Professor Amber VanDerwarker and graduate students Kate Brown, Toni Gonzalez, and Hugh Radde have been featured in The Current for their work in the UCSB Gender Equity Project which produced five papers exploring issues associated with women in archaeology. This project originally stemmed from an odd fact that came about in a graduate seminar Professor Vanderwarker taught in 2016 called "Archaeology of Gender": Although the majority of archaeology graduate students in California are women, roughly 70 percent end up choosing careers in cultural resource management (CRM) over academia. They found contributing reasons to include a presense of sexual harassment in the workplace and lack of female leaders and mentorship (especially a lack of women of color). This has sparked a conversation urging the importance of addressing the inequities faced in the field as well as making a more conscious effort to hire more women and people of color in archaeology.

More about the UCSB Gender Equity Project can be read at the full article here: https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2019/019335/strata-gender-equity