Last week I posted about the AHA's outrageous decision not to allow a perfectly good panel to proceed at its annual meeting unless the organizer could locate a woman--some woman, any woman--to be part of the panel. Said woman (not here named to underscore the fact that her importance in this scenario is merely as a representative of her sex) has been located, and is participating only to enable her colleagues to move ahead with their panel; she's not happy about the AHA's policy, and has even joked that she might wear a t-shirt that reads "token" to the panel.

Now IHE reports that when asked about the AHA policy, that organization's illustrious president--a woman--did not die of embarrassment, rapidly backpedal, or accuse an anonymous staff member of overzealousness that the organization cannot condone. Instead, she defended the policy:

Barbara Weinstein, a professor of history at New York University who is the AHA's current president, says that's a fair question, but she also thinks the policy has done a lot of good and that those who complain that they can't find women (or men) for panels generally aren't looking hard enough.

A generation or so ago, she said, AHA sessions were full of panels of only men, even as women were doing important work. The rule, she said, "has had a healthy impact." Serving on program committees, Weinstein said that she has heard complaints over the years from scholars who say that because of their specialties, "there are no women who study X," and she said that is almost always "an imagined problem." Even if many AHA panels today would end up with at least one man or one woman--without any rule requiring that--some fields may be likely to be missing female voices.

She said, for example, that many women these days are doing military history, although they may be doing it in ways different from what the field has traditionally supported, and so may not come instantly to mind when people are organizing such panels. While the AHA makes gender a rule, it encourages other forms of intellectual diversity as well, Weinstein said. She's a scholar of Latin American history and said that when she has reviewed panel proposals, she has been struck by the number of themes that relate broadly to the world but feature only perspectives from American or European history.

Weinstein stressed that the association is an equal opportunity enforcer of its gender policy. She remembered a program committee telling organizers of a panel on the history of menstruation, proposed featuring only female scholars, that they needed to add a man. They did and the panel was better for it, Weinstein said. She was recently at a meeting where a female scholar working on a panel on the history of domestic service wondered aloud "where am I going to find a man" doing such work, and a man in the group volunteered that in fact he was studying that topic and would love to help. Such incidents, Weinstein said, suggest the positive impact of the rule.

At the same time, she said she hoped that conference organizers would look for "good faith efforts," and not apply rules rigidly. In addition, she said that with women not only entering the profession but leading the association, "perhaps there is no longer a need for the rule." She said she was "perfectly willing to revisit" the question, but that because this was official AHA policy, it would need to go through association governance and wasn't something she as president could simply change.

Weinstein has paid lip service to the idea that this policy may need to be revisited by the AHA. But words are cheap. Perhaps, in the spirit of democracy, AHA members could vote on whether they want to retain this policy. If they are qualified to take stands on foreign policy, surely they are qualified to decide this.