VCU news

By Joan Tupponce

Paola Roldan’s interest in gender identity issues stems from her experience eight years ago as a faculty member in the economics department at Universidad del Norte in Colombia where she was part of the team that designed public policy regarding women's empowerment in the Colombian Caribbean region.

“I conducted in-depth interviews with cisgender and transgender women to understand their struggles,” said Roldan, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work.

After observing transgender women’s experiences of violence, discrimination and social and internal stigmas, she realized she wanted “to devote my career to promoting gender equality,” she said.

Roldan, who has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, and a master’s degree in environmental economics from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, came to VCU because of its emphasis on diversity and multidisciplinary research.

“That’s crucial for me,” she said. “As an international student, knowing the school embraces diversity among its students and professors was essential for deciding to study at VCU.”

The social work profession will give her the “theoretical and methodological tools to help find solutions to the employment discrimination that sexual and gender minority people face,” she said.

Roldan spent three weeks this summer in the 2023 ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods at the University of Michigan, thanks to a diversity scholarship she received this spring. The scholarship enables graduate students to receive additional skills in quantitative analysis.

The application process was very competitive, with 150 graduate students vying for the award that among other things, provided tuition expenses, free lodging and meals as well as a stipend.

“Receiving the scholarship was crucial for me to attend such an excellent program,” said Roldan, a native of Colombia. “The total cost of attending the program in person is out of my current budget, so it was only possible for me to be part of the 2023 summer program with this scholarship.”

The summer program provided intense quantitative methods training. Roldan took two advanced courses and one practical lecture.

“To give you an estimate of the program's intensity, the number of teaching hours of each course was about the same as a semester course in an academic year (around 40 hours) but in just three weeks,” she said. “I had eight hours of classes every day for those three weeks.”

The program included graduate and postdoctoral students, researchers and faculty from a wide range of institutions, disciplines, countries and backgrounds.

“I met a Ukrainian researcher who is interested in conducting research in Latin America and another scholar who is conducting research in Colombia. So, there are a lot of opportunities for future research collaboration,” she said, adding that networking was also an essential part of the program.

Roldan, who wants to teach in the future, learned different ways of teaching quantitative courses. She also heard about teaching assistantship positions for graduate students. She plans to apply for one of the positions in the summer of 2024.

“Having this opportunity will be an unparalleled pedagogical experience that will prepare me to teach advanced statistical courses and research methods in the future,” she said.

Roldan’s research interest lies in employment discrimination against transgender people. The techniques she learned in her VCU courses will allow her to “evaluate the impact of policies related to employment discrimination and the effects of employment discrimination on mental health and work attitudes, for example,” she said.

After getting her doctorate, she wants to keep doing research with the Latinx LGBTQ+ community.

“It could be at a research university or a think tank,” she said. “My ultimate goal is to contribute to society by developing, implementing and evaluating interventions to eliminate employment injustices that sexual and gender minority people face.”