Seminar Series Summaries
The Center for Gender in Organizations hosts and participates in many seminars. The following material summarizes some of these important gatherings:
CGO Fall 2008/Spring 2009 Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series
*Sponsored by TJX, Inc.
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
The 2008/09 CGO Fall Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series is sponsored by TJX, Inc.