Episodes
Thursday Dec 01, 2016
Thursday Dec 01, 2016
Across the world, the increasing use of digital payments for government to person transactions for social programs has provided an entry point for the world’s poor into the formal financial sector. This phenomenon begs the question: how can governments best leverage this opportunity to enable economic empowerment for women? This seminar explores research that uses a randomized controlled trial to assess how financial inclusion coupled with targeted benefit payments impact women's labor force participation and economic welfare in India.
Simone Schaner, Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College
Thursday Nov 10, 2016
The History of the 'Mommy Track' with Elizabeth Singer
Thursday Nov 10, 2016
Thursday Nov 10, 2016
As women began to fill the ranks of management in the 1980s, the impact of motherhood on an individual’s career trajectory and the corporate balance sheet became a source of debate among feminists and business leaders. In this seminar, Elizabeth Singer More examines the “mommy track” argument that some feminists, most prominently Felice Schwartz of Catalyst, claimed would save businesses money by working to retain white-collar women. Schwartz hoped this argument would persuade businesses to provide benefits, such as flex-time and paid maternity leave, which they had resisted providing for years. But there were two significant costs to the “mommy track” argument. The first was the possibility that mothers who did not want to be on a decelerated career track would be involuntarily sidelined. The second was that by basing a claim for treating mothers as valued employees on the company’s profit interest alone, feminists risked losing the standing to demand rights and benefits that did not directly benefit the bottom line.
Elizabeth Singer More, WAPPP Fellow; Lecturer on History and Literature; Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Thursday Sep 22, 2016
Thursday Sep 22, 2016
This seminar explores how gender is enacted by founders of social ventures. In particular, Lakshmi Ramarajan looks at how female social venture founders conform to cultural beliefs about gender-appropriate activities and how this conformity may be reinforced or disrupted by characteristics of the environment in which they are embedded. She argues that the trend towards the use of commercial activities in social ventures is inconsistent with cultural beliefs about gender for female founders of social ventures. Using data on 590 new U.S.-based social ventures during 2007-2008, Ramarajan examined the conditions under which commercial activities are more or less likely to be used by female founders. Results show that female founders of social ventures are less likely to use commercial activities than male founders and that the social venture founders’ local community context moderates this effect in two ways: the prevalence of women-run businesses in the social venture founder`s local community weakens the enactment of gender, while the influence of gender on the use of commercial activities is stronger when the intended beneficiaries of the social ventures are local.
Speaker: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School
Thursday Apr 07, 2016
Thursday Apr 07, 2016
Maternity
leave policies have known effects on short-term child outcomes. However, little
is known about the long-run impact of such leaves on women’s health as they
age. This seminar examines whether maternity leave policies have an effect on
women's mental health in older age. Data for women age 50 years and above from
countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) are
linked to data on maternity leave legislation from 1960 onwards. A
difference-in-differences approach that exploits changes over time within
countries in the duration and compensation of maternity leave benefits is
linked to the year women were giving birth to their first child at age 16 to
25. Late-life depressive symptom scores of mothers who were in employment in
the period around the birth of their first child were compared to depression
scores of mothers who were not in employment in the period surrounding the
birth of a first child and, therefore, did not benefit directly from maternity
leave benefits. The findings suggest that a more generous maternity leave
during the birth of a first child is associated with reduced depression
symptoms in late life. This seminar explores how policies experienced in
midlife may have long-run consequences for women’s health and wellbeing.
Speaker:
Lisa Berkman, Thomas
D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology; Director, Harvard
Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard. T.H. Chan School of
Public Health
Thursday Mar 31, 2016
Thursday Mar 31, 2016
The return to work following the birth of a first child is often a period of time when new mothers are working towards mastering the tasks associated with caring for an infant and managing their workplace demands. New mothers may consider leaving their organization if they question their ability to either effectively perform their job or their parenting roles. Drawing from social support and social comparison theories, this seminar explores how supportive work environments shape new mothers’ turnover intention. Using a sample of 695 new mothers who had recently returned to work following the birth of their first child, Ladge finds evidence that perceived manager support and role models who portray work and family balance influence both job and maternal self-efficacies, which contribute to new mothers’ turnover intentions.
Speaker: Jamie Ladge, Associate Professor of Management and Organizational Development, D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University
Wednesday Mar 09, 2016
Wednesday Mar 09, 2016
How can women get ahead in competitive fields? One proposed way is through sponsorship programs – where a person (the sponsor) advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. While these types of programs have received popular attention, little empirical evidence exists on their effectiveness. Coffman uses a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In the experimental setting, being sponsored provides a credible signal of one’s ability and/or creates a link between the protégé’s and sponsor’s payoffs. She finds that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. Similarly, sponsorship has a directionally more positive effect on the earnings of male protégés than female protégés. Therefore, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. This seminar will explore how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field. Speaker: Katie Coffman, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Ohio State University
Wednesday Mar 02, 2016
What Works: How to Design Diversity with Iris Bohnet
Wednesday Mar 02, 2016
Wednesday Mar 02, 2016
Gender diversity is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and debiasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Behavioral design offers a new solution. Building on her talk in the fall and her new book, WHAT WORKS: Gender Equality By Design, Professor Bohnet will discuss what organizations can do create more inclusive environments, level the playing field and help diverse teams succeed. Speaker: Iris Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy; Director, Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School
Monday Feb 29, 2016
Two Decades of Gender-Role Attitude Change in Europe with Mary Brinton
Monday Feb 29, 2016
Monday Feb 29, 2016
Speaker: Mary C. Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
Friday Nov 20, 2015
Friday Nov 20, 2015
Gender Inequality persists to varying degrees across post-industrial economies. The seminar introduces the new Weatherhead Initiative at Harvard to study comparative gender inequality in OECD countries and outlines some of the major scholarly and policy challenges relating to the structure of work and its articulation with the family.
Thursday Oct 29, 2015
Thursday Oct 29, 2015
Can symbolic awards motivate individuals to contribute their ideas and knowledge to a common project? Jana Gallus presents results from a large-scale natural field experiment at Wikipedia, exploring whether a purely symbolic award scheme can be used to motivate new editors and thus mitigate Wikipedia's editor retention problem. In a new project, she seeks to understand how awards have to be designed in order to enhance their recipients' self-confidence in gender-incongruent fields and encourage high-ability individuals to contribute their ideas. Speaker: Jana Gallus, Postdoctoral Fellow, Behavioral Insights Group, Harvard Kennedy School