Dissed in the Department: Women of Color Graduate Students Talk about Integrating Sociology

What happens when women of color enter the predominantly white, male world of graduate sociology? In Dissed in the Department, Eric Margolis and Mary Romero give voice to graduate students whose experiences reveal a hidden curriculum of exclusion operating within the very discipline that studies social inequality.

Through in-depth interviews, the article documents how women of color graduate students navigated departments where their presence was simultaneously tokenized and ignored — where faculty mentorship was scarce, where their research interests were dismissed as “not real sociology,” and where the social dynamics of seminars and colloquia reproduced the racial and gender hierarchies the discipline purported to critique.

The findings expose a troubling gap between sociology’s stated commitment to diversity and the lived experiences of those who embody it, raising fundamental questions about who is welcomed in academia and on whose terms.