Gender issues

Today at the Harvard Business School's Gender & Work Symposium there were several talks addressing how aspects of organizational structure and culture affect women's relationships with one another and their tendency to embrace or distance themselves from their identity as women. Few Women at the Top Robin Ely presented her dissertation research on White professional women in large law firms in which she asked: Does it matter how many women are in senior ranks for the relationships among women lower down in the organization? She expected there to be more supportive peer and hierarchical relationships among women in more sex integrated firms and that the quality of within- group relationships would depend on where that group is positioned in the organizational hierarchy. Her results showed that: When the proportion of women in senior management was relatively high , women felt indifferent or good about being a woman, believed senior women were good role models, and reporte

Paula Giddings At today's  Harvard Business School's Gender and Work Symposium ,  Paula Giddings ,  Sandra Finley , and Jennifer Richeson  gave fascinating talks about the traps that feminists have fallen into that pit race against gender to prevent White women and Black women from banding together in a united front for women's progress.   Giddings, Professor of African-American History at Smith College, discussed how suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Susan B. Anthony , and Lucretia Mott ignored  Ida Wells-Barnett 's call in 1903 for women to work together across racial lines. Instead the suffragettes followed a policy of expediency to get Southern White women on board by arguing that elite White women should have had the right to vote before Black men, or " Sambo ." After Title VII of the Civil Rights Act passed, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report authored by Patrick Moynihan titled  The Negro Family: A Case to National Action . The report b