From Women-Staffed to Women-Led: Gender and Leadership in Academic Libraries, 1974-2018.

This article reviews post-1974 scholarly literature on women’s leadership in academic libraries, with the emphasis on the United States. The purpose of this synthesis is to highlight research areas and themes that have significantly expanded the profession’s knowledge about gender and its impact at the top administrative level. The article starts with a brief overview of theories of gender and leadership before tracing scholarship on the gendered career patterns singled out in Schiller’s work (1974). The article then focuses on additional issues related to gender and library administration, including leadership styles, perceptions of differences between male and female leaders, and the lack of diversity among academic library women directors

Leveraging ligand affinity and properties: discovery of novel benzamide-type cereblon binders for the design of PROTACs

Immunomodulatory imide drugs (IMiDs) such as thalidomide, pomalidomide, and lenalidomide are the most common cereblon (CRBN) recruiters in proteolysis-targeting chimera (PROTAC) design. However, these CRBN ligands induce the degradation of IMiD neosubstrates and are inherently unstable, degrading hydrolytically under moderate conditions. In this work, we simultaneously optimized physiochemical properties, stability, on-target affinity, and off-target neosubstrate modulation features to develop novel nonphthalimide CRBN binders. These efforts led to the discovery of conformationally locked benzamide-type derivatives that replicate the interactions of the natural CRBN degron, exhibit enhanced chemical stability, and display a favorable selectivity profile in terms of neosubstrate recruitment. The utility of the most potent ligands was demonstrated by their transformation into potent degraders of BRD4 and HDAC6 that outperform previously described reference PROTACs. Together with their significantly decreased neomorphic ligase activity on IKZF1/3 and SALL4, these ligands provide opportunities for the design of highly selective and potent chemically inert proximity-inducing compounds

The Right to a Job, the Right Types of Projects: Employment Guarantee Policies from a Gender Perspective

There is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide jobs while creating public assets. In addition to physical infrastructure, an area that has immense potential to create much-needed jobs is that of social service delivery and social infrastructure. While unemployment and enforced idleness persist, existing time-use survey data reveal that people around the worldespecially women and childrenspend long hours performing unpaid work. This work includes not only household maintenance and care provisioning for family members and communities, but also time spent that helps fill public infrastructural gapsfor example, in the energy, health, and education sectors. This paper suggests that, by bringing together public job creation, on the one hand, and unpaid work, on the other, well-designed employment guarantee policies can promote job creation, gender equality, and pro-poor development