SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – Six African American women college professors were honored for their commitment to higher education on Thursday night.
The African Female Professors Award Association held it’s first-ever award ceremony Thursday night, honoring professors from multiple local colleges.
Traci Gaynor decided to organize this event while completing her master’s degree, where she saw how few African American women professors there are.
“As an African American woman in the classroom settings and going from class to class I realized that there weren’t very many African American professors,” Gaynor told 22News. “That led me to do some research and then I found some statistics and then I began to think about how I can draw attention to this, i don’t want to call it a deficit, but this under representative of a group of women in higher ed.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, black women hold only one percent of the full-time faculty roles on college campuses.
