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MARIAL CENTER COLLOQUIUM Louise Marie Roth (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona) Having It All? Workplace Culture and Work-Family Conflict Wednesday, October 11, 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m Wall Street relies on a myth of meritocracy, claiming to be a citadel of pure economics where individuals are paid for performance and evaluated objectively. Accordingly, people with similar qualifications and performance should receive similar pay, regardless of gender or family status. But this is a myth – assumptions about gendered family roles are actually foundational to Wall Street’s culture. The workaholic organizational culture of Wall Street clashes with the broader cultural assignment of childrearing responsibilities to women. Workplace time norms equate time on the job with commitment to the job and demand all-encompassing career devotion. These norms converge with the gender division of family work and gender discrimination to create a set of institutionalized obstacles to gender equality. A culture of long hours, gender norms from the broader culture, childcare arrangements among Wall Street workers, and maternity discrimination interact to produce inequality. In her new book Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street, sociologist Louise Marie Roth compares the experiences of men and women who work on Wall Street and concludes that America’s financial industry continues to discriminate, despite a flurry of high-profile sex discrimination lawsuits in the 1990s. Dr. Roth finds not only that women earn an average of 29 percent less but also that they are shunted into less lucrative career paths, are not promoted, and are denied the best clients, according to Princeton University Press, which published Dr. Roth’s book. Selling Women Short reveals the subtle structural discrimination that occurs when the unconscious biases of managers, coworkers, and clients influence performance evaluations, work distribution, and pay. In their own words, Wall Street workers describe how factors such as the preference to associate with those of the same gender contribute to systematic inequality. Among those endorsing the book are sociologist Kathleen Gerson, co-author of The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality. “This first-rate work is poised to join a small circle of influential books tackling the question of how gender inequality persists amid the avowedly merit-based segments of the American economy,” Gerson says. “ Clearly presented and written in an engaging style, Selling Women Short is the only book I have seen that compares 'successful' and 'derailed' women and men, thus making it possible to disentangle the influence of gender from other, more 'gender neutral' factors that shape the career trajectories of workers in high-powered jobs.” Louise Marie Roth is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. Her primary research interest is gender stratification, especially in employment, organizations, and law. Recent articles from her book research have also appeared in Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Sociological Perspectives , The Sociological Quarterly and Sociological Inquiry. In the near future, Dr. Roth expects to conduct a cross-national study of reproduction and childbirth from an organizational perspective, especially as related to the organization of health insurance, medical malpractice insurance, and malpractice law.
DIRECTIONS TO THE MARIAL CENTER The MARIAL Center is located on the 4th floor of the main building of Emory's Briarcliff Campus,
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