Explores reasons for women's continued economic disadvantage and the conflicts women feel between career and family, which men do not. Offers proposals that would help society overcome these discrepancies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year A Times Higher Education Book of the Week Best Business Book of the Year, 800-CEO-READ Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts. Presenting research-based solutions, Iris Bohnet hands us the tools we need to move the needle in classrooms and boardrooms, in hiring and promotion, benefiting businesses, governments, and the lives of millions. “Bohnet assembles an impressive assortment of studies that demonstrate how organizations can achieve gender equity in practice...What Works is stuffed with good ideas, many equally simple to implement.” —Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal “A practical guide for any employer seeking to offset the unconscious bias holding back women in organizations, from orchestras to internet companies.” —Andrew Hill, Financial Times
In this book, the author builds on decades of complex research to examine the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of labor between couples in the home. The author argues that although public and private discourse has brought these concerns to light, the actions taken - such as a single company slapped on the wrist or a few progressive leaders going on paternity leave - are the economic equivalent of tossing a band-aid to someone with cancer. These solutions, the author writes, treat the symptoms and not the disease of gender inequality in the workplace and economy. Here, the author points to data that reveals how the pay gap widens further down the line in women's careers, about 10 to 15 years out, as opposed to those beginning careers after college. She examines five distinct groups of women over the course of the twentieth century: cohorts of women who differ in terms of career, job, marriage, and children, in approximated years of graduation - 1900s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s - based on various demographic, labor force, and occupational outcomes. The book argues that our entire economy is trapped in an old way of doing business; work structures have not adapted as more women enter the workforce. Gender equality in pay and equity in home and childcare labor are flip sides of the same issue, and the author frames both in the context of a serious empirical exploration that has not yet been put in a long-run historical context. This book offers a deep look into census data, rich information about individual college graduates over their lifetimes, and various records and sources of material to offer a new model to restructure the home and school systems that contribute to the gender pay gap and the quest for both family and career. --
Passet shows that the majority of correspondents who participated in the sex radical movement resided in the Midwest and the Great Plains states, where ideas of individual freedom and sovereignty resonated particularly strongly.".
In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.
This volume is the first collection of Martha Albertson Fineman’s most important and influential work. Feminist legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman has spent decades pushing the boundaries of law, questioning and reconceptualizing legal and social definitions of family, dependency, vulnerability, and state responsibility. The pieces collected in this book trace the arc of Fineman’s scholarship, from gender equality; to the role of the family as a social institution; to dependency; to autonomy; to the legal subject and vulnerability theory. This book reflects a lifetime of radical reimagining of the relationship between the state, individuals, families, and other social institutions that is just as relevant today, if not more so. In this book, Fineman offers a foundation for the achievement of true social justice, through the centering of our shared human vulnerability and dependency, grounded in the recognition of the ontological body and its material needs. Arranged in sections, and introduced by leading scholars in the field, these pieces ask us to re-examine our legally enshrined commitment to formal equality and the “mythological” autonomous independent legal subject; recognizing instead that we must call for an active and responsive state that meaningfully provides resilience through its social institutions. This collection demonstrates an evolution of heretical thought that has always pressed for a deeper understanding of the foundations of law and society, offering a model for other scholars on how to keep pressing through the hard work of thinking and rethinking the conceptual basics of language, law, society, and justice. This book will appeal to academics, policymakers, lawyers, activists, and students in law and politics theory with interests in law and society, human dependency and vulnerability, state responsibility, and feminism and the family; as well as others who have applied Fineman’s vulnerability theory to issues in the fields of bioethics, artificial intelligence, and policing, to name just a few.
"The essays in this volume confront the inroads that economics has made into the legal academy.... Law and Economics uses principles of neoclassical economics to develop laws and social policies that maintain if not bolster current allocations of power."—from the Introduction The Law and Economics school has had a significant impact on the legal and governmental landscape in the United States. It posits a perfectly rational "economic man"—homo economicus—who is unconstrained by familial and communal ties and who can and should make decisions solely in light of considerations of economic value. Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus offers a major intervention in debates about how law has come under the influence of economic principles. Drawing on the latest thinking in the fields of feminist legal theory, critical legal studies, and feminist economics, the essays critique the notion that legal and policy decisions should be made solely through the lens of economics. While the contributors question the wholesale incorporation of the neoclassical economic model into legal analysis, they do not all discard economic analysis and theory. Situated at the intersection of feminism, law, and economics, Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus will appeal to scholars and students of these disciplines as well as policy analysts and social theorists interested in family, education, labor, and welfare.
Examines three decades of data on the relationship between women¿s labor market activity and the income mobility of families that lose a spouse through death, divorce, or separation. Wives¿ labor market activity acts as partial insurance for women and their families against the negative economic consequences of marital dissolution. However, while women who lose their husbands increase their earnings significantly, the number of upwardly mobile families is quite small, and a majority of families actually move down. In addition, they do less well in successive decades. These findings imply that U.S. social and economic policies currently leave considerable gaps in ¿insurance¿ for families in the event of marital dissolution. Tables and graphs.