Women and Work Conference
Speaker Bios
The keynote address for Thursday evening will be delivered by Joan C. Williams, Ph.D.
Joan Williams is a prize-winning author and expert on work/family issues, including Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She has played a leading role in documenting workplace bias against mothers and others who care for children, parents, and disabled family members. Her current work focuses on social psychology, and on how work/family conflict affects families across the social spectrum, with a particular focus on how caregiving issues arise in union arbitration.
The lead-off speaker for Panel 1 titled “Opting Out?” is Pamela Stone, Ph.D.
Pamela Stone is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research centers around issues of women in the work force, with a focus on sex segregation, pay discrimination, and pay equity. Stone is the author of “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home” which tackles this issue from the perspective of the women themselves and provides concrete ideas for redesigning workplaces to make it easier for women–and men–to attain their goal of living rewarding lives that combine both families and careers.
The lead-off speaker for Panel 2 titled “Opting In?” is Susan Lambert, Ph.D.
Susan Lambert’s fields of special interest include lower-skilled jobs and low-wage workers, work-life issues, and organizational theory and management. Currently, Lambert is co-Principal Investigator (with Julia Henly) of a cluster-randomized field experiment that will assess the worker- and store-level effects of a workplace intervention intended to improve scheduling practices in entry-level retail jobs. She recently completed a study of 88 lower-skilled jobs in 22 workplaces in 4 industries (retail, hospitability, transportation, and financial services).
The lead-off speaker for Panel 3 titled “The Changing Workforce and Changing Family” is Ellen Galinsky, Ph.D.
Ellen Galinsky is President and Co-Founder of Families and Work Institute, a Manhattan-based non-profit organization that conducts research on the changing family, changing workforce and changing community. Ms. Galinsky is the author of over 35 books and reports, including the groundbreaking book, Ask the Children, selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best work-life books of 1999. She has published more than 100 articles in academic journals, books, and magazines.
The lead-off speaker for Panel 4 titled “Looking to the Future” is Peggie Smith, J.D.
Peggie Smith is a professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, and a research scholar at the University's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Her primary teaching and research interests are in the areas of employment and labor law, legal history, and women and work. Her research addresses the legal implications caused by the separation between race and gender, home and work, and work and family. Her current work focuses on innovative legal strategies to organize and represent low-wage service workers, especially family child care providers and home care workers.
Discussants
Heather Boushey is a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.
Michelle Budig is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on gender, employment, labor markets, earnings, stratification, family, and cross-national family policy.
Nancy Folbre is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Associate Editor of the journal Feminist Economics. Her research interests include the interface between feminist theory and political economy, with a particular interest in caring labor and other forms of non-market work.
Naomi Gerstel is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently doing research on job schedules, job leaves and unpaid care work to family and friends.
Bernie Jones is an Associate Professor of Law at Suffolk University. Her interests include teaching law and the family and women and the law, with specific attention on the current limitations of law and legal theory in addressing the needs of women in the workplace.
Joya Misra is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research includes explorations of work-family and welfare policies across welfare states, and how race/ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, and citizenship intersect to shape labor market outcomes for workers.
Maureen Perry-Jenkins is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on the ways in which socio-cultural factors such as race, gender, and social class, shape the mental health and family relationships of employed parents and their children.
Eve Weinbaum is an Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Director of the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on community response to plant closings, organizing, and labor and politics.
Moderators
Lee Badgett is a Professor of Economics and the director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in the economic characteristics of same-sex couples.
Dan Clawson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He specializes in workers’ rights and labor unions, and he is currently studying how workers embrace, resist and negotiate their work hours and schedules.
Miliann Kang is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research is on Asian immigrant women's work in the service economy, focusing on Korean women in the nail salon industry.
Jennifer Lunquist is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lunquist is a social demographer with an emphasis on race and ethnic stratification, family, infant health, and immigration.
