In the Viginia Gildersleeve panel on "Women, Work, and the Academy" (December 9, 2004), Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, and Virginia Valian outline our best current understanding of the status of women and minority scholars in academia and describe some of the most promising interventions undertaken to change these conditions. The inspiration for this panel and for the conference that followed is a growing body of work that focuses attention on conditions that persistently reproduce inequalities in the representation and recognition of women and minority scholars in most senior ranks of the academy, even as their numbers improve in the training pipeline in virtually all fields.