Leaky Pipelines and Mountain Paths: How Inequality Shapes and Prematurely Ends Academic Archaeology Careers

Discourse on inequities, exclusivity, and the "leaky pipeline" for women and other marginalized people is common in archaeology; however, most scholarly literature on these subjects is quantitative, identifying what trends are occurring but not how they have come to be and what effects they have. My 100 qualitative interviews with academic archaeologists elucidate these processes. In this talk, I use the metaphor of climbing a mountain to examine a variety of forms of inequality in academic archaeology careers and call for change in the discipline to allow people of all identities to participate in the interpretation of the human past.