Kate Clancy

@kateclancy.bsky.social

20470 Followers 1849 Following

Feminist science professor at the University of Illinois. Labor organizer. Author of PERIOD. Out 8/26: PREGNANCY INTERRUPTED: The Science and Stories of How Pregnancies Really End. Settler, queer. 🍉 Pre-order here! http://bit.ly/4y4DMkB

Photograph of a displaying peacock with the text "I just rolled all 100 of my ass eyes"
What are faculty doing with their time when they aren’t teaching? FSSE data show that faculty report spending 40 to 57 percent of their time teaching. Although they teach less, tenured and tenure-track faculty members actually work around 15 percent longer hours compared to their nontenure-track peers and devote more time to both research and to service.
Figure from The Faculty Workload Myth article in the Chronicle showing that since 2000 faculty salaries have become a lower and lower portion of most four year public university budgets. We are around 13% of the budget at this point.
Third, faculty salaries are falling even if we statistically control for faculty rank and institution. By our analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data, tenured and tenure-track salaries are down 10 percent in real terms since 2016 and are lower today than they were in 2002; nontenured faculty salaries are down 4 percent since 2016 and are at 2002 levels today. To put this plainly: Suppose sharply increased teaching loads enabled institutions to cut one out of every seven full-time faculty. (That’s roughly what we saw last year in severe cuts announced at West Virginia, Western Illinois, and St. Cloud State Universities.) The associated savings in salary and benefits even through such drastic action would amount to less than 2.5 percent of total institutional expenditures for the typical university. The upshot? If you think higher education has a cost problem, squeezing more teaching out of faculty is not the first place you should look.
Enter hormonal contraception. When young people, whose brains are in a critical period where they are responding to and being organized by hormonal exposures, are prescribed hormonal contraception, they are replacing whatever hormonal exposures come from their endogenous (from within) hormones with an exogenous (from without) one. Exogenous, synthetic hormones may have a greater binding affinity – this means they can exert stronger effects via hormone receptors. For a full-grown person not in a critical transition period, this may not matter. For a young person whose hormonal exposures are more variable (because of typical experiences of infrequent menstrual cycles, lower hormone concentrations, and anovulation) this could lead to significant differences in terms of how their tissues and organs differentiate and learn to respond to hormones. Two big points to make here: First, there are many reasons a young person (and their caregiver) may be considering a hormonal treatment at this age: dysmenorrhea (painful periods) are very common, they may already be developing endometriosis, they may need a less easy-to-spot form of contraception, they may have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, they may be non-binary or trans – and a hundred other possibilities. Some of these are very, very important for quality of life, some are suicide prevention. There are a lot of phenomena out there where a hormonal treatment is the only feasible option, and the alternative is terrible. Second, we need not fear change. That is, many, many factors influence our endogenous hormones and therefore also have reorganizing effects on the adolescent brain, from exercise to schooling to pandemics to authoritarian regimes to family separation to climate change to inciting joy. And so, we need not fear hormonal treatments simply because they influence the brain in some way. What we need to ask is, under certain circumstances and for certain bodies, are these treatment exposures influencing the brai…
A photograph of a lactation room slash electrical closet in a research institute where I gave a talk a few years back
Today I’ll be arguing that Title IX and Title VI are legalistic mechanisms that create a sense of action, give sensitive information to people in power, but in the end do nothing to resolve issues of sexual misconduct or race-based discrimination. What’s remarkable to me is how they each manage to do this in effectively opposite ways: with Title IX in creating an atmosphere of fear to report, and in Title VI creating an atmosphere of fear to be reported. Complainants in Title IX processes are often additionally victims of social and professional retaliation, professional and educational consequences, and institutional betrayal. Respondents in Title VI processes are often additionally victims of social media campaigns and doxxing, professional consequences, and institutional betrayal. It’s a lose-lose situation.
Picture a woman trying to do work and to enter into equal and satisfying relationships with other people—when she feels physically weak because she has never tried to be strong; when she drains her energy trying to change her face, her figure, her hair, her smells, to match some ideal norm set by magazines, movies, and TV; when she feels confused and ashamed of the menstrual blood that every month appears from some dark place in her body; when her internal body processes are a mystery to her and surface only to cause her trouble (an unplanned pregnancy, or cervical cancer); when she does not understand nor enjoy sex and concentrates her sexual drives into aimless romantic fantasies, perverting and misusing a potential energy because she has been brought up to deny it. (Preface to Our Bodies, Ourselves 1973; emphasis added)
Within months, Flora became pregnant again as a result of the repeated sexual violence. (Flora is not her real name — we’re protecting her identity owing to safety concerns. Our account of her experience is based on legal documents The Cut reviewed and interviews with her legal team; The Guardian was the first outlet to report her story.) She gave birth to her second child and, in early 2025, was able to escape her alleged trafficker with the help of a local nonprofit organization. Flora fled to the DMV and took refuge in a church. The man then allegedly stalked her, threatening to report her to immigration authorities and take her children away; Flora obtained a restraining order against him and was able to connect with the nonprofit Human Trafficking Legal Center for assistance. On January 30, the Center helped her report her alleged trafficker to federal authorities. On the same day, the unthinkable happened: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Flora at a routine check-in appointment and shipped her 1,200 miles away to a detention center in Louisiana, separating her from her 4-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter.
The cover of the book Pregnancy Interrupted: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End by Kate Clancy. Features a zoomed in ultrasound image of an empty gestational sac as the background, with the book title in a grayish pink color in the foreground. This book will make you sad and angry and happy so I think you should read it.
Last year, I spearheaded a survey and interview research project on the experiences of scientists at field sites. Over sixty percent of the respondents had been sexually harassed, and twenty percent had been sexually assaulted. Sexual predation was only the beginning of what I and my colleagues uncovered: study respondents reported psychological and physical abuses, like being forced to work late into the day without being told when they could head back to camp, not being allowed to urinate, verbal threats and bullying, and being denied food. The majority of perpetrators are fellow scientists senior to the target of abuse, the target themselves usually a female graduate student. Since we started analyzing these data, I haven’t been able to read a single empirical science paper without wondering on whose backs, via whose exploitation, that research was conducted.
A photograph of a few Yale retirees speaking at a press conference after occupying a building because they are fucking badass. Early 2000s, New Haven CT.
Jesse Jackson, I think in 2003 not 2005, speaking to a crowd at a rally in New Haven CT.
Photograph of a rally in New Haven CT somewhere around 2005. A crowd in the foreground, Jesse Jackson maybe ten to fifteen feet from the photographer (me). If I remember correctly he participated in a rally and spoke.
Screenshot indicating that there are 7558 people in line ahead of me to sign up for the NYC Hyrox
Photo of an email with information about the NYC Hyrox 2026, with access code information scribbled out.
Small piece of cardboard wrapped in plastic where the plastic reads UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE, WE CARE, Dear Postal Customer, We sincerely regret the damage to your mail during handling by the Postal Service. We hope this incident did not inconvenience you. We realize that your mail is important to you and that you have every right to expect it to be delivered in good condition....(there's more but it doesn't really matter)... Please accept our apologies. Sincerely, Your Postmaster
Black medium haired cat closeup with very pink tongue blep
Poster that reads SAVE THE DATE - WEBINAR Addressing Sexual Harassment Against Women in the Tech Sector. 16 December 2025. 8:30-10am EST. Organised by UN Women, ITU, and the Action Coalition on Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality
These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.
With promising results from the US pilot studies, Speizer, who was at Harvard Medical School at the time, submitted a National Cancer Institute grant application that was eventually successful. However, by the time the funding was received in 1974, the follow-up questionnaire was revised to cover a 2-year period and needed to be repiloted. In the second pilot mailing, questionnaires were addressed to 3 groups on the basis of responses from the first pilot: “Doctor, give this to your wife,” “Ms,” and “Mrs.” The worst response came from the “Ms” group. Women who were married and aged 30 to 55 years in 1974 did not like to be called “Ms.” The most important information came from the “Mrs” group, in that a substantial portion of the women in this group reported that they had not seen the initial questionnaire. Their physician husbands had presumably filled out the form for them. We therefore redirected the effort to nurses, because we believed it was important to have a medically sophisticated group of study participants.
Photograph with people blurred from the No Kings March in Urbana, IL. My favorite sign from this image reads "From Palestine to Mexico all the walls have got to go"
Poster for the UIUC Campus Faculty Association Organizing Training happening tomorrow, May 8, 12-1:30pm at the Clark Lounge at the University YMCA. While the focus will be on campus organizing it's for anyone looking to pick up some basic organizing skills.
An image of the audiobook cover of An Immense World Young Readers Edition by Ed Yong, read by Rose Eveleth.
An annoying and highly inaccurate chart looking at ovulation and implantation days where I'm redrawing data from an existing paper to make a point in my upcoming book. The article it's from, which is fantastic, is Mahendru et al 2012 Ultrasound Obstet Gynecol. The data shown in this image are not an accurate representation of the data in the paper. This is a very silly problem.
My name is Kate Clancy, I’m a senator from Anthropology. I also serve on the senate committee for student discipline. I will speak on the connection between the university response to last year’s encampment and the visa revocations now hitting our campus. Last April, brave students and community members stood together to protest Palestinian genocide and work towards divestment. University administration called the cops. The cops initiated physical contact with protestors, and one protestor was pushed to the ground by an officer and ended up concussed. Over the summer, campus administrators worked to revise the campus administrative manual and UIPD spent countless hours coming up with things to charge protestors with. UIPD sent a number of reports to the Office for Student Conflict Resolution, and several students were investigated through the student discipline system in addition to the nine students and community members who still face legal charges. At any point the university could have considered its obligations to academic freedom, the right to protest, the safety of the campus and broader community, and come to different conclusions. They could have contacted OSCR and had disciplinary investigations halted. They could have contacted the UIPD and discouraged additional detective work. They could have spoken to the States Attorney to ask that she drop the charges. Instead the university facilitated punishment and abandoned their students. The university’s actions last year unlocked the door for Trump and his cronies, and they have now blown it open. Students – we don’t know who or how many, or whether there will be more – have had their visas revoked. They must flee the country or risk being taken on the street and detained like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and countless others. (Alt text continued in next post.)
Photograph of Kate and her kids at a rally with the faces of other folks blurred out because she's not a cop
Image of UIUC's statue Alma Mater with a red bar over its mouth. Text reads: BREAK THE SILENCE. BREAK THE FEAR. AN ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK EVENT MONDAY MARCH 24 @ NOON ILLINI PLAZA ON THE QUAD "In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all." -- Mahmoud Khalil, political prisoner
It must be difficult to see all the capaciousness that comes with being queer – all the potential, the joy – and compare it to your own small life, one increasingly defined by a toxic, rigid definition of masculinity that requires aggression, cruelty, and isolation. At the same time, you have to work to be left behind in these moments – to see the possibilities of queer futures as excluding you rather than enjoying all it has to offer in terms of how we understand what it means to be a person, a family, a community.
Screenshot of an email that reads: "Dear Authors, As you may know, the new presidential administration in the United States has issued Executive Orders, including one that impacts foreign aid.  As part of these Executive Orders, USAID-funded projects have received stop work orders. Given the circumstance, we must stop all work on Global Health: Science and Practice. As such, I regret that we will have to postpone processing submitted papers. We know that a lot of work has gone into preparing your paper. Please feel free to take your manuscript elsewhere. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this challenging time.   Sincerely, Natalie Culbertson Managing Editor Global Health: Science and Practice Journal"
A photograph of a redheaded seven year old in a dentist's chair wearing big rubber boots, a sparkly skirt, and hot pink sunglasses.
Screenshot of a portion of the linked newsletter, which reads: When I wrote PERIOD, I wrote it as a feminist science book about the menstrual cycle. What I mean is, people keep trying to fit it into their understanding of what a book about periods should be: a self-help book to tell you how to fix them, or a cultural narrative to make you feel all woo woo about them. It’s a particular kind of sexism that has led us to expect little more than this: a guidebook to make us more palatable to others, or a reminder of how special it is to bleed so that we withstand pain and suffering. If there is anything to “fix” when it comes to our periods it's a completely different set of things: our understanding of what constitutes normal, our relationship to the environment, our recognition of how great it is that our bodies are a flexible system that responds to change rather than acts the same through this crisis and the next. So, that’s not what I wrote. You can check out my Goodreads reviews to find the occasional person with exactly this frustration because this is what we are supposed to feed people when it comes to this topic. I was supposed to tell you what to eat and what exercises to do and what pollutants to avoid to have a nice, healthy, normal cycle. Or, I was supposed to toxic positivity you into submission about our connectedness to mother earth. Instead, PERIOD teaches you about the eugenic histories of both gynecology and anthropology, about the mocking, degrading way we have written about and treated women scientists who had big ideas, about the cultural biases that have led to biased ideas about what periods are even for. Instead of a how-to or woo woo, I hoped to write about how one might think about periods, and from there, how one might think about science and one’s place in the world.
Introduction of JAMA paper that reads Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. More women die from pregnancy associated homicide (while pregnant or in the year after pregnancy) than other causes of maternal mortality such as preeclampsia or hemorrhage.
Introduction of JAMA paper that reads "Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. More women die from pregnancy associated homicide (while pregnant or a year after pregnancy) than other causes of maternal mortality, such as preeclampsia or hemorrhage"
Medium-haired black cat curled up in a sunspot surrounded by the detritus of daily family living - purse, children's shoes, adult shoes, brown delivery bag.
Photograph of my hand holding an empty Reese's pumpkins wrapper
Screenshot of a section of a word document title page that reads "Pregnancy, interrupted: the n..." and is cut off. A few lines below, the words "draft for review."
Photograph of Kate Clancy holding a paperback copy of her book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.
A photograph of flowers picked by a child, in a mason jar, next to a hand drawn banner by the same child reading "I LOVE YOU" with four hearts.
Photograph of Foellinger Hall at the University of Illinois, with two dropped banners. One reads "WE WON'T STOP" and the other reads "UNTIL YOU DIVEST." Part of the encampment is in the foreground and to protect protester identities the hundreds of people gathered for a rally are not shown.
Two more emails with sender's names intentionally obscured. One medical doctor writing me about my book for the fifth time and one e-card from the same address I've been receiving them from for weeks.
A screenshot of four email previews in a row with the sender's name intentionally obscured. You can see previews of the first line of each email.
Photograph of an envelope addressed to Kathryn Clancy and one printout of several anti-trans missives with lots of dramatic underlining and circling.
Photograph of a hand holding the Italian translation of the book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. Cover is blue with a large red drop.
Photo of the title slide of a talk "The big myth" by Naomi Oreskes
Results A total of 487,870 women with singleton (n = 480,010) and twin (n = 7860) pregnancies met the inclusion criteria. The risk of the composite primary outcome, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, and cesarean delivery increased with high maternal BMI in both singleton and twin gestations, but these associations were weaker in twin compared with singleton gestations (association of BMI ≥ 40.0 kg/m2 with primary outcome: aRR = 3.10, 95%-CI 2.96–3.24 in singletons compared with aRR = 1.74, 95%-CI 1.37–2.20 in twins). In singleton pregnancies the risk of preterm birth at < 320/7 weeks increased with maternal BMI, mainly due to an increased risk of provider-initiated preterm birth. In twin gestations, however, underweight (but not overweight or obesity) was associated with the greatest risk of preterm birth at < 32 weeks (aRR 1.67, 95%-CI 1.17–2.37), mainly due to an increased risk of spontaneous preterm birth (aRR 2.10, 95%-CI 1.44–3.08).
A photograph of a six year old redheaded girl hugging a pink neck pillow like it's the best birthday present in the world.
Rough collie dog in profile lightly coated in snowflakes
Person wearing sunglasses where "bitch what the fuck" is reflected in the glasses
A birthday cake with blue icing, the number 44, and "PERIOD" and "K80" written on it so that it kind of looks like the cover of PERIOD: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy
A pile of books with a Nintendo switch on top.
Six people standing in a row and smiling, all holding copies of Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.