Leslie Tower, associate professor of Social Work at West Virginia University, is a passionate advocate for policies that support women’s full participation in society.

Following two years of service to the Council on Social Work Education, the sole accrediting agency for social work education in the United States, Tower was named co-chair of the organization’s Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education.

The Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education is a council of the Commission on Diversity and Social and Economic Justice. The council is responsible for the development of educational resources relevant to women’s issues within social work education. They work to eliminate all procedures within academia that hinder the full participation of women, make recommendations to the board on all matters of policy and initiate and coordinate programs and activities related to women in social work education. This leadership position is a two-year commitment.

Tower’s previous work led to this appointment. In 2006, as a member of the WVU Council for Women’s Concerns she was instrumental in founding the Lactation Network, an informal network of WVU employees who were willing to let a nursing mom use their private space to pump.

In 2011, the WVU ADVANCE Center, created through the support of a $3.2 million National Science Foundation Institutional Transformation grant, took over the Lactation Network and designed a model for dedicated lactation rooms, based on the Department of Health and Human Services recommendations. Tower is a co-principal investigator on the ADVANCE grant and co-creator of the new Lactation Support Program.

In August 2012, a formal Lactation Support Program was implemented. The Program offers accessible lactation rooms and reasonable break times. The document stipulates that ”...supervisors should make every reasonable accommodation to support the needs of nursing mothers.” This includes, for example, women in staff positions not being required to clock-out to express milk.

In 2009, Tower conducted a Faculty Campus Climate Survey, which helped build empirical support and later adoption of a procedure she advocated, the WVU Parental Work Assignment Procedure. This procedure allows faculty the flexibility to attend to a newborn or newly adopted child by requesting a modification in duties for one semester without a reduction in salary.

Tower has plans to affect change at the national level of her professional organization. She is working to give appropriate credit to authors of articles presented at the council’s Annual Program Meeting, the premier national meeting in social work education. Under the current policy, only the individuals presenting the paper, versus all who authored it, are named in the conference program. The policy deprives authors unable to attend and present their due credit. Tower reports that it systematically and negatively impacts women because caregiving often impedes women’s ability to travel. She says that her proposed policy change will positively impact women’s careers, as the predominant caregivers in our society.

Tower, along with other WVU faculty members, has already set her sights on improving another care giving barrier faculty often face—managing child and elder care when traveling for professional development. They envision a program that would provide funding to reimburse incremental care giving expenses incurred as a result of research-related travel.

“A family travel program is personally important to me,” Tower said. “I once turned down a paper acceptance to CSWE’s Annual Program Meeting, because I could not afford to bring my husband and nursing baby to Texas for the conference.”

Leslie E. Tower joined the WVU faculty in 2002. She has a dual appointment in the School of Social Work and Department of Public Administration. Tower has published research on women and work, adult learners and violence against women. She created and moderates two parenting listservs for faculty, staff and students and serves on various university level committees, including the WVU Parental Leave Task Force and Faculty Senate Welfare Committee. In recognition of this work, she was named the 2009-10 Mary Catherine Buswell Award recipient. The Buswell award honors a faculty or staff member, or citizen who has provided outstanding service to women at WVU.

For more information, contact Leslie Tower at 304-293-7226 or via e-mail at leslie.tower@mail.wvu.edu.

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