CGO Speaker Series and Seminars
The Center for Gender in Organizations hosts many speakers and seminars. The following material summarizes some of these important gatherings:
CGO Fall 2009/Spring 2010 Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series
*Sponsored by The TJX Companies, Inc.
Fall 2009 Speaker Series Lineup:
December 1, 2009 "Creating Predictable Time Off in a 24/7 World"
Speaker: Leslie Perlow, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Harvard Business School
Time: 4:30pm –
6:00pm, Reception to follow 6:00pm – 6:30pm
Place: M222, School
of
Service professionals work long hours and are expected to make work
their top priority at all times. If something comes up, they stay late.
When not at work, they check their BlackBerries. Of the 1,000
professionals we surveyed, 92% worked 50 or more hours a week and
nearly half that group turned in 65-plus-hour weeks. If you add time
spent monitoring work while not actually at work, nearly a quarter of
the sample was spending 100-plus hours a week on the job.
More than the long hours, though, it is the unpredictability of the
work that takes a toll. Individuals find themselves unable to make
personal plans. Yet they put up with the demands, believing that to be
successful in a professional service firm, you have to be accessible
and willing to jump into action whenever called. 80% considered this
responsiveness necessary for the firm’s success and for their own.
But, is being “always on” fundamental to client service work? To
explore this question, I chose a “hard” test case—one of the world’s
leading consulting firms. Over the past four years, more than 75 teams
have participated in a predictable-time-off experiment: Each team
member is required to take one scheduled day or night off per week for
the duration of the client engagement (usually 3-6 months). During
their time off, individuals are expected to totally disconnect, neither
working nor checking voicemails or emails.
The results have been powerful. The participants benefit, often more
than they expected. Moreover, the team effort to ensure the highest
quality work and 24/7 client coverage, even while members have
predictable time off, has generated a range of second-order benefits
for the work process. These findings have important implications not
only for individuals’ lives outside of work but also for firms striving
to provide the highest standard of client service.
October 20, 2009 "Workplace Flexibility in Its Interpersonal Context"
Speaker: Assistant Professor Spela Trefalt
In order to deal with the prevalent work-nonwork conflict and its negative consequences, more and more organizations offer their employees formal and informal workplace flexibility, the ability to determine when, where, and for how long they work. Many individuals, however, find it challenging to enact these arrangements. In this presentation, Professor Špela Trefalt will present her findings from a qualitative study conducted in a large U.S. law firm, focusing on attorneys’ daily enactment of workplace flexibility. She found that when attorneys made informal flexible deals and when they used formal flexibility, arranged for with the firm, they attended to their relationships with colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, and clients. This sometimes facilitated and other times impeded attorneys’ ability to enact the desired flexibility. Professor Trefalt will show that organizations tend not to take this fundamentally interpersonal nature of flexibility into account. She will provide some suggestions and lead us in discussion of the implications of these findings for design and implementation of organizational flexibility policies that are perceived as usable and for enhancing organizational support for informal flexible arrangements.
September 15, 2009 "Men, Women, and Practicing Gender at Work: Saying & Doing vs. Said & Done"
Speaker: Professor Patricia Yancey Martin
Most organizational theories consider gender irrelevant. In a meritocracy, it is assumed that performance criteria are all that is used to assign jobs, evaluate outcomes, and reward people with promotions, raises, opportunities and authority. Yet, decades of research show that organizations are, indeed, gendered. Gender – not only the sex of individuals but also gender relations, expectations and norms – extensively affect how people are assigned, treated, and evaluated at work. How can that be? Patricia Martin whose early work with David Collinson on “mobilizing masculinity” sheds light on the inner workings of gendering processes, answers this question and applies it to the 21st century workplace. She offers a framework for understanding and analyzing dynamics in the workplace that characterizes gender as a social institution. Professor Martin will offer an overview of the framework and identify some new phenomena--such as transnational business masculinity–and help us apply the framework to our own institutions and work situations.
Dr. Patricia Yancey Martin Bio
Dr. Patricia Yancey Martin is Emerita Professor of Sociology at Florida State University (Tallahassee Florida USA) [with previous stints as Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Delaware, Ohio State University, University of Tennessee, Universita degli Studi di Trento (in Italy), Ruhr University (in Germany), Gothenburg University (Sweden), and University of Illinois at Chicago (USA)]. Her interests include the practices of gender at work, sociology of the body, and women’s movements. A monograph on organizations responding to sexual assault appeared in 2005 (Rape Work: Victims, Gender & Emotions in Organization & Community Context (2005) and a book (with Myra Marx Ferree) on feminist organizations (Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement) in 1995. Recent work includes ‘Gender as Practice: Further Thoughts on Reflexivity,’ Gender, Work and Organization 13(3; 2006), ‘Gender as Social Institution,’ Social Forces 82 (June 2004); ‘“Said and done” vs. “saying and doing”: Gendering practices, practicing gender at work,’ Gender & Society 17 (2003), ‘Gender bias and feminist consciousness among judges and lawyers: A standpoint theory analysis,’ SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (3; 2002, with J. Reynolds and S. Keith), “‘Mobilizing Masculinity’: Women’s Experiences of Men at Work,” Organization 8 (2001). Martin also has recent papers on violence against women, with a focus on organizational responses to this aspect of gender relations. In all, she has written 90+ articles, two books, and edited a third book. She served as chair of her department before she retired and she remains active in the American Sociological Association, the Southern Sociological Society, the European Group on Organization Studies, Sociologists for Women in Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Martin received the Jocher-Beard Distinguished Contributions to Gender Award from the Southern Sociological Society in 1999, the Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award from Sociologists for Women in Society in 2001, the Best Paper Award from the Journal of Human Relations in 2002, the Distinguished Article Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Sex and Gender in 2004, the Feminist Activism Award from Sociologists for Women in Society in 2006, the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association in 2007, and the Roll of Honor Award from the Southern Sociological Society in 2008. She was Marie Jahoda Distinguished Feminist Professor of Women’s Studies at Ruhr University (Bochum, Germany) in 2007 and a Fulbright Scholar in Sweden in spring 2008. Martin serves as Associate editor for Gender, Work, and Organization and is now co-editing the Handbook on Gender, Work, and Organization. Finally, she is writing a book (with S. Bird) on Gender and Organizations.
Spring 2009 Speaker Series Lineup:
May 12, 2009 "How to Make Change: Lessons Learned from a Seven-Year Experiment"
Speakers: Shifra Bronznick and Didi Goldenhar of Advancing Women Professional and the Jewish Community
Gender equity interventions begin with an honest assessment of current conditions followed by customized strategies for change. Shifra Bronznick and Didi Goldenhar, co-authors (with Marty Linsky) of Leveling the Playing Field: Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life, will discuss the experience of leading this change process in the Jewish nonprofit sector where the gender gap in leadership is more pronounced than in other fields. As change management experts, they will discuss how they incorporated a number of different change perspectives, including the CGO framework for gender equity (Kolb, Fletcher, Meyerson, Merrill Sands, and Ely, 1998) and Collaborative Interactive Action Research (Rapoport, Bailyn, Fletcher and Pruitt, 2000) to accelerate progress in a challenging environment. They will give an overview of their approach, describe some of their unique initiatives and reflect on successes and obstacles along the way. Finally they will summarize the key lessons learned from this seven year initiative and lead us in a discussion of how to apply these lessons to our own organizations and institutions.
Shifra Bronznick is a consultant who specializes in creating new initiatives and helping not-for-profit organizations navigate change. Shifra is the founding President of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, and the co-author with Didi Goldenhar and Marty Linsky of the book, “Leveling the Playing Field.” The leadership strategist to the White House Project virtually since its inception, Shifra designed their National Women’s Leadership Summits and a new initiative “Women Rule,” a groundbreaking program launched in partnership with O, the Oprah magazine. Shifra Bronznick is a senior fellow at the NYU Research Center for Leadership in Action at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. Previously, Shifra served as Executive Vice-President of Swig, Weiler & Arnow Mgt. Co., Inc., one of the premier commercial real estate firms in New York.
Didi Goldenhar is a consultant for the nonprofit sector, focusing on leadership development and change initiatives in the areas of education reform, the environment, culture and women’s leadership. She serves as a senior consultant to Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community and is the co-author, with Shifra Bronznick and Marty Linsky of Leveling the Playing Field. She currently advises the NYC Leadership Academy, an innovative incubator to train principals in high-need NYC schools and is a member of the Leading Change Working Group, based at the Hauser Center for Nonprofits at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
April 29, 2009 "Putting conflict in its proper place: a look at outside influences on competition and controversy among women"
Speaker: Dr. Karen L. Proudford, Associate Professor of Management, Morgan State University, Department of Business Administration
Interactions between women in organizational settings are often described as cooperative and collaborative. Alongside this benign view, however, sits the lived-experiences of women as intensely competitive, having powerful ambitions, actively seeking higher status, and as experiencing betrayal, disappointment and frustration in their relationships with other women. This talk examines the influence of cross-gender interactions on the relationships among women, such that conflict originates outside and erupts within woman-to-woman interactions. Implications for building networks of supportive relationships among women, and for establishing a solid base of support for women in leadership, are discussed.
Dr. Proudford's is Associate Professor of Management at Morgan State University. Her research focuses on group and intergroup dynamics, diversity and conflict. She has presented papers on these topics at academic conferences and lectured on the related issues of leadership, organizational growth and change, and employee motivation. Her work has appeared in Group and Organization Management, the Journal of Labor and Employment Law, the Journal of Career Development, The Diversity Factor, and the International Review of Women and Leadership. In addition, she contributed to the volume, Addressing Cultural Issues in Organizations: Beyond the Corporate Context. Dr. Proudford is also affiliated with the Center for Gender in Organizations, SIMMONS Graduate School of Management, Boston, Massachusetts.
March 10, 2009 "The Accumulation of Disadvantage: A Simulation of How Perceptions Advance Women's Leadership"
Speaker: Dr. Barbara S. Lawrence, Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA
Organizations have used a wide range of strategies in an effort to increase the proportion of women in leadership. Understanding which interventions are most effective, however, can be difficult. In this presentation, Professor Barbara Lawrence, drawing on the work she has done with co-authors Jim Blythe and Cathy McGrath, offers a simulation-based approach to reproduce the micro-dynamics of hiring, retention and promotion decisions. Eventually, this simulation will facilitate comparisons of explanatory theories and organizational interventions that produce effective change. This Speaker Series session will include an overview of this exciting new approach, a discussion of the critical simulation parameters, and a chance to think about how to apply this approach to your organization.
*The simulation is based on demographic data from a large commercial organization, including population data on work groups, sample survey data identifying subjects? social networks and data from the local SMA labor force.
Barbara S. Lawrence is Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1983. She received her PhD from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1999 her work with co-authors in Spain and the United States, received the Best Paper Award of the First International Conference of the Ibero-american Academy of Management. She received the 1998 Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.
February 17, 2009 "Board Diversity: Critical Mass for Achieving Change"
Speaker: Alison M. Konrad, Professor of Organzational Behavior at the University of Western Ontario, Corus Entertainment Chair in Women in Management
Interviews with 50 women directors, 12 CEOs, and 7 corporate secretaries of Fortune 1000 firms provide an enticing glimpse behind the closed doors of corporate boardrooms. Board diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, and nationality is clearly having an impact on these powerful corporations. Their stories suggest that achieving board diversity is not easy. Working with a dozen boards of (much) smaller organizations, Alison Konrad, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Western Ontario, will discuss how she experienced many of the challenges first-hand.
January 28, 2009 "Beyond Narrow Bands and Fine Lines"
Speaker: Professor Joyce K. Fletcher, Distinguished Research Scholar and CGO Faculty
Its been over 20 years since the publication of Breaking the Glass Ceiling (1987) and the identification of what authors Ann Morrison, Randall White, and Ellen Van Velsor called the “narrow band” of behavioral options for female leaders. Act too feminine and your competence is questioned which disqualifies you for leadership. Act too masculine and you are seen as aggressive and arrogant which also disqualifies you for leadership. Indeed, the double bind women like Hillary Clinton face when vying for leadership positions was so obvious in this year’s presidential primary that the issue has entered the common vernacular and become conventional wisdom. That we have general agreement on the problem is, of course, good news. Solutions, on the other hand have not fared as well. Advice for women has progressed little beyond how to walk a “fine line” or navigate the labyrinth of leadership these double binds create. In this session Professor Fletcher will use CGO’s “fourth frame perspective” to re-think the double bind in light of leadership issues facing us today. She will offer a new framework to use in identifying strategies for success and engage us in a discussion about how to apply these lessons to our own leadership challenges.
Fall 2008 Speaker Series Lineup:
December 1, 2008 "Making Time for Life in Leadership"
Speaker: Jessica DeGroot, MBA, President and Founder, ThirdPath Institute http://www.thirdpath.org/
In today’s changing world, both men and women crave more balanced lives. Yet so often these work/ life issues are presented only from a women’s point of view. In this session of CGO’s Fall Speaker Series, President and founder of the ThirdPath Institute, Jessica DeGroot, will join us to discuss ways to expand our thinking and consider the issue of work/life balance more broadly - especially its relationship to leadership and career success. Researchers from the ThirdPath Institute have collected data on the ways in which women and men are actively re-designing work, re-designing family and re-designing leadership itself to create more balanced lives. Their data suggest that changes in the definition of good leadership, changes in technology, and new ideas about what it means to do good work, are creating exciting opportunities for innovation and creative thinking about this important issue. Join us for a thought provoking discussion examining these three leverage points for change:
Redesigning work
Redesigning family
Redesigning Leadership
November 5, 2008 "Gender, Culture and Success: How Latina 'cultural scripts' affect the career success of mid-level managers"
Speaker: Evangelina Holvino, Ed.D. , President, Chaos Management, Ltd., and CGO Affiliate http://www.chaosmanagement.com/
One of the hallmarks of the CGO perspective is what we call “gender in all its complexity.” By that we mean that in order to understand the experience of women at work, we must take into account the way different aspects of social identity such as race, ethnicity, age and sexual orientation operate simultaneously to influence gender dynamics in organizations. In this presentation, and celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, Dr. Holvino explores the experience of Latina mid-level managers in Fortune 1000 corporations using the concept of “cultural scripts.” She will explain the concept and describe the way in which these scripts both support and challenge Latinas leadership and career development. Dr. Holvino will also lead a discussion of strategies to increase support and effectiveness for managing the scripts and cultural challenges that rise from diversity in the workplace.
September 15, 2008 "Discussing the Undiscussable: Race Talk, Race Practice and Learning about Race at Work"
Speaker: Erica Foldy, Ph.D, of the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, and CGO Affiliate In many work environments, race and ethnicity tend to be undiscussables, or taboo topics, because they can raise charged and thorny issues and emotions. Yet, research in clinical fields, including counseling psychology and social work, suggests that skillfully engaging race and culture - what is often called “cultural competence” - enhances clinicians’ work with their clients. This presentation explores two elements that are necessary for cultural competence: high color cognizance and strong learning behaviors. Color cognizance is a way of understanding the role of race in an organization’s work. Low color cognizance is the equivalent of color blindness, or the perspective that race and culture are not relevant to the work and should be de-emphasized. Preliminary analysis suggests that a team is culturally competent only if it has both high color cognizance and strong learning behaviors.
CGO Hosts Learning Seminar on Cultural Intervention in Policing
On October 19, 2004, CGO hosted Dr. Joan Eveline of the University of Western Australia and Dr. Michael Booth of Murdoch University (Perth, Australia) for a learning seminar on "Policing Identity, Gender and Process: Cultural Intervention in the Western Australia Police Service." Joan and Michael discussed the process and outcomes of a cultural intervention project they led within an Australian police service. The ambitious goal of the intervention project was to change the male-identified nature of policing. To date over 1,100 police service staff have joined in seven completed action research projects, and outcomes include a women-only leadership development program for both sworn officers and public servants, a mentoring program and staff development fund for women public service officers (unsworn officers), a female assistant commissioner to head the training academy, changes to recruiting and re-employment criteria, the removal of the time-at-rank promotion system which hampered those with family responsibilities, and a high-level implementation committee chaired by the Commissioner of Police. The committee's brief—to develop an inclusionary cultural identity for policing—is supported by the inclusion of senior and junior personnel plus as outsiders the State Equal Opportunity Commissioner and two academics specializing in gender and organization. A paper written by Joan and Michael, reflecting on the on the micropolitics of project ownership, capacity-building, frame-matching and identity at work for these members, the continuing forces ranged against change, and the background effects of a concurrent Royal Commission into police malpractice, will soon be published in the journal Gender, Work and Organization.
Unpacking Leadership: Who Gets to Lead and Why? (2001-2002)
The topic of leadership has received much attention—from the Greeks to Machiavelli to today's management gurus—yet this interest has emphasized some ideas at the expense of others. In our seminar series, we "unpacked" the concept of leadership. We explored both traditional and alternative notions of "leading" and "following" to understand whose interests and what purpose these concepts serve. We heard from a variety of academics and practitioners who challenged conventional wisdom, and expanded our understanding to address such questions as:
- Leadership for what and for whom?
- Who is allowed to lead and why?
- Why do certain models of leadership take hold while others do not?
- How do organizations cultivate leaders?
A Generation of Professional Women in Leadership: Findings from Three New Research Studies
Jill Silverstein, Vice President and Director of Corporate Education, State Street Research and Management Company
Laurie Slavitt, Executive Director, Winds of Change Foundation
Marion Ruderman, Research Scientist, Center for Creative Leadership
Where Does Leadership Lead?: New Ways of Thinking About a Familiar Topic
Mona Harrington, Program Director, Workplace Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alison Bowens, Executive Director, Women's Institute for Leadership Development (WILD)
Patricia Romney, President and Founder, Romney Associates
Kathy Kram, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Boston University
Marion McCollom Hampton, Southwind Associates
Racial Taboos and the Dynamics of Leadership
David Thomas, H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Marion McCollom Hampton, Southwind Associates
Voices from the Field: Leadership for Social Change
Lucia Rayas, President of the Board of Directors, Association for Women's Rights in Development; Regional Policy Advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean, IPAS
Shamillah Wilson, Young Women and Leadership Program Manager, Association for Women's Rights in Development
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Building Alliances Across Differences: 2000 - 2001
Building Alliances Across Differences? was the title of the Center for Gender in Organizations' (CGO) 2000-2001 Seminar Series. In the 1999-2000 Seminar Series, we explored new ways of thinking about constructing alliances in order to help groups in organizations work together to transform their workplaces in ways that advance both equity and effectiveness. In this series, we stepped back from the assumption of building alliances and instead focused on what some of the challenges are to finding ways to create alliances. We asked, who is it that wants to engage in alliance-building, and for what reasons? What are other ways of thinking about working across differences? Our seminar speakers drew on a range of disciplines and expertise to explore potential for and challenges to alliance-building in different arenas and amongst different identity groups.
What Does it Mean to Be Chinese (and Female) in the United States?
Elena Yang, Independent Scholar
Imagine Coexistence: Narratives from Fieldwork in Rwanda
Sara Cobb, Executive Director, Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School
Negotiating the Spirit of the Deal: Economic and Social Contracts in Longer Term Agreements
James Sebenius, Professor, Harvard Business School
Working Toward Multiculturalism: The Case of the Boston Women's Fund
Carmen Chan, Co-Chair of Board, Boston Women's Fund
Jean Entine, Executive Director, Boston Women's Fund
Catherine Joseph, Director of Grants Program, Boston Women's Fund
WomenBridgeRace: The Connections Between Racial Legacies, Intimacy, and the Use of Power
Members of WomenBridgeRace: Rita Andrews, Toni Dunton-Butler, Delyte Frost, and Patricia Wilson
Building Alliances Across Differences: 1999 - 2000
The 1999 CGO conference, Gender at Work, highlighted two barriers to change in organizations around gender equity: 1) the splits and competition between different groups of women (e.g., white women and women of color, gay and straight women, women across hierarchical divides); and 2) the splits and competition between women and men.
In our seminars, we explored new ways to address these barriers in order to promote equity and effectiveness in organizations. Scholars and practitioners of coalition theory, social movements theory, dialogue, and relational practice, to name a few, have experimented with and studied various approaches to building alliances. In each seminar we paired a scholar who focuses on alliance-building in different arenas amongst different identity groups to talk about their work with a practitioner whose work focuses on a particular approach to alliance-building (e.g., dialogue or coalition-building). This approach helped us to generate new ways of thinking about alliance-building with the goal of empowering and mobilizing different groups in organizations to work together to transform their workplace.
Relational Practice: Illustrations from Union Alliance-Building
Jean Baker Miller, Director, Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at Wellesley College
Kris Rondeau, Director of Organizing, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees' Higher Education Division
Mark Chesler, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
Carol Hardy-Fanta, Director of Research, Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts
Michael Piore, Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Karen Proudford, Assistant Professor of Management, Morgan State University
William Gamson, Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Sue Hyde, New England Field Organizer and Director, "Creating Change" Conference, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force