The purpose of this session is two-fold. First, we wish to introduce the SFA OWLE (Organization for Women’s Leadership and Equity), the newly created professional women’s organization, to interested members of our campus community. Second, we wish to share experiences that we believe are relevant to others on our campus, in our community, and at other institutions, who might seek to create organizations through which to advocate for the unique needs of their marginalized or underrepresented group. To that end, this session will include a panel of female employees at SFA who have worked for more than a year to plan for, create, and implement a professional women’s organization for our campus. The panel will begin the session by sharing the reasons why a professional women’s organization is needed on our campus (as well as many similar institutions nationwide) and will describe the steps taken to create the organization. The committees constituted in the organization’s by-laws reflect the challenges faced by women in academia. We will share challenges we faced as we sought to create an organization that would provide support to women of differing types of employment (e.g., both staff and faculty), from different academic disciplines and areas of the university, in different stages of their personal and professional lives, and from diverse positionalities (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, parenthood status, etc.). We will also identify some of the successes our organization has achieved in its early stages
