Episodes
Thursday Sep 17, 2015
Thursday Sep 17, 2015
Paternity leave, men's role in childcare, and their work-life balance have become more commonly discussed topics by policymakers and business leaders. What kinds of policies succeed in getting fathers involved in their children's lives from the beginning? What are the long-term consequences for families, in terms of fathers' and mothers' careers, incomes, and the division of household labor at home? In this seminar, Ankita Patnaik discusses how parental leave schemes can be designed to induce fathers to participate and whether small changes in the initial parenting experience can have lasting effects on both parents' behavior. She presents findings from a study that shows that even a few weeks of paternity leave can have a large and persistent impact on sex specialization in the long-term by encouraging a more equal distribution of household responsibilities. Speaker: Ankita Patnaik, Researcher, Mathematica Policy Research
Friday Feb 20, 2015
Friday Feb 20, 2015
Debate abounds about why women continue to be underrepresented in top management positions and in male-dominated domains. This presentation reviews research on an often subtle, but powerful and pervasive, organizational force that discourages men and women from engaging in non-stereotypical roles and behavior: The harassment and mistreatment of gender incongruent employees. The author’s research on this topic is reviewed, from “not man enough” harassment, to the sexual harassment of “uppity” women, to the general mistreatment of non-traditional parents. The presentation concludes with recent studies that distinguish mistreatment from advancement and shed light on the “double bind” for women and the systematic scope of gender regulation in the workplace. SPEAKER: Jennifer L. Berdahl, Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and Diversity, University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business
Monday Sep 15, 2014
Monday Sep 15, 2014
Why has women’s professional advancement stalled? A widely accepted explanation is that women’s family obligations conflict with long hours of jobs, hampering their advancement into senior organizational positions. The commonly championed solution has been policies offering flexible work arrangements designed to mitigate such conflict. Yet research shows that men, too, experience work-family conflict. Moreover, work-family policies do little to help women or men’s workplace advancement, and in fact, often hurt them. In this presentation, Ely draws from her in depth case study of a global professional service firm to ask why the belief that work-family conflict lies at the heart of women’s stalled advancement persists. She explores how this popular narrative self-perpetuates despite evidence to the contrary, and how organizations use this narrative as an explanation for women's blocked mobility partly because it diverts attention from the broader problem of a long-hours work culture among professionals. Speaker: Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Decades after the second wave feminist movement, how do today’s college-aged women think about the effects of combining work and motherhood on children’s outcomes? In Goldberg’s study, she compared how students estimated the effect to meta-analytic effect sizes, which provided the ‘actual’ effects of maternal employment on children. Results indicated that, on average, college women overestimate the negative effects of maternal employment, especially full-time employment, on children. Significant variability in the direction and accuracy of the stereotypes was explained by individual characteristics such as culture/ethnicity, work values, and gender attitudes. In this seminar, we will discuss implications for work/life plans of the generation coming to adulthood. Speaker: Wendy Goldberg, Professor Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, UC Irvine
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
A growing body of research finds that mothers and other caretakers experience disadvantages in the workplace. Professor Correll will present recent research that uncovers the social psychological mechanisms producing these disadvantages. Her argument demonstrates how “family friendly” laws that prohibit discrimination against workers who take family leave can mitigate these biases. Professor Correll will present experimental evidence that supports this argument and shows that law is more effective than voluntary organizational policies in counteracting the disadvantages caretakers experience at work. She concludes with a discussion of how workplaces can more effectively reduce the caretaker penalty. Speaker: Shelley Correll, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
This field study of a strategy consulting firm explores how men and women cope with organizational pressures to construct a professional identity that involves full devotion to work. Reid finds that while some people easily embrace this imposed identity, most experience a conflict between it and the less-devoted professional identities that they desire to construct. She traces how men and women navigate this conflict by aiming to stay true to their desired selves while either (1) passing as adherents to, or (2) overtly revealing their deviance from, the imposed identity. Unpacking the different ways in which people manipulate features of their work, we construct and manage these deviant professional selves. Drawing on performance and interview data, she demonstrates how both those who embrace the imposed identity and those pass as adherents to it are held in high esteem and rewarded by the firm, while those who reveal their deviance are recognized as such and penalized. Speaker: Erin Reid, Assistant Professor, Boston University
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Work-Family Policy in the U.S. with Jane Waldfogel
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
The American family is changing, but our public policies have not kept pace. In 1967, 2/3 of American children had at least one stay-at-home parent, and only 1/3 had all their parents working. Today, because of increases in maternal employment (and single motherhood), the situation is reversed: 2/3 of children have all their parents working, and only 1/3 have a stay-at-home parent. In addition, more workers now have responsibility for elders or other dependents, due to increased longevity and smaller baby boom families. These challenges are not unique to the US, but are more acute here than in peer countries, because our public policies have not been updated to reflect them. To meet the needs of children when parents work, and to help adults caring for the elderly or other dependents, our policies must provide more comprehensive work-family supports—paid family leave, other forms of paid leave, workplace flexibility, and child care. This is particularly true for low-income families who currently have the least access to such benefits at work and who have fewer resources with which to buy them. Why is the US such an outlier in this regard, and what might we be able to do about it? Speaker: Jane Waldfogel, Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Jobs and Kids: Female Employment and Fertility in China with Karen Eggleston
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Data on 2,355 married women from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey are used to study how female employment affects fertility in China. China has deep concerns with both population size and female employment, so the relationship between the two should be better understood. Causality flows in both directions. A conceptual model shows how employment prospects affect fertility. Then an instrumental variable isolates this effects. Female employment reduces a married woman's preferred number of children by 0.35 on average and her actual number by 0.50. Ramifications for China's one-child policy are discussed. Speaker: Karen Eggleston, Director, Asia Health Policy Program, Stanford University
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Thursday Aug 21, 2014
Low fertility countries in Europe and Asia have adopted new work-family reconciliation policies, with varied results. Boling analyzes the politics of work-family reconciliation policies in three conservative welfare states, arguing that in this policy area, politics gets in the way of policy learning, making it difficult to borrow the “best practices” of other countries. The reasons for this differ, but relate to policy histories and repertoires, political institutions, labor markets that exact high opportunity costs from mothers who spend time at home with children, and cultural expectations about good mothering. Speaker: Patricia Boling, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Purdue University