front cover of The Bellwomen
The Bellwomen
The Story of the Landmark AT&T Sex Discrimation Case
Stockford, Marjorie A
Rutgers University Press, 2004

In the early 1970s, David Copus, a young, long-haired lawyer, teamed up with his government colleagues to confront the mature and staid executives of AT&T over the company’s treatment of its female and minority employees.  Their disagreement resulted in a $38 million settlement that benefited 15,000 employees, more than 13,000 of them women, and changed our perceptions of women’s and men’s roles in the workplace forever.

Copus, who worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), was charged with representing American citizens who suffered from employment discrimination. Time and again he saw young, black women in the South being turned down for available jobs in local phone companies—usually as telephone operators—often for no valid reason at all. He and the EEOC decided to challenge AT&T’s company-wide sex discrimination practices. Eventually, AT&T’s corporate colleagues, witnessing AT&T’s capitulation, began to hire and promote women into better jobs themselves. At the same time, the EEOC started to more aggressively push corporate America to give women better opportunities.

The Bellwomen recounts the history of this case in a novelistic style, illuminating the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of all the players, from AT&T corporate leaders, to the lawyers of the EEOC, to the female activists fighting for what they believed. Stockford also profiles three beneficiaries of the case, presenting their ambitions and achievements.

Combined with the power of America’s civil rights laws and the influence of the second wave women’s movement, this case provided a catalyst that drove many more women into the paid workforce in non-traditional jobs. By the late twentieth century, when women could be seen working everywhere, from construction sites to corporate offices, it appeared that they belonged there and always had. 

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Breadwinners and Citizens
Gender in the Making of the French Social Model
Laura Levine Frader
Duke University Press, 2008
Laura Levine Frader’s synthesis of labor history and gender history brings to the fore failures in realizing the French social model of equality for all citizens. Challenging previous scholarship, she argues that the male breadwinner ideal was stronger in France in the interwar years than scholars have typically recognized, and that it had negative consequences for women’s claims to the full benefits of citizenship. She describes how ideas about masculinity, femininity, family, and work affected post–World War I reconstruction, policies designed to address France’s postwar population deficit, and efforts to redefine citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that gender divisions and the male breadwinner ideal were reaffirmed through the policies and practices of labor, management, and government. The social model that France implemented in the 1920s and 1930s incorporated fundamental social inequalities.

Frader’s analysis moves between the everyday lives of ordinary working women and men and the actions of national policymakers, political parties, and political movements, including feminists, pro-natalists, and trade unionists. In the years following World War I, the many women and an increasing number of immigrant men in the labor force competed for employment and pay. Family policy was used not only to encourage reproduction but also to regulate wages and the size of the workforce. Policies to promote married women’s and immigrants’ departure from the labor force were more common when jobs were scarce, as they were during the Depression. Frader contends that gender and ethnicity exerted a powerful and unacknowledged influence on French social policy during the Depression era and for decades afterward.

[more]
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Changing the Game
Women at Work in Las Vegas, 1940-1990
Joanne L. Goodwin
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The growth of Las Vegas that began in the 1940s brought an influx of both women and men looking to work in the expanding hotel and casino industries. In fact, for the next fifty years the proportion of women in the labor force was greater in Las Vegas than the United States as a whole. Joanne L. Goodwin’s study captures the shifting boundaries of women’s employment in the postwar decades with narratives drawn from the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project. It counters clichéd pictures of women at work in the famed resort city as it explores women’s real strategies for economic survival and success.

Their experiences anticipated major trends in post-World War II labor history: the national migration of workers during and after the war, the growing proportion of women in the labor force, balancing work with family life, the unionization of service workers, and, above all, the desegregation of the labor force by sex and race. These narratives show women in Las Vegas resisting preassigned roles, seeing their work as a testimony of skill, a measure of independence, and a fulfillment of needs. Overall, these stories of women who lived and worked in Las Vegas in the last half of the twentieth century reveal much about the broader transitions for women in America between 1940 and 1990.
[more]
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Cheffes de Cuisine
Women and Work in the Professional French Kitchen
Rachel E. Black
University of Illinois Press, 2021

Works of Distinction, LDEI M.F.K. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Culinary Media Content, 2022

A rare woman’s-eye-view of working in the professional French kitchen

Though women enter France’s culinary professions at higher rates than ever, men still receive the lion’s share of the major awards and Michelin stars. Rachel E. Black looks at the experiences of women in Lyon to examine issues of gender inequality in France’s culinary industry. Known for its female-led kitchens, Lyon provides a unique setting for understanding the gender divide, as Lyonnais women have played a major role in maintaining the city’s culinary heritage and its status as a center for innovation. Voices from history combine with present-day interviews and participant observation to reveal the strategies women use to navigate male-dominated workplaces or, in many cases, avoid men in kitchens altogether. Black also charts how constraints imposed by French culture minimize the impact of #MeToo and other reform-minded movements. 

Evocative and original, Cheffes de Cuisine celebrates the successes of women inside the professional French kitchen and reveals the obstacles women face in the culinary industry and other male-dominated professions.

[more]
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Conquering Heroines
How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX
Sara Fitzgerald
University of Michigan Press, 2020
In 1970, a group of women in Ann Arbor launched a crusade with an objective that seemed beyond reach at the time—force the University of Michigan to treat women the same as men. Sex discrimination was then rampant at U-M. The school’s admissions officials sought to maintain a ratio of 55:45 between male and female undergraduate entrants, turning away more qualified female applicants and arguing, among other things, that men needed help because they were less mature and posted lower grades. Women comprised less than seven percent of the University’s faculty members and their salaries trailed their male peers by substantial amounts. As one administrator put it when pressed about the disparity, “Men have better use for the extra money.”

Galvanized by their shared experiences with sex discrimination, the Ann Arbor women organized a group called FOCUS on Equal Employment for Women, led by activist Jean Ledwith King. Working with Bernice Sandler of the Women’s Equity Action League, they developed a strategy to unleash the power of another powerful institution—the federal government—to demand change at U-M and, they hoped, across the world of higher education. Prompted by a complaint filed by FOCUS, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare soon documented egregious examples of discrimination in Michigan’s practices toward women and threatened to withhold millions of dollars in contracts unless the school adopted remedies. Among the hundreds of similar complaints filed against U.S. colleges in 1970–1971, the one brought by the Michigan women achieved the breakthrough that provided the historic template for settlements with other institutions.
 
Drawing on oral histories from archives as well as new interviews with living participants, Conquering Heroines chronicles this pivotal period in the histories of the University of Michigan and the women’s movement. An incredible story of grassroots activism and courageous women, the book highlights the kind of relentless effort that has helped make inclusivity an ongoing goal at U-M. 
 
[more]
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The Declining Significance of Gender?
Francine D. Blau
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
The last half-century has witnessed substantial change in the opportunities and rewards available to men and women in the workplace. While the gender pay gap narrowed and female labor force participation rose dramatically in recent decades, some dimensions of gender inequality—most notably the division of labor in the family—have been more resistant to change, or have changed more slowly in recent years than in the past. These trends suggest that one of two possible futures could lie ahead: an optimistic scenario in which gender inequalities continue to erode, or a pessimistic scenario where contemporary institutional arrangements persevere and the gender revolution stalls. In The Declining Significance of Gender?, editors Francine Blau, Mary Brinton, and David Grusky bring together top gender scholars in sociology and economics to make sense of the recent changes in gender inequality, and to judge whether the optimistic or pessimistic view better depicts the prospects and bottlenecks that lie ahead. It examines the economic, organizational, political, and cultural forces that have changed the status of women and men in the labor market. The contributors examine the economic assumption that discrimination in hiring is economically inefficient and will be weeded out eventually by market competition. They explore the effect that family-family organizational policies have had in drawing women into the workplace and giving them even footing in the organizational hierarchy. Several chapters ask whether political interventions might reduce or increase gender inequality, and others discuss whether a social ethos favoring egalitarianism is working to overcome generations of discriminatory treatment against women. Although there is much rhetoric about the future of gender inequality, The Declining Significance of Gender? provides a sustained attempt to consider analytically the forces that are shaping the gender revolution. Its wide-ranging analysis of contemporary gender disparities will stimulate readers to think more deeply and in new ways about the extent to which gender remains a major fault line of inequality.
[more]
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Documenting Desegregation
Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act
Kevin Stainback
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Enacted nearly fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act codified a new vision for American society by formally ending segregation and banning race and gender discrimination in the workplace. But how much change did the legislation actually produce? As employers responded to the law, did new and more subtle forms of inequality emerge in the workplace? In an insightful analysis that combines history with a rigorous empirical analysis of newly available data, Documenting Desegregation offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America—and what needs to be done in order to achieve a truly integrated workforce. Weaving strands of history, cognitive psychology, and demography, Documenting Desgregation provides a compelling exploration of the ways legislation can affect employer behavior and produce change. Authors Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey use a remarkable historical record—data from more than six million workplaces collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since 1966—to present a sobering portrait of race and gender in the American workplace. Progress has been decidedly uneven: black men, black women, and white women have prospered in firms that rely on educational credentials when hiring, though white women have advanced more quickly. And white men have hardly fallen behind—they now hold more managerial positions than they did in 1964. The authors argue that the Civil Rights Act's equal opportunity clauses have been most effective when accompanied by social movements demanding changes. EEOC data show that African American men made rapid gains in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, white women gained access to more professional and managerial jobs in the 1970s as regulators and policymakers began to enact and enforce gender discrimination laws. By the 1980s, however, racial desegregation had stalled, reflecting the dimmed status of the Civil Rights agenda. Racial and gender employment segregation remain high today, and, alarmingly, many firms, particularly in high-wage industries, seem to be moving in the wrong direction and have shown signs of resegregating since the 1980s. To counter this worrying trend, the authors propose new methods to increase diversity by changing industry norms, holding human resources managers to account, and exerting renewed government pressure on large corporations to make equal employment opportunity a national priority. At a time of high unemployment and rising inequality, Documenting Desegregation provides an incisive re-examination of America's tortured pursuit of equal employment opportunity. This important new book will be an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.
[more]
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Equity for Women in Science
Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement
Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière
Harvard University Press, 2023

The first large-scale empirical analysis of the gender gap in science, showing how the structure of scientific labor and rewards—publications, citations, funding—systematically obstructs women’s career advancement.

If current trends continue, women and men will be equally represented in the field of biology in 2069. In physics, math, and engineering, women should not expect to reach parity for more than a century. The gender gap in science and technology is narrowing, but at a decidedly unimpressive pace. And even if parity is achievable, what about equity?

Equity for Women in Science, the first large-scale empirical analysis of the global gender gap in science, provides strong evidence that the structures of scientific production and reward impede women’s career advancement. To make their case, Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière have conducted scientometric analyses using millions of published papers across disciplines. The data show that women are systematically denied the chief currencies of scientific credit: publications and citations. The rising tide of collaboration only exacerbates disparities, with women unlikely to land coveted leadership positions or gain access to global networks. The findings are unequivocal: when published, men are positioned as key contributors and women are relegated to low-visibility technical roles. The intersecting disparities in labor, reward, and resources contribute to cumulative disadvantages for the advancement of women in science.

Alongside their eye-opening analyses, Sugimoto and Larivière offer solutions. The data themselves point the way, showing where existing institutions fall short. A fair and equitable research ecosystem is possible, but the scientific community must first disrupt its own pervasive patterns of gatekeeping.

[more]
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Fetal Rights, Women's Rights
Gender Equality in the Workplace
Suzanne U. Samuels
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many private employers in the United States enacted fetal protection policies that barred fertile women—that is, women who had not been surgically sterilized—from working in jobs that might expose fetuses to toxins. In Fetal Rights, Women’s Rights, Suzanne Samuels analyzes these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants, and interest groups. She poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace, including: are women workers or wombs?
    Placing the fetal protection controversy within the larger societal debate about gender roles, Samuels argues that governmental decision-makers confuse sex, which is based solely on biological characteristics, with gender, which is based on societal conceptions. She contends that the debate about fetal protection policies brought this ambiguity into stark relief, and that the response of policy-makers was rooted in assumptions about gender roles. Judges, legislators, and regulators used gender as a proxy, she argues, to sidestep the question of whether fetal protection policies could be justified by the biological differences between women and men.
    The fetal protection controversy raises a number of concerns about women's role in the workplace. Samuels discusses the effect on governmental policies of the ongoing controversy over abortion rights and the debates between egalitarian and relational feminists about the treatment of women at work. A timely and engrossing study, Fetal Rights, Women's Rights  details the pattern of gender politics in the United States and demonstrates the broader ramifications of gender bias in the workplace.

[more]
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Freedom Is Not Enough
The Opening of the American Workplace
Nancy MacLean
Harvard University Press, 2008

In the 1950s, the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans. Today, diversity in the workforce is a point of pride. How did such a transformation come about?

In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.

Freedom Is Not Enough reveals the fundamental role jobs play in the struggle for equality. We meet the grassroots activists—rank-and-file workers, community leaders, trade unionists, advocates, lawyers—and their allies in government who fight for fair treatment, as we also witness the conservative forces that assembled to resist their demands. Weaving a powerful and memorable narrative, MacLean demonstrates the life-altering impact of the Civil Rights Act and the movement for economic advancement that it fostered.

The struggle for jobs reached far beyond the workplace to transform American culture. MacLean enables us to understand why so many came to see good jobs for all as the measure of full citizenship in a vital democracy. Opening up the workplace, she shows, opened minds and hearts to the genuine inclusion of all Americans for the first time in our nation’s history.

[more]
front cover of Gender Bias and the State
Gender Bias and the State
Symbolic Reform at Work in Fifth Republic France
Amy G. Mazur
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

This is the first systematic study of French policy regarding equal employment for women. Mazur asks why policy makers choose to make symbolic reforms. Is there a certain set of conditions particularly conducive to the formation of symbolic reform? If symbolic reforms are meant to do nothing, why do governments allocate limited resources to them?
    Mazur examines five legislative proposals, dating from 1967 to 1982, three of which resulted in legislation: the 1972 Equal Pay Law. the 1975 Equal Treatment Law, and the 1983 Egalité Professionelle Law. These five case studies reveal the continuity over three decades of “symbolic” reform, reform that does not solve the problem it was designed to address.

[more]
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Gendered Tradeoffs
Women, Family, and Workplace Inequality in Twenty-One Countries
Becky Pettit
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Gender inequality in the workplace persists, even in nations with some of the most progressive laws and generous family support policies. Yet the dimensions on which inequality is measured—levels of women's employment, number of hours worked, sex segregation by occupations and wages—tell very different stories across industrialized nations. By examining federally guaranteed parental leave, publicly provided child care, and part-time work, and looking across multiple dimensions of inequality, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook document the links between specific policies and aggregate outcomes. They disentangle the complex factors, from institutional policies to personal choices, that influence economic inequality. Gendered Tradeoffsdraws on data from twenty-one industrialized nations to compare women's and men's economic outcomes across nations, and over time, in search of a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of gender inequality in different labor markets. Pettit and Hook develop the idea that there are tradeoffs between different aspects of gender inequality in the economy and explain how those tradeoffs are shaped by individuals, markets, and states. They argue that each policy or condition should be considered along two axes—whether it promotes women's inclusion in or exclusion from the labor market and whether it promotes gender equality or inequality among women in the labor market. Some policies advance one objective while undercutting the other. The volume begins by reflecting on gender inequality in labor markets measured by different indicators. It goes on to develop the idea that there may be tradeoffs inherent among different aspects of inequality and in different policy solutions. These ideas are explored in four empirical chapters on employment, work hours, occupational sex segregation, and the gender wage gap. The penultimate chapter examines whether a similar framework is relevant for understanding inequality among women in the United States and Germany. The book concludes with a thorough discussion of the policies and conditions that underpin gender inequality in the workplace. The central thesis of Gendered Tradeoffs is that gender inequality in the workplace is generated and reinforced by national policies and conditions. The contours of inequality across and within countries are shaped by specific aspects of social policy that either relieve or concentrate the demands of care giving within households—usually in the hands of women—and at the same time shape workplace expectations. Pettit and Hook make a strong case that equality for women in the workplace depends not on whether women are included in the labor market but on how they are included.
[more]
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Investment in Women's Human Capital
Edited by T. Paul Schultz
University of Chicago Press, 1995
How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility, and training? In thirteen wide-ranging and innovative empirical analyses, Investment in Women's Human Capital explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family.

Section I considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labor market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children.

The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, including the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.
[more]
front cover of Just One of the Guys?
Just One of the Guys?
Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality
Kristen Schilt
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The fact that men and women continue to receive unequal treatment at work is a point of contention among politicians, the media, and scholars. Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions. Just One of the Guys? sheds new light on this phenomenon by analyzing the unique experiences of transgender men—people designated female at birth whose gender identity is male—on the job.

Kristen Schilt draws on in-depth interviews and observational data to show that while individual transmen have varied experiences, overall their stories are a testament to systemic gender inequality. The reactions of coworkers and employers to transmen, Schilt demonstrates, reveal the ways assumptions about innate differences between men and women serve as justification for discrimination. She finds that some transmen gain acceptance—and even privileges—by becoming “just one of the guys,” that some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender, and that other forms of appearance-based discrimination also influence their opportunities. Showcasing the voices of a frequently overlooked group, Just One of the Guys? lays bare the social processes that foster forms of inequality that affect us all.

[more]
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Leaving Science
Anne E. Preston
Russell Sage Foundation, 2004
The past thirty years have witnessed a dramatic decline in the number of U.S. students pursuing advanced degrees in science and an equally dramatic increase in the number of professionals leaving scientific careers. Leaving Science provides the first significant examination of this worrisome new trend. Economist Anne E. Preston examines a wide range of important questions: Why do professionals who have invested extensive time and money on a rigorous scientific education leave the field? Where do these scientists go and what do they do? What policies might aid in retaining and improving the quality of life for science personnel? Based on data from a large national survey of nearly 1,700 people who received university degrees in the natural sciences or engineering between 1965 and 1990 and a subsequent in-depth follow-up survey, Leaving Science provides a comprehensive portrait of the career trajectories of men and women who have earned science degrees. Alarmingly, by the end of the follow-up survey, only 51 percent of the original respondents were still working in science. During this time, federal funding for scientific research decreased dramatically relative to private funding. Consequently, the direction of scientific research has increasingly been dictated by market forces, and many scientists have left academic research for income and opportunity in business and industry. Preston identifies the main reasons for people leaving scientific careers as dissatisfaction with compensation and career advancement, difficulties balancing family and career responsibilities, and changing professional interests. Highlighting the difference between male and female exit patterns, Preston shows that most men left because they found scientific salaries low relative to perceived alternatives in other fields, while most women left scientific careers in response to feelings of alienation due to lack of career guidance, difficulty relating to their work, and insufficient time for their family obligations. Leaving Science contains a unique blend of rigorous statistical analysis with voices of individual scientists, ensuring a rich and detailed understanding of an issue with profound consequences for the nation's future. A better understanding of why professionals leave science can help lead to changes in scientific education and occupations and make the scientific workplace more attractive and hospitable to career men and women.
[more]
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Never Done
A History of Women’s Work in Media Production
Hill, Erin
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Winner of the 2018 Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)​

Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized. 
 
Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry—from the employees’ wives who hand-colored the Edison Company’s films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM’s backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid “women’s work,” or “feminized labor,” Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity.   
 
 
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Opposing Ambitions
Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization
Sherryl Kleinman
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"Renewal" is a holistic health center run by baby boomers whose political ideals were shaped by the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Through interviews and observation, Sherryl Kleinman takes us inside Renewal and shows us how its members struggled to maintain a view of themselves as progressive and alternative even as they sought conventional legitimacy.

In Opposing Ambitions we meet the members of Renewal as individuals; learn about the differences in power, prestige, and respect they are accorded; why they talked endlessly about money; and how they related to each other. Kleinman shows how members' attempts to see themselves as unconventional, but also as serious operators of a legitimate health care organization, led them to act in ways that undermined their egalitarian goals. She draws out the lessons Renewal offers for understanding the problems women face in organizations, the failure of social movements to live up to their ideals, and how it is possible for progressives to avoid reproducing the inequalities they claim to oppose.
[more]
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Organizing Women
Home, Work, and the Institutional Infrastructure of Print in Twentieth-Century America
Christine Pawley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

In the first decades of the twentieth century, print-centered organizations spread rapidly across the United States, providing more women than ever before with opportunities to participate in public life. While most organizations at the time were run by and for white men, women—both Black and white—were able to reshape their lives and their social worlds through their participation in these institutions.

Organizing Women traces the histories of middle-class women—rural and urban, white and Black, married and unmarried—who used public and private institutions of print to tell their stories, expand their horizons, and further their ambitions. Drawing from a diverse range of examples, Christine Pawley introduces readers to women who ran branch libraries and library schools in Chicago and Madison, built radio empires from their midwestern farms, formed reading clubs, and published newsletters. In the process, we learn about the organizations themselves, from libraries and universities to the USDA extension service and the YWCA, and the ways in which women confronted gender discrimination and racial segregation in the course of their work.

[more]
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"Rights, Not Roses"
Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80
Dennis A. Deslippe
University of Illinois Press, 2000

Educated, white collar professional women carried the most visible banners of feminism. But working class women were a powerful force in the campaign for gender equality. Dennis A. Deslippe explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing both the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism. 

Deslippe's account unravels a complex history of how labor leaders accommodated and resisted working women's demands for change. Through case studies of unions representing packinghouse and electrical workers, Deslippe explains why gender equality emerged as an issue in the 1960s and how the activities of wage-earning women in and outside of their unions shaped the content of the debate. He also traces the fault lines separating working-class women--who sought gender equality within the parameters of unionist principles such as seniority--from middle-class women--who sought an equal rights amendment that would guarantee an abstract equality for all women. 

Thoughtful and detailed, "Rights, Not Roses" offers a new look at the complexities of working-class feminism.

[more]
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They Don't Want Her There
Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University
Carolyn Chalmers
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Before the nation learned about workplace sexual harassment from Anita Hill, and decades before the #MeToo movement, Chinese American professor Jean Jew M.D. brought a lawsuit against the University of Iowa, alleging a sexually hostile work environment within the university’s College of Medicine.

As Jew gained accolades and advanced through the ranks at Iowa, she was met with increasingly vicious attacks on her character by her white male colleagues—implying that her sexuality had opened doors for her. After years of being subjected to demoralizing sexual, racial, and ethnic discrimination, finding herself without any higher-up departmental support, and noting her professional progression beginning to suffer by the hands of hate, Jean Jew decided to fight back. Carolyn Chalmers was her lawyer.

This book tells the inside story of pioneering litigation unfolding during the eight years of a university investigation, a watershed federal trial, and a state court jury trial. In the face of a university determined to defeat them and maintain the status quo, Jew and Chalmers forged an exceptional relationship between a lawyer and a client, each at the top of their game and part of the first generation of women in their fields. They Don’t Want Her There is a brilliant, original work of legal history that is deeply personal and shows today’s professional women just how recently some of our rights have been won—and at what cost.
 
[more]
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What Works
Gender Equality by Design
Iris Bohnet
Harvard University Press, 2016

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

[more]
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Who Gets the Good Jobs?
Combating Race and Gender Disparities
Cherry, Robert
Rutgers University Press, 2001

Racial and gender employment inequalities are alive and well today. In 2000, the U.S. government offered $508 million to settle more than one thousand lawsuits brought against the federally funded Voice of America by female workers. At the same time, African American employees of Coca-Cola sued their employer, citing the large number of minorities in low-paying jobs, with just a handful at top levels. Even Alan Greenspan has urged firms to eliminate the “distortions that arise as a result of discrimination.”

The political agenda regarding this issue is polarized. Many conservative economists claim that financial considerations have led businesses to hire minorities because such practices increase profits. In opposition, many liberal economists believe businesses will hire minorities only if forced to do so by equal employment opportunity policies. Robert Cherry bridges these two positions, arguing that there is some truth to the positive effect of the profit motive, but that market forces alone are not enough to eliminate employment and earnings disparities.

            Cherry surveys the political and economic forces that influenced labor market practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the employment barriers African Americans, women, and immigrants encounter. He then assesses the effects of 1960s civil rights legislation and finds that improvements have been substantial, primarily for college-educated African Americans and women; therefore, he recommends that equal employment opportunity policies be strengthened. Cherry demonstrates how the promotion of full employment can further the advancement of working-class African Americans and women.

[more]
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Women and Workplace Discrimination
Overcoming Barriers to Gender Equality
Gregory, Raymond F
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Attorney Raymond F. Gregory addresses the millions of women who think they might be facing sexual discrimination and explains federal measures enacted to assist workers in contesting unlawful employer conduct. He presents actual court cases to demonstrate the ways that women have challenged their employers. The cases illustrate legal principles in real-life experiences. Many of the cases relate compelling stories of workers caught up in a web of employer discriminatory conduct. Gregory has eliminated legal jargon, ensuring that all concepts are clear to his readers. Individuals will turn to this book again and again to obtain authoritative background on this important topic.

Topics covered include:

  • The increasing incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace
  • Common forms of sex discrimination
  • Discrimination against older women
  • Discrimination against women of color
  • Discrimination against women in the professions
  • Discrimination against pregnant women
  • Discrimination against women with children
  • Sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, termination
  • Employer liability for workplace sexual harassment
  • Employer retaliation against workers
  • Proving sex discrimination in the courtroom
  • Compensatory and punitive damages
  • Back pay, front pay, and other remedies
[more]
front cover of Women and Workplace Discrimination
Women and Workplace Discrimination
Overcoming Barriers to Gender Equality
Gregory, Raymond F
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Attorney Raymond F. Gregory addresses the millions of women who think they might be facing sexual discrimination and explains federal measures enacted to assist workers in contesting unlawful employer conduct. He presents actual court cases to demonstrate the ways that women have challenged their employers. The cases illustrate legal principles in real-life experiences. Many of the cases relate compelling stories of workers caught up in a web of employer discriminatory conduct. Gregory has eliminated legal jargon, ensuring that all concepts are clear to his readers. Individuals will turn to this book again and again to obtain authoritative background on this important topic.

Topics covered include:

  • The increasing incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace
  • Common forms of sex discrimination
  • Discrimination against older women
  • Discrimination against women of color
  • Discrimination against women in the professions
  • Discrimination against pregnant women
  • Discrimination against women with children
  • Sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, termination
  • Employer liability for workplace sexual harassment
  • Employer retaliation against workers
  • Proving sex discrimination in the courtroom
  • Compensatory and punitive damages
  • Back pay, front pay, and other remedies
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front cover of Women at Work
Women at Work
Rhetorics of Gender and Labor
David Gold
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women’s labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women’s trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.
 
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