/pdf/unbending-gender-why-family-and-work-conflict-and-what-to-do-3quvxb3q7q.pdf

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It

Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In LEAN IN, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.

每月一書：Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Manhood in America: A Cultural History

Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives. Mary Blair-Loy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2003. 269 pp. ISBN 0-674-01089-2. $39.95 (cloth). Despite the rapid increase in women's educational attainment and enhanced labor force opportunities, women continue to lag behind men in career success. Goldin (2004) estimates that only 21%-27% of recent cohorts of college-educated women achieve "work and family" success (babies and well-paid careers) by midlife; Mary Blair-Loy, in Competing Devotions, helps us understand why. Based on in-depth interviews with 56 women in top executive positions in the finance industry and with 25 women who left these high-powered careers to focus on children and family, she illuminates the factors that impede gender equality in the labor market and the home even among those with the greatest resources and ability. According to Blair-Loy, two powerful schema help define the options of high-achieving women: the schema of "devotion to work" and "devotion to family." Schema operate at both the social and individual level: They are powerful not only because they offer shared understanding about how the world works and how it should work but also because they become internalized by the individual. The dilemma for high-achieving women is that they are caught between the widely shared belief that their profession is a calling, but so is motherhood. Under the devotion to work schema, market work is more than a job, it is a vocation. Work in these high-powered finance jobs requires single-minded devotion. In its extreme, only those who devote themselves totally to the job are worthy of the rise to the top. On the other hand, an equally powerful devotion to family schema sees motherhood in much the same light, as a life's work to which a woman must give herself over. One cannot be a "good mother" part time, and it is assumed that biology makes women, not men, the best caregivers of children. Because time is finite, it is difficult-indeed impossible for the most zealous adherents of both-to combine work and family. Fully two thirds of the 56 women in Blair-Loy's sample of top finance executives do not have children. Blair-Loy sees these women as conformists; they do not challenge the devotion to work schema by trying to combine highpowered careers with childrearing. Instead, they forego becoming mothers. On the other side, the women who have completely given up careers to rear children also do not challenge either schema but rather reinforce the notion that occupational achievement and good mothering are incompatible. Interestingly, views of what children need differ for those who devote themselves to family versus those who continue in high-powered careers while also rearing children. …

Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives

Understanding and remedying women's underrepresentation in majority-male fields and occupations require the recognition of a lesser-known form of cultural bias called masculine defaults Masculine defaults exist when aspects of a culture value, reward, or regard as standard, normal, neutral, or necessary characteristics or behaviors associated with the male gender role Although feminist theorists have previously described and analyzed masculine defaults (eg, Bem, 1984; de Beauvoir, 1953; Gilligan, 1982; Warren, 1977), here we define masculine defaults in more detail, distinguish them from more well-researched forms of bias, and describe how they contribute to women's underrepresentation We additionally discuss how to counteract masculine defaults and possible challenges to addressing them Efforts to increase women's participation in majority-male departments and companies would benefit from identifying and counteracting masculine defaults on multiple levels of organizational culture (ie, ideas, institutional policies, interactions, individuals) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Masculine defaults: Identifying and mitigating hidden cultural biases.

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Robert W. Livingston

Papers

Work as a Masculinity Contest