont, California AAUW devised and implemented a business model to reverse the trend of declining membership. Within two years of applying their model, branch membership increased from 77 to 162.

AAUW NC purchased a copy that you can borrow from Sheila (see contacts) or you can send for your own copy. $20 includes cost of shipping and handling. Make check payable to Fremont AAUW and mail to PO Box 8254, Fremont, CA 94537-8254. Please include your name, branch, address, phone number & e-mail.

Then she covered the highlights of the AAUW Membership VP Toolkit. That was sent in late summer to all branch Membeship VPs and includes the 2008 Leadership DVD and accompanying CD of resources. It also includes a special membership vp CD of resources. The documents and information are, of course, almost all on www.aauw.org, but if you’d like to see their arrangement as presented to the memership vps, they’ve been uploaded to the AAUW NC member center. Start at this table of contents page (login as you would to view the AAUW NC branch state rosters).

Here are the slides:

Again, if you have questions, please contact Sheila (contacts)

RSS for AAUW Webmanagers

Wednesday, October 15
8 p.m - 9:30 p.m

This site reposts AAUW headlines (see the right sidebar), and some of the branch sites (including Raleigh and Winston-Salem) repost both AAUW and AAUW NC headlines. If you’d like to learn more about RSS and how to use it to share information with other sites, please register for this event: http://www.tinyurl.com/webinar-rss.

For more information, see http://wiki.bbvx.org/index.php?title=Webinar:_RSS.

• Presentation as a flash movie (should work for everyone)
• Presentation as a PowerPoint file (you’ll need PowerPoint or the free PPT viewer)
• Presentation as a PDF (six slides per page)

At the AAUW NC 2008 Summer Meeting, Carolyn Garfein, member of the AAUW Educational Foundation board, spoke to us about recent changes in AAUW and the proposed changes for the organization once AAUW (the membership organization) and the Educational Foundation (the charitable arm) combine their assets and activities as of July 1, 2009 (as voted at the 2007 national convention).

The proposed bylaws were distributed by e-mail to AAUW leaders earlier in the month, and AAUW NC President, Millie Hoffler-Foushee printed copies for the attendees at the meeting. See AAUW Indiana for the text of the proposed bylaws and an explanatory memo

Handouts for Carolyn’s presentation

If you’d like to show the info to a group (rather than just distribute the handouts and/or the proposed bylaws or other information) here are Carolyn’s slides -

• Presentation as a flash movie (should work for everyone)
• Presentation as a PowerPoint file (you’ll need PowerPoint or the free PPT viewer)
• Presentation as a PDF (six slides per page)

For more information on the changes, see AAUW Briefing Series (in the www.aauw.org Member Center).

Equity is still an issue!

In AAUW, we advance equity for women and girls through:

1. Research on equity issues that impact the lives of women and girls and which resonate with members of the community.
2. Education for ourselves on those issues so we can discover the opportunities for us to fight those inequities, while we also encourage education on all fronts as the best strategy to decrease inequity overall
3. Advocacy to carry out what we learn and “shape the future” with work in our schools, our legislatures, courts and our communities.

Our current theme is Education as the Gateway to Women’s Economic Security which shapes our work and informs our projects. Many of those are based on pay equity.

Pay Equity

In the spring of 2007, we published Behind the Pay Gap which reports that just one year out of college, women working full time already earn less than their male colleagues, even when they work in the same field. Ten years after graduation, the pay gap widens. At the conference we had some copies of the executive summary, and review copies of the full report. You can download those here:

• 12-page Executive Summary of Behind the Pay Gap
• Download Behind the Pay Gap

To learn more about pay equity and how you can combat it, check these resources

• Request download link for Pay Equity Resource Kit.
• Additional Pay Equity information from aauw.org

Other Reports and Resource Kits

The following additional kits were also on display at the conference

• Download Where the Girls Are, the Spring 2008 report on girls’ educational achievement
  Policy recommendations
• Request download link for Woman-to-Woman Voter Turnout Guide
  Updated for 2008, this is a key reference for your GOTV efforts
• Request download link for Affirmative Action Resource Kit
  Additional Affirmative Action information from aauw.org
• Request download link for Title IX Resource Kit
  Additional Title IX information from aauw.org
• Download Young Advocates Toolkit from ncchild.org
  Additional information on using the toolkit from aauwnc.org

Please contact info@aauwnc.org if you’d like to partner with AAUW members in NC to make use of those kits, but feel free to use the information with your stakeholders.

Additional Resources

• All AAUW Research Reports, including series on sexual harassment, women in the workplace, equity issues on campuses, and gender equity in the schools. The Educational Foundation reports began in 1991-1992 with the publication of Shortchanging Girls: Shortchanging America, the groundbreaking research that changed the conversation about girls in the schools.
• More on AAUW Public Policy positions
• and the AAUW
• The AAUW Educational Foundation is the largest source of funding for graduate student women. See www.aauw.org for information on fellowships and grants and our work to end sex discrimination in higher education.

Do you want to learn more?

• Follow AAUW and AAUW NC updates through RSS feeds. [Note that you can “subscribe” to RSS feeds through e-mail using sites like rssfwd.com, but also consider upgrading your web browsing practices to use an RSS reader. See www.aauw.org for an overview. Note that both of these sites allow you to subscribe to just a subset of the news. AAUW NC’s public policy feed and AAUW’s equity issues and legislative alerts feeds may be of particular interest.
• Join us! Members have access to members-only resources like a series of e-mail lists and
  • the weekly Washington Update
  • downloads available only to members - for example, the branch public policy chair resource guide
  By joining AAUW,
  you belong to a community that
  breaks through educational and economic barriers
  so that all women have a fair chance.

  For information on joining AAUW NC or a branch in North Carolina, please contact info@aauwnc.org.

AAUW Overview

If you have time, please watch this 6.5 minute video for more about AAUW. Everyone speaking is an AAUW member:

Here are the handouts for that meeting:

• Overview
  • The branch as a bookshelf
  • Picture of the mission
• Samples of mission in action — see more at www.aauw.org
  • Advocacy: Pay Equity ideas (more at www.aauw.org)
  • Education: National Girls Collaborative Project - see ngcproject.org and and the Science House
  • National Conference for College Women Student Leaders (more at nccwsl.org)
  • Research: History of Eleanor Roosevelt Fund publications
• Other handouts
  • Executive Summary of “Title IX at 35″ (full report)
  • NC Women United report card on 2007 legislative session (more at ncwu.org)
• Staying in the loop
  • Comparing AAUW NC and AAUW Asheville web sites (www.aauwnc.org, asheville.aauwnc.org)
  • Sample AAUW NC e-newsletters: state, national (current editions)