In October 2023, the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, part of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, hosted 70 women scholars from around the country for the 2nd Annual Women in Legislative Studies Conference which spanned two days. This is the largest gathering of female legislative scholars outside the Political Science Association's national conferences.
The Taubman Center was invited to host this year's conference by the founding board of WiLS, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer (Rice University), Eleanor Powell (University of Wisconsin at Madison), Gisela Sin (University of Illinois), and Taubman director Wendy Schiller, a legislative scholar herself, gladly accepted. Othniel Harris, program manager at the Taubman Center, led the team that staffed the conference, including undergraduates Jessica Hinton, Ayla Kim and Emma Stroupe, who worked closely with Ph.D. candidate Emily Elia, lead logistics coordinator for partner institution, Rice University.
Women in Legislative Studies (WiLS) is an organization whose mission is to engage, support, and promote women who study legislative politics. It has grown from a single networking event at a national political science conference to a freestanding organization that hosts research workshops, professionalization seminars and an annual conference where women scholars can receive constructive feedback and support as they navigate the political science profession.
The conference hosted 14 panels focusing on all aspects of legislative politics in the United States and abroad, including career building, elections, campaign finance, communication strategy, and exerting influence in legislatures. Additionally, the conference presented three workshops on how to get articles published, the experiences of female legislative scholars of color, and how to balance research, teaching and service in academic settings.
Lindsey Cormack, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Stevens Institute of Technology noted, "The conference was a weekend of intellectual stimulation and professional camaraderie. It provided a genuine uplift for me and the sessions sparked some ideas for new projects and the opportunity to lay down some potential co-authors pathways."
For many of the attendees at the Women in Legislative Studies conference, it was their first time visiting the Watson Institute, Brown University and Providence and they were impressed with the scope and size of the Watson Institute and the Brown campus more generally. Most of all, they found the conference to be a supportive and productive experience, which provided career advice and mentorship, new pathways for scholarship, and feedback for them to produce publications from their conference papers.