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A funny thing happened on the way to gender equality

In her recent talk, “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled,” sociology Professor Paula England pointed out that since the 1970s women have increasingly majored in previously male-dominated fields like business, marketing, and accounting. Yet, there has been little increase in men majoring in traditionally female fields like English, education, and sociology.

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The new F-word

English professor, Michele Elam, noticed very few of her students felt comfortable using the word feminism, and still fewer identified themselves as feminists. In her talk, “The New F Word (Feminism) and Beyond: Gender, Race, and other Classroom Unspeakables,” Elam argues for moving these topics into “teachables” and shows how race and gender function as critical intellectual tools for social and literary analysis.

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Feminism, not dead again

katha_pollittKatha Pollitt, the award-winning writer for The Nation, is one of the most popular and widely read feminist pundits in the country. Pollitt will speak at Stanford on February 23, 2011 in a talk titled, “What Do You Mean I’m Not Equal Yet? Women in the 21st Century.” Her talk will touch upon a variety of issues from the status of women to the continuing importance of feminism to women of all ages.

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For Women Leaders, Body Language Matters

Deborah Gruenfeld Deborah Gruenfeld of the Stanford Graduate School of Business had some sobering news to share with a group of high-level women executives and entrepreneurs. “When it comes to leadership,” Gruenfeld told the group, “there are very few differences in what men and women actually do and how they behave. But there are major differences in perception. Men and women doing the same things are perceived and evaluated differently.”

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Moving beyond macho

Williams (2) - edit Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law and Founder/Director, Center for WorkLife Law at Hastings College of the Law, points to dated masculine conventions that dominate the workplace as a major barrier to both women and men. Encouraging men to break from these roles, she argues, will do much to advance both work-life balance and gender equality.

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