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Working Lives / Lives that Work

WFF continues its exploration of the challenges of working lives. This series of three spring seminars looked at social policy and empirical data from in and outside the U.S. to understand how women and men in different segments of the workforce respond to competing demands.

Working Lives / Lives that Work: Research on Working Women in Japan and the United States

Wednesday April 4, 2007

This panel, relying on political science, anthropological, and sociological research from Japan and the U.S., discussed the ways in which labor markets, household obligations, education, and child care structure work options for women and men in different economies.

The panelists were:

  • Frances Rosenbluth, Professor of Political Science
  • Dhooleka Raj, Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University
  • Glenda Roberts, Visiting Fellow in Anthropology, Yale University and Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of International Relations, at Waseda University in Tokyo
  • Karen Hansen, Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Brandeis University

Frances Rosenbluth discussed structural impediments to female labor force participation in Japan. Dhooleka Raj and Karen Hansen presented on care work, the "blame game," and structural impediments for women in the United States. Glenda Roberts presented qualitative data on women in two corporations in Tokyo, illustrating how difficult it is for Japanese women to "have it all." In contrast to the women in Frances Rosenbluth's study, Roberts examined the strategies of some women who are able to keep their careers after taking childcare leave.

The presentation by Karen Hansen and Dhooleka Raj can be viewed here.
The presentation by Frances Rosenbluth can be viewed here.

 

Speaker Bios

France Rosenbluth is a Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Her research and teaching center on comparative political economy, with a particular focus on Japan and the political economy of gender. She has just completed editing a book entitled The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility (Stanford University Press, forthcoming) and is co-authoring a book with Torben Iversen (Government, Harvard University) on The Political Economy of Gender: How Labor Markets Shape Norms and Limit Female Political Representation. She has also published (with Torben Iversen and David Soskice, "Divorce and the Gender Division of Labor in Comparative Perspective," Social Politics, summer 2005; (with Torben Iversen) "The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross National Variation in the Gender Division of Labor and the Gender Voting Gap," American Journal of Political Science, January 2006; "Work Matters: Female Political Representation in Comparative Perspective" (with Rob Salmond and Michael Thies, forthcoming from Gender and Politics).

See Francis Rosenbluth's presentation from September 2006 Gender Socialization: How Bargaining Power Shapes Social Norms and Political Attitudes

 

Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj focuses on the increasing politicization of ethnicity and religion in neo-liberal nation-states. Her interests include: political anthropology, urban anthropology, gender and families, transnationalism and globalization. Her research and publications explore how ethno-religious minorities involved in transnational migrations transform families and nation-states. Her book Where are you from? Middle Class Migrants in the Modern World (2003, University of California Press) is based on fieldwork with South Asian migrant families in London, England. In India, she has conducted research with Partition Hindu refugee families in Delhi. Furthering her interest in using critical ethnographic enquiry to understand how globalization is changing families and nation-states, she has begun to conceptualize two research projects based on the USA. The first, a pilot project initiated while a fellow at the Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, explores the effects of globalization in suburban America focusing on work-life issues. The second major fieldwork in the US involves Bioterrorism preparedness in key urban sites (conducted with Battelle Memorial Institute, Centers for Public Health and Research Evaluation). Previously, she has also been Visiting Scholar in Women’s Studies at Harvard and earlier held the Smuts Fellowship at The Center of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.

 

Glenda S. Roberts is a Visiting Fellow and Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of International Relations, at Waseda University in Tokyo. She is also an Editorial Board member of the Social Science Japan Journal (U. Tokyo and Oxford University Press), and Treasurer of the Section for East Asian Anthropology in the American Anthropological Association. Her main research interests are gender, work, migration, and population issues, especially in regard to Japan. Books include Staying on the Line: Blue-Collar Women in Contemporary Japan (U. Hawaii Press,1994) and the edited volume with Mike Douglas, Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). She is currently on sabbatical leave at the Department of Anthropology at Yale University for the 2006-07 academic year, writing up research on work/life balance in the corporate world in Tokyo.

Read Glenda S. Robert's Balancing Work and Life: Whose Work? Whose Life? Whose Balance?

Roberts, Glenda S. 2007. “Similar Outcomes, Different Paths: the Cross-national Transfer of Gendered Regulations of Employment.” In Gendering the Knowledge Economy: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Sylvia Walby, Heidi Gottfried, Karen Gottshcalk, and Maria Osawa. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

 

Karen V. Hansen is Professor of Sociology & Women's and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. She teaches courses in feminist theory, sociology of families, women's biography and society, and historical methods. Professor Hansen's most recent book, Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care (Rutgers University Press, 2005), investigates the lives of working families and the networks they construct to help them care for their school-age children. A finalist for The C. Wright Mills Award, its stories vividly illustrate the conflicts, hardships, and triumphs of four families that span the economic spectrum (working class, middle class, professional middle class, and upper class). It examines how working parents manage the crisis of care -- the shortage of responsible adults with sufficient time to attend to the needs of their kin -- that is structurally produced and individually experienced. Not-So-Nuclear Families details the complex relationships between the adults in the ways they sustain a safe environment for their children and cultivate emotional and practical support for the parents. A network constructed around care for children quickly broadens to a system of sharing and trading about all aspects of life. Sociological studies of child rearing that focus exclusively on nuclear families assume that they are isolated. Those portraits, so gripping in the U.S. cultural imagination, inadequately capture the ebb and flow of people in and out of children's lives. Hansen also also written Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England, and Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader.

 

Working Lives / Lives that Work: American Social Policy

Progressive Family Values Conference

Presented by the Yale Law School American Constitution Society
Co-sponsored by the National American Constitution Society and Yale's Women Faculty Forum

Saturday April 21, 2007

The Women Faculty Forum joined with the Yale Law School’s chapter of the American Constitution Society to explore the meanings, confluence, and implications of the terms ‘progressive,’ ‘family,’ and ‘values.’ Articulating commitments to this language, the common values, and policies which signify progressive family values has proven difficult, frustrating, and ineffective on a national level. This conference was an effort to better address these issues and featured the following confirmed speakers:

  • Rosa DeLauro Nine-term Congresswoman for Connecticut’s Third District whose work focuses on issues of economic insecurity, child care, educational quality and access, and health care.
  • Ariela Dubler Vice-Dean and Professor of Law at Columbia University.
  • Mark Greenberg Director of Social Policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and Executive Director of the Task Force on Poverty at the Center for American Progress.
  • Jacob Hacker Professor of Political Science and Resident Fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University
  • Karen Kornbluh Policy Director for Senator Barack Obama
  • George Lakoff Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and Senior Fellow at The Rockridge Institute
  • Robert Lerman Senior Fellow in Labor and Social Policy at the Urban Institute and Professor of Economics at American University
  • Nina Pillard Professor of Law at Georgetown University
  • Judy Scott General Counsel to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and a partner at James & Hoffman
  • Neera Tanden Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Center for American Progress and Policy Director for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton

View the poster for the event.

 
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