Every semester Assistant Professor in the social work department Deanna Durham teaches a class called Race and Gender. In this class, the big project that everyone must complete is something called a social change project, where you form a group in the class, tackle a social issue you see on campus, and try to fix it or improve it. On Mar 22nd, one of these social change projects started to go into motion. This group is made up of Natalie Ladd, a senior; Meredith Lehman, a junior; Evelyn Shenk, a senior; and Lindsey White, a senior. They chose their social change project to be creating a panel of women in positions of leadership at EMU and asking them questions about how it is to be a woman in a position of leadership. Lehman said that, “we think it is important to highlight women in leadership for other people to model after.” They decided to work together as a group because they had similar topics. Lehman was wanting to do a project to highlight women in leadership and White wanted to do a project that promoted feminism. So they decided to combine those two ideas into one idea by making the women in the leadership panel. Lehman said “it was not that hard to organize this, because between the four of us we know enough about campus that we were able to get the free common grounds and the convocation point easily.”

This panel was made up of five people and one empty chair. The five were President Susan Schultz Huxman, associate professor of education Kathy Evans, athletics director Carrie Bert, Mayor Deanna Reed, School of Science, engineering, art, and nursing, Tara Kishbaugh, and lastly, Director of Multicultural Student Services Celeste Thomas. Evans said that the empty chair was for all the Transgender women that were not on this panel and did not have a voice here at EMU. It was very powerful to see these women sitting up there and telling their stories of how they have pushed through hardships and adversity to get to where they are today. These five talked about how they have been told to be quiet or how they have had to work extra hard than the men in their fields to get to where they are today. Bert said, “the hardest thing for me to unlearn was that doing it as well as the guys is not a good comparison. I like it when people tell me I throw like a girl; that means I am doing something right.” One last quote from the panel was something that was said by mayor Reed: “You don’t have to please everyone because some people you just aren’t going to please.”