Julia Lynch, UPenn Professor of Political Science

 

127. Julia Lynch

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Julia Lynch

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will, hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Julia Lynch. Julia, welcome to the show.

 

Julia Lynch  00:16

Thanks. Thanks for doing this. Will, this is such a cool enterprise, and I hope you managed to finish it. You know, before we all die, well,

 

Will Bachman  00:26

only take another 30 years, at the rate of one per week. So we are, we are working on it, 120 episodes down. So tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Julia Lynch  00:40

Um, you know, this is not how I had planned to answer this question, but your introduction, which mentioned the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 actually prompted me to think of something, probably one of the spaces where I’ve traveled farthest from where I was in 1992 is um in terms of my identity as a woman, rather than as like any of the other things that I might be um one of my close friends during the time that I was at Harvard was Allison Clark, who was very involved in, like, the Women’s Leadership Conference and stuff like that, and was a really strong feminist, and I just sort of rolled my eyes at her for most time in college, because I was like, how can you worry about, you know, feminism, when there are all these other problems in the world, like poverty and racism and all that stuff is so much worse. And then, lo and behold, I get out into the world and like, find myself trying to make my way in a career. And, you know, as a wife and mother and all of these issues that used to seem so secondary to me, and that I had rolled my eyes and Allison about, um, suddenly became like all consuming, like the way that my career has been structured and impacted by, you know, usually fairly subtle forms of discrimination against the way that my life course has been organized and constrained in some ways, but also, you know, enriched in many other ways by being a mother and by being a wife twice, has just really sort of transformed my view on these things. So anyway, that’s like one part of my trajectory. I would say, in other ways, like professionally, my trajectory has been much more straightforward. I left Harvard, I worked as a secretary for a year, applied for a rotary fellowship, went to Italy, came back, did a PhD in Political Science, which for a gov major. It’s not that surprising, you know, went straight from my PhD into my first job at Penn got tenure. Have been at Penn my entire career. You know, it was sort of very predictable professional trajectory. But, like, I had no idea when I started that, that political science was a profession that was male dominated. I would have to really fight to make my place there for a variety of reasons, one of which was being a woman in a male dominated profession. So yeah, it’s like my very straightforward professional and in some ways personal trajectory too. I married my college boyfriend. We had two children. We were married for 25 years before getting divorced. You know, that was sort of a very predictable and straightforward trajectory too. But you know, I didn’t expect to get divorced. I didn’t expect to be disabled by long COVID At the age of 50, like so on the surface it all seems very placid and like exactly what you would expect, and underneath there have been bumps in the road, as we’ve all experienced, I’m sure, but also, like, more importantly for me, just surprises, like things that I didn’t expect about the way that my life would go, and I’m actually really glad that I’ve had those surprises in what otherwise would just be a really kind of boring life.

 

Will Bachman  04:52

There’s a lot to expand on. A lot of different directions we could go. Sorry, that was a little chaotic. No, are. Lives are chaotic. And that was not really so there was, but there’s many different directions we could go. I’d like to start with what you started with, which was, you know your identity as a woman, and you said your career has been structured and impacted in this male dominated field. Talk to us a bit more about that, expand on, on, on that. Yeah, I

 

Julia Lynch  05:25

think, um, academia is generally viewed as a fairly friendly profession for women, in part because it, in some ways, offers a lot of flexibility. And I think within academia, there’s a view that, you know, it’s really for people of our generation. It was really stem, where women had a problem, and as long as you were not, you know, trying to make your way in STEM, you would be fine. But in fact, at this point. Um, some of the social science disciplines, political science, economics and philosophy too, which I sort of include as a social science, although it’s a humanities technically discipline, um, those are some of the most male dominated areas of the university now, they remain that way despite, you know, big changes in STEM over the course of my career. So certainly, if you wanted to go into astrophysics or, you know, chemistry or something like that. In 1992 you would have been in the minority as a woman. But at this point, those the STEM disciplines, largely because of pressure from the NSF, the National Science Foundation, have really made a lot of efforts and a lot of progress in being more inclusive towards women and the social science disciplines have not so, yeah, so, you know, I just,

 

07:09

I had no

 

Julia Lynch  07:11

idea that like women, would just be held to a different standard than men, systematically and repeatedly when it came to things like, were you going to get tenure, or were you going to get promoted, you know, and until I saw it myself in my own life, I just, like, had no idea. What else like, Can you say more

 

Will Bachman  07:39

about that? That, what? What specifically, what was the different standard?

 

Julia Lynch  07:45

Just so. So if you come up for for tenure in a political science department, you know that typically means you’ve spent six or seven years as an assistant professor, maybe more if you have extended your tenure clock because you had kids, but you can do that whether you’re a man or a woman. And you know, taken, sorry, that’s my dog taking parental meeting

 

Will Bachman  08:13

at 10 o’clock. But pup is pretty worked up about the tenure clock.

 

Julia Lynch  08:18

He doesn’t like it when I move when he’s napping under my desk. Okay, he’s brown cheese. So, yeah, typically you come up for tenure and and there’s some assessment of, like, the amount that you’ve published and the impact that that publication has had, in addition to, you know, some minor consideration of your teaching and service record within the university and also beyond. Like, have you served on any big national committees or anything like that? And just, you know, in the early part of my career, it was like time after time after time, you know, men with, like, really limited qualifications would make it through that bar. And, you know, women with much better qualifications would be discouraged from coming up. Would be told, Well, your case isn’t a slam dunk, maybe you should leave, or they would come up and not make it through so. And I saw this from both sides, you know, I saw it as a junior professor, and then when I was on the other side and able to participate in that decision making, I could see it even more clearly. And just, you know, the kinds of things that people would say in the tenure letters, which are these all important letters your departments solicits from, you know, the best and brightest in your field. And you know, people would refer to female candidates as you know, how nice they were and how cooperative they were, that male candidates would all be brilliant and path breaking. And you know, subsequent research has shown that. Systematic, you know, this this wasn’t just something that I was seeing, but that this is really pervasive, actually, in the tenure and promotion process, in the publication process, you know, women authors tend to get cited less than male authors. You know, even controlling for sort of the quality of the journal, etc, so they’re just all these, like, really, you know, from inside of academia, they seem really big and really obvious. From somebody looking from the outside, they probably seem a lot more subtle. But like, I had somehow always thought that the business world would be where that discrimination would be occurring. But academia, I mean, I was a child of professors like, What could possibly go wrong, you know? And it was just such a shock to realize that the level of discrimination against women that was taking place in the academy, I think, would never have been tolerated in the private sector, in part because, you know, you were losing many of your best people just because They happen to be women, right? Okay,

 

Will Bachman  11:21

wow, that’s so and, and it wasn’t, wasn’t kind of obvious, or it wasn’t as straightforward to as a undergraduate, like, Wow, all my professors are men in political science or in the government. No, because they weren’t. Oh, I see

 

Julia Lynch  11:35

so like, one of the things that happens is the people who you see as a student are the professors who are most out there, most available, you know, making themselves welcoming, like you go to their office hours because they’re not scary. Well, guess who those professors are? Those are the women, and by and large, those women didn’t get tenure. So I had a lot of contact with assistant professors at Harvard who were women, but most of them didn’t get tenure, and so they left, and who were replaced by more young women who would then not get tenure and leave. So it didn’t sort of clock right? Like it just, it didn’t, it didn’t hit me that there were so few tenured women in the department, because the ones who were there and available and teaching classes I was interested in, there were a lot of women.

 

Will Bachman  12:44

So I’m curious, are there any universities that have done a sort of wage labor arbitrage, of saying there’s all these undervalued, you know, like undervalued in the marketplace, female political science professors, we are going to make a rock star department by hoovering up all of those, you know, like female political science rock star professors. And we can even probably, you know, I mean, yeah, so we can get all these, like rock star people who are publishing in top journals but not getting tenure in their departments, like in a competitive marketplace, you might think that’s what would happen, right? What about is that happening in the academic world?

 

Julia Lynch  13:30

So the academic job market is a really weird market, like it doesn’t really behave like a market, so part of it is like huge information asymmetry issues, but so the short answer is that, like on average, the percentage of women in senior faculty positions, so full professor positions in political science has barely budged over the last 30 years. Um, so it’s still it’s about 30%

 

14:11

um, it,

 

Julia Lynch  14:16

I’m sure that there are institutions where that percentage is higher. Political Science is very kind of it’s siloed as a field. So there are four main sub fields. There’s American politics, there’s comparative politics, which is the rest of the world, which is what I do. There’s international relations, which is sort of dominated by security and international organizations like the UN and then there’s political theory, which is kind of look like the philosophy arm of our department. And the representation of women in those four sub fields is very different. So. There are, historically, not very women, not very many women in international relations, more in comparative politics and in political theory. And American politics is sort of in the middle so, so it kind of depends on what your department specializes in, right? Like, if you’re a department that’s heavy in political theory, at this point, you’re probably going to have more women. But if you’re a department that’s heavy in international relations, you’re still probably not going to have very many senior faculty who are women. But I think the most important thing to know about this not very interesting topic for most of the world, is just that women are entering the pipeline. There’s no shortage of PhD applicants who are women. We could easily fill an entire class of, you know, incoming PhD students in the United States, right with highly qualified female candidates. That’s not the issue. The issue is that, for a variety of reasons, they either jump or get pushed off of the tenure track early on in the process and never very few of them make it through to become full professors in political science. So because much of the hiring happens, so you have this sort of market for junior people at the pre tenured stage. And women get those jobs. They just then don’t go on to get tenure if they are tenured, they take longer at the associate tenure sorry, the Associate Professor stage, they can take up to twice as long as men, usually, because they do more service, and they’re not encouraged to come up as quickly as men are. So then, even if they stay on the tenure track, it takes them longer to get to that stage of full professor, and then they spend just shorter percentage of their career at that top rank. So that’s sort of like the typical pattern

 

Will Bachman  17:16

now, just from the outside, yeah, and talking to friends and so forth. In the academia world, it seemed like in particularly in the 2000 10s, in some departments, at least, there was a big push in the 2000 10s to increase diversity, just lays in. A lot of businesses were doing that. Lot of faculty departments were pushing to say, Okay, we need to get more women and minorities like, you know, as as professors. Yeah, curious to hear your take on if you observe that in the world of political science. And was it just given lip service, or were people like, oh, man, we need to hire this and this one, you know, even though they can’t maybe exactly say it, you know, out loud or publish it, like, basically, we need to get a woman in this role, or we need to get a minority in this role, which, you know, because they were trying to, you know, meet the, you know, kind of targets, right, that the university would set. Did you see any of that? And I’m curious, or was it more just kind of, like, they blow it off. And you know,

 

Julia Lynch  18:23

so So our university did encourage us to diversify, certainly at the level of of new hires of assistant professors, and we did, happily, right. I mean, there was a little pushback from some people in the department. There always is right, by the way, it was not the older people in the department, generally speaking, like that was another assumption that I had coming in. Oh, it’s just these old dinosaurs, you know, they’ll, they’ll leave eventually. And then the men who were who, like, came of age in the 70s, they got it right. It was the men who came of age in the 80s and 90s who’ve been the most problematic. Wow, that’s yeah. So, you know, we were children of the Reagan era, right? But anyway, we did. We did. We hired a lot more women and a lot more minorities of various kinds, you know, be they sexual minorities, racial, ethnic, national, you know, we internationalized the faculty quite a lot during that period. And and that was really all to the good. The problem is we didn’t fix the leaks in the pipeline. And so we made a lot of progress at the junior level, but then people would sort of leak out of the pipeline again for the same reasons that they were leaking out before it was, you know, expectations that women would do a lot of service, that they wouldn’t then be rewarded for. You. Know, gendered citation patterns, gendered patterns of specialization, where women tend to do the kind of work in the discipline that is less valued. They’re more likely to do qualitative work. They’re more likely to do work that is on, you know, that is about the experiences of women and minorities, and that work is sort of devalued in the profession. It’s not seen as being as important. And so, you know, all of these sort of various forces that lead people to trickle out of the pipeline are still there, unfortunately, and that’s why you haven’t seen those numbers at the top of the distribution really budge.

 

Will Bachman  20:41

So I saw this one sub stack couple weeks ago. It was about this concept. I don’t know if they invented it, or if we’ve been around for a while of male flight, particularly in academic disciplines, yeah. And it gave this example of some disciplines used to be very heavily male dominated, like sociology, I think was an example. And I think anthropology was an example, and then it had this theory that when the percentage of women was like 10% or 15% or 20% or 25% men would keep going into that discipline. But if women got to be like 40% then there was this tipping point, and men would stop going in. And then very quickly, it transitioned to being a female dominated field, and now with the majority of female of college students being female, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if that happens in your discipline over the course of our lifetimes. You know,

 

Julia Lynch  21:39

I think it will be really interesting. So my father was an archeologist, which is a sub field of anthropology, yeah, and it was a totally male dominated discipline at the time, when he was a professor. And now, like even at Penn, which is, I would say, a fairly conservative institution, as far as you know, changes like of any sort. You know, anthropology is a totally female discipline. Now, I think maybe we have one male professor left. So it’s really, it’s very striking to see that happen. I think it’s interesting that it hasn’t happened yet in political science as a whole, although, you know, if you look at male representation in political institutions in the United States, I guess it’s not that surprising, right? I mean, women have definitely made breakthroughs. And, you know, various other kinds of minorities in the political system have also had important breakthroughs, but it’s still pretty much a white man’s game, right? So, you know, maybe it’s not surprising that the discipline, which is dominated by the study of American politics, you know, looks like what it studies that said, within the discipline of political science, I think there are areas where you’ve seen that kind of male flight. So it used to be that qualitative, comparative historical research, which is kind of what I do. You know, when I went to graduate school, I went to Berkeley, which was the sort of the premier place to do that kind of work. And most of my colleagues in my cohort, which was a very large cohort, there were about, you know, 25 of us. They were mostly men, right? So at that time, at the time I was trained, men, were still doing this kind of work. And in fact, some of the most prominent people in the country doing this kind of work, people like Steve Levitsky and Daniel ziblatt, who wrote how democracy died, right that book that got a lot of play a couple of years ago. They were both, you know, my colleagues in graduate school, and they do the same kind of work that I do, but incoming people there, there are far fewer men who do that now, the sort of qualitative, comparative, historical research has really been become much more female dominated, just in the time that I’ve been in the profession. So there are areas where that’s changed.

 

Will Bachman  24:16

Tell us a bit more in detail about your research. Yeah.

 

Julia Lynch  24:20

So I love my research. I don’t always love being a professor, but there are two things I love, I love teaching, and I love my research. So my research, really, throughout the entirety of my career as a political scientist, has been about the politics of inequality, one way or another. And for people who remember me talking a blue streak in justice class our freshman year, that might not come as a surprise. So I’m working now, and for the last like 10 years, pretty much have been working exclusively on the politics of health inequality. Ways. So why is it that some groups in society are healthier, live longer lives than others, and sort of, what is? What does politics have to do with that? So I work mainly in a comparative perspective. So I was trained as a specialist in Western European politics, and partly that was because I was interested in Europe. I had done my rotary fellowship in Italy. But also it’s because at that time, you couldn’t really study American politics if you do weren’t doing like elections and voting behavior and like Congress, the like formal modeling of congressional committees like that was just what you did if you weren’t in American politics, if you were interested in policy, there wasn’t really room for you in the discipline at that point. So I studied it in Europe, which seemed like, you know, maybe a good comparator for the US. And, yeah, so I have a book coming out in May, which is a book that is written for, actually, a general audience, not for specialists. So like anyone could pick it up and read it, which is called getting better, and it’s about how, essentially what governments need to do in order to really make a dent in the problem of health inequalities, which are driven much more by inequalities in income and social circumstances than they are by inequalities in healthcare. So healthcare is kind of a minor contributor to health inequalities, the big contributors are things like poverty inequality, racial discrimination, stuff like that. So we look at four cases in this book, the US during the Great Society, Brazil, during the period of democratization. German reunification in the early 90s and the English national health inequality strategy in the sort of the decade from 1997 to 2010 basically, these are all examples of periods of time when the government actually made pretty big strides in terms of reducing health inequalities, which resulted, not only in fairer societies, but also in healthier, less expensive societies, which is also good. And unfortunately, we found that in all four of these cases there was then kind of a retrenchment and kind of a return, a return to the status quo ante, of more inequality, more social inequality, and hence more health inequalities. But we talk in the book about how you might be able to avoid that. So this is kind of an example of of some of the work that I do.

 

Will Bachman  28:05

Okay, I got a very simple question about health inequality. Tell me, should be super easy to answer. You hear that the United States has like a lower life expectancy than Europe, right? But we’re actually wealthier than Europe, and we spend more money per capita on health care than Europe, even though we don’t have sort of single pay or whatever, like net we spend more money in health care. So why is that the case? Is it because we have worse diet and people are Is it because we don’t exercise enough, or what is the story?

 

Julia Lynch  28:42

So the story is simple question, we, on average, have lower life expectancy because people who are lower down in the social hierarchy in the US have much worse life expectancy than people in Europe, and the reason for that is we have a lot more poverty we have. And poverty is not only bad for health, because it prevents you from, you know, buying fresh vegetables, right? Because fresh vegetables are expensive, um, and it means you can’t have a membership at a gym, and you might be working three jobs to try to make ends meet, and you don’t have a lot of time to, like, get out there and take a two hour walk every day, right? Like, it’s partly because poverty has kind of a direct impact on these behavioral things that we think, you know, are important for health, but it’s also because poverty causes stress, and stress shortens the part of our chromosomes that is responsible for making sure. Sure that we don’t age too quickly. And so the stress mechanism, the the chronic stress when you have no control over your situation, is really, really bad for health, and it is the reason why people who are poor and people who are also subject to other to other forms of discrimination, like, you know, daily kind of racial discrimination also causes the same kind of chronic stress those people in our society tend to live less healthy, shorter lives, and we have so many people in that circumstance in the United States, that it brings our average life expectancy down big time, as compared to societies in Europe where there’s less poverty, where there are fewer people who are subject to, you know, daily racism because there are fewer people of color living in These societies, but also because, like, the labor market is more heavily regulated, and so you can’t discriminate against people of color in the same way, right? So it’s a, it’s a big complex of policy decisions that we have made and then also not made, like the decision to really not do anything about poverty in this country, particularly child poverty, because these experiences accumulate over a lifetime. So if you start your life, or even your prenatal life, in poverty, your health outcomes are much worse than they are if you don’t right. So it’s a there are many, many policy decisions that we make, and also political decisions like, are we going to include people and allow them to have a voice in politics? This too has like a direct association with health. So there are lots of reasons why the US does poorly on these metrics, despite spending a lot on health care, but most of them come down to sort of political and policy decisions that we have made about choosing not to deal with inequality in the way that Most European societies have.

 

Will Bachman  32:18

Okay, so listeners, pre orders help tremendously, and we will include a link in the show notes to getting better the policy,

 

Julia Lynch  32:28

well, it’s free. Oh, it’s open access. Open

 

Will Bachman  32:33

Access. Well, there you can buy a paperback version on Amazon right now you can pre order it. So this is Wait, this is gonna be a free access book. Say, explain that. Tell us a little bit more about that. So

 

Julia Lynch  32:44

two of my collaborators for this book were an author team of three who like working together. But two of my collaborators are from the UK, and the sort of scientific infrastructure in Europe demands that if you receive funding from a European funding agency, you have to make your work open access, open openly accessible to the public. It was funded by taxpayer money so taxpayers should be able to see the products. So we used grant money to pay for the publisher, which is Bristol University Press, to make the book open access. So free to download, so

 

Will Bachman  33:26

free to download. So if you want a Kindle version, it is free. And if you’d like to get a paperback version, you can buy it. You pay 2250, on Amazon right now, so, but that will include a link in the show notes. And addition to Amazon, is there are some other places where people can get the get the book,

 

Julia Lynch  33:44

yeah, so, so I usually just send people to the Bristol University Press website, um, and if you’re ordering it from the US, that will usually bring you to an aggregator in the Us who who sells academic imprints from other countries. You could also order it through your local bookstore. They’re usually happy to order stuff for you.

 

Will Bachman  34:07

There you go. Yes, support your local bookstore. I love that. So I wanted to kind of just return to remark that you said earlier, and feel free to just say, let’s move on. But you said that you were surprised to get divorced after 25 years. I don’t want to pry and to the that your personal affairs. But do you want to share anything with that about, you know, lessons learned, or tips for the rest of us, or anything about that? You know,

 

Julia Lynch  34:39

I should have listened to my former husband, who came to the conclusion long before I did that it just wasn’t going to work anymore. And yet, I think both of us felt like we kind of wanted to stick it out for the kids and but along, you know. In those last 10 years of the marriage, where we were kind of sticking it out for the kids, it just was. It became so clear to me that a it wasn’t doing the kids any favors to kind of see their parents living like a lie, basically, like, Why? Why would I want that for them? Why would I want to model that for them? I didn’t. So in retrospect, I think we should have just ripped the band aid off. But you know, lots of things are clear in retrospect, right? But you know the upside of waiting and waiting until I did to actually, you know, separate our households and all of that is that, you know, the timing was right to meet my wonderful current husband. And so I feel like my my second act is going great, and I don’t really have any complaints about my first act either. I got two wonderful children and lots of dogs, and, you know, a lifelong friend in my former husband, so I can’t really complain about either.

 

Will Bachman  36:16

Congratulations on your second act. Was tell us about, what did it feel like to think about, oh, do I want to do this again? And, oh, my god,

 

Julia Lynch  36:27

yeah, I don’t, like a lot of people have asked me, you know, why don’t you get married again once enough? And I think, you know, particularly for a lot of women who’ve been through, like raising kids, and, you know, just taking care of lots of things, like, why would you want to do that again? I think a lot of a lot of women really want their freedom after having been through that experience. I think part of it is that my former husband was a very equal partner in raising kids, and, you know, was relatively accommodating of my career and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I maybe didn’t feel that need to, like, be free, that some other people feel, um, but you know, you’re in love, right? You fall in love and like crazy things happen. So

 

Will Bachman  37:24

outside of professoring and and, you know, just that family life, anything else about what you have going on in your life, you know, books, cultural consumption, media, diet, exercise, any travels that you would like to tell us about outside of being a professor?

 

Julia Lynch  37:45

Well, at the moment, I’m Doom scrolling way too much, and partly that’s because I’m about to leave for Europe to do field work for my next project, which is traveling to Europe for work has been a pretty constant theme of my career, which has been great, and I consider myself so privileged to be able to get like somebody else, to pay for this. It’s amazing, but I am not singing with my choir, so one of the like fixed points in my life, over the last 20 years, has been a small women’s choir that I sing with. These are church ladies, lesbians, lesbian church ladies, fellow professors, older. Women, like it’s just this amazing group of people who I would never meet in my ordinary life, and somehow we all just get together and laugh so so hard every Tuesday night. And for me, you know, having been an orchestral musician for a long time, I played semi professionally in graduate school, you know, to make money. I just once I had kids in a full time job, I just couldn’t play french horn anymore. And so for me, making music in this new way has been really, really fun.

 

Will Bachman  39:21

Okay, I’m so glad you brought this up, semi professional musician to make money in graduate school. Yeah, tell us a bit about that.

 

Julia Lynch  39:30

Well, I played French horn with the Harvard Radcliffe orchestra for four years, and, you know, the Lowell House opera, and did a lot of gigging in college, like, you know, for weddings and stuff like that. But when I moved out to the West Coast for graduate school, it turned out that Sara Jobin, who was, I think, a year ahead of us, was. Was she was a conductor, and I knew her from Lowell House opera and that kind of stuff. And she had a conducting gig in the East Bay, like the Dublin symphony or something like that. And she would call me in to play for so that was a nice little, nice little side gig. And also I did some weddings and, you know, stuff like that.

 

Will Bachman  40:24

With this orchestra, who are you performing for?

 

Julia Lynch  40:28

It was a community orchestra, like it was a semi professional orchestra, you know, it was mostly people who were not their main gig. Wasn’t being a full time musician somewhere, you know, it was probably mostly people like me, who were, you know, spent a lot of time making music, as you know, college students and whatever, but like didn’t go on to become professional music musicians, but still wanted to play. Okay,

 

Will Bachman  40:54

so if I interview another person for this show who helped pay for their political science degree by gigging on the French horn, that would be, I would be amazed you. I think

 

Speaker 1  41:07

you’re probably not gonna find one another one of those gigging on the French horn to make some extra cash. Oh, you should

 

Julia Lynch  41:15

ask Ruth McKenzie, who was in our class, was also a French horn player. She played a she played an HRO with me, and I’m not sure what she’s gone on to do with her life, but you might ask her

 

Speaker 1  41:28

this whole underworld of French horn gig

 

Julia Lynch  41:31

economy people, right? Well, there are a lot of French horn players. So where’s the Uber

 

Will Bachman  41:36

for French horn players?

 

Julia Lynch  41:38

Yeah, exactly.

 

Will Bachman  41:41

Okay. So, wow, that’s very cool. So you and who does your women’s choir perform for is you just get together and sing together? Do you go to play concerts or

 

Julia Lynch  41:53

so we have concerts a few times a year. It started out really mostly being just friends and family. But we’ve kind of outgrown our performance spaces. They can, like the audiences, just keep getting better and bigger. I think we’re pretty good, actually. And then we also play gigs, like at the Philadelphia free library for Women’s History Month, or, you know, stuff like that, like local the goal of the choir is to sort of perform music written by women. So most of what we do is is female composers, very often contemporary female composers. So we, you know, we’ll do a Women’s History Month, and we often have a concert around elections to, you know, just encourage people to get out and vote.

 

Will Bachman  42:44

I’ve heard, I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard about research that suggests particularly when, well, people when, either when people dance together in a group, or when people sing together, particularly it does some kind of aligning your brain waves or your emotional like, like people very much feel this connection when when humans dance together or sing together. Have you experienced that? Some tell us a bit about that.

 

Julia Lynch  43:14

So I’ve definitely read that research, and I think it’s fascinating. You know, I certainly experienced that as an orchestral musician like you’re in a group of like 110 115 people, and you’re all kind of breathing together and moving together with the music. And it’s a really powerful experience in this smaller group of women, like you can’t feel sort of the whole room breathe in the same way that a symphony orchestra does, but like there’s no reason why all of us should be like these women, if anything happened to me, they would be the first ones on the doorstep with a casserole. No question, right? And there’s just something about the bond that you create with each other when you’re, you know, making music together, I guess I don’t know. I mean, I think engaging in any form of community is really powerful. I mean, whether it’s going to, you know, a church or synagogue or mosque or, you know, belonging to a running club, like whatever it is that you do, right? I think these, these acts of engaging in community, they’re so rare for us as adults, and then especially in this era that we live in, where we’re, you know, we’re all attached to our phones all the time. It’s so rare to have these periods of time in our life when we put down the phone and engage with other people, just as people. And I think that is a really powerful experience, regardless of whether you’re singing your. Making music or doing something else.

 

Will Bachman  45:03

Julia, are there any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you?

 

Julia Lynch  45:11

Well, I mean that justice class freshman year was pretty wild. I had a nickname, which I only learned about somewhat later. I apparently I was the Justice queen. That was my nickname, because I would actually get up and talk class of 750, people, um, and there was something about that that just like, scratched my brain in the right way. And so I went on to take a bunch of other political theory classes as an undergrad, and, you know, became a gov major. So I think, you know, that’s probably the class that started it all. But one of the things that’s been really nice about kind of going on in the same profession that I was an undergrad in is many of the people who I knew as my professors have since become my friends and colleagues, and so that’s that’s like a really special experience. I remember taking a class on the welfare state in the United States, which is, you know, very close to my current research interests. And that was taught by Theda Skocpol and Margaret Weir, well, you know, Margie was on my dissertation committee. She is someone who I’m in regular contact with. I send her my students when they need mentoring, like, you know, you end up forming these long term relationships with people who were, you know, such inspirations. So that’s pretty cool.

 

Will Bachman  46:55

That’s awesome. Julia, where can listeners find you online if they want to learn more about your upcoming book and your research? Blue Sky, okay. What’s your handle there? Oh, God,

 

Julia Lynch  47:10

I don’t even know. Hang on.

 

Will Bachman  47:13

Oh, yeah, we are doing some real time research. Listeners, real

 

Julia Lynch  47:17

time research profile. It is at jaylenge 13, dot B sky, dot social. All

 

Will Bachman  47:26

right, we will include that link in the show notes. Julia, thank you so much for joining today. This

 

Julia Lynch  47:33

has been a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it. Will you.