Archive
work-life balance
Domestic Work, Migration and Gender
Recorded Mar 9, 2011
This forum, organized by DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association and co-sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard Women's Studies, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, engages scholars, policy advocates, activists, and allies about the situation of immigrant women domestic workers with the Philippines as a case study. The forum is moderated by Leah Obias, and introduced by Catherine Sameh, and the list of speakers and topics includes: Neferti Tadiar, Professor and Chair of Women's Studies at Barnard College, discussing globalization, migration and domestic work; Alexa Kasdan, Director of Research and Policy at the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center, discussing community participatory research and organizing work; Cecille Venzon, Member of the Board of Directors of DAMAYAN, giving a worker's testimonial; Terri Nilliasca, Activist and Student at CUNY Law Center, discussing power dynamics at the domestic workplace and the intersections of race, class, gender and immigration; and Linda Oalican, Program Coordinator of DAMAYAN, offering concluding remarks on building a comprehensive migrant domestic workers movement.
ListenValuing Domestic Work
Premilla Nadasen and Tiffany Wiliams
Domestic work—the daily maintenance of households and the labor of caring for children and other dependents—is crucial work. It enables workers to go out into the world, reproduces a new generation of workers and citizens, and sustains relationships among parents, children and families. And yet, it is devalued, degraded and made invisible. Its degradation and invisibility are produced through processes of gendering that naturalize domestic and caring labors as women's work, and racialization that naturalize low-wage, "dirty" jobs as the work of people of color and immigrants. As laborers doing devalued work, domestic workers receive neither adequate wages nor any of the other legal protections many US workers have—sick leave, time off, and collective bargaining. In New York and nationally, workers have organized for better wages, humane treatment and the right to legal protections that cover other US workers.
Read MoreThe Work-Family Dilemma: A Better Balance
A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center and BCRW
Recognizing the need for a forum to discuss work-family issues that focused on issues across the economic spectrum, A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center and The Barnard Center for Research on Women, along with the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California at Hastings, and the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development, planned a summit bringing together leaders and experts (those who have studied these issues and those who advocate for better policies) and the actual stakeholders (labor, business and elected officials in New York City).
Read MoreWomen, Work, and the Academy: Strategies for Responding to ‘Post-Civil Rights Era’ Gender Discrimination
Alison Wylie, Janet Jakobsen, Gisela Fosado
This report is based on the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Conference at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, with keynote speakers Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, and Virginia Valian. The participants in this conference have all made significant contributions to our understanding of the situation women currently face in academia, highlighting the effects of a diffuse set of barriers to women's participation: small-scale, often unintended differences in recognition, support and response that can generate large-scale differences in outcomes for women. This conference was organized so as to take stock of the extant research and interventions and to chart a course forward.
Read MoreValuing Domestic Work
Gisela Fosado and Janet R. Jakobsen
Contributors include Eileen Boris, Christine E. Bose, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Jennifer Klein, Wendy Kozol, Pei-Chia Lan, Premilla Nadasen, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Leah Obias, Ai-jen Poo, Saskia Sassen, Third World Newsreel, and Basia Winograd.
Read MoreWomen and Work: Building Solidarity with America’s Vulnerable Workers
National Domestic Workers Alliance
Last year, BCRW hosted the first National Domestic Workers Alliance conference, bringing together domestic workers from across the country to develop a national agenda, and to discuss how best to educate the public and strategize to achieve fair labor standards for domestic workers, including a living wage, basic benefits, and health care. This year, we […]
Read MoreOff-Ramps and On-Ramps
Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Elizabeth Vargas
Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (top image, left) and news anchor and correspondent Elizabeth Vargas (second image, left) will engage in a discussion on the specific challenges facing professional women as they juggle work and family commitments. In her recent book, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, Sylvia Ann Hewlett takes a critical look at how companies can attract […]
Read MoreWomen in the Workforce
Curated by Suzanna Denison '09
Women have always contributed to the workforce in formal and informal ways, but their labor has not always been recognized. Karl Marx stated that "[women's] labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital." From the social issues concerning sexual harassment to the policy reforms surrounding the wage gap, this exhibit showcases a variety of materials from the BCRW collection that relate to women's participation in the workforce. These documents chronologically span three decades, starting in the early 1970s with documents from MIT's significant conference "Women in Science and Technology," which sparked a discussion of women in higher education and skilled professions, to materials that showcase 1990s women-run, women-owned businesses.
Read MoreNational Domestic Workers Alliance Conference
This June, BCRW joins Domestic Workers United in their educational efforts on fair labor standards for domestic workers in New York, including a living wage, basic benefits and health care. The first National Domestic Workers Alliance conference brings organizations from across the country together to discuss how best to protect the 200,000 domestic workers in […]
Read MoreBreaking Down Barriers: Women and Their Experiences in the Sciences
Alison Williams, Nkechi Agwu, and Peggy Shepard
Despite the fact that enrollment of women studying in the sciences has risen to comparable numbers as that of white men in higher education, women of color are still grossly underrepresented in academic and other science professions. This panel will provide students the opportunity to hear from women who have not only beaten the odds, […]
Read MoreYoung Feminists Take on the Family
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
Contributors include Jennifer Baumgardner, Laura Coats, Rory Dicker, Ayun Halliday, Heather Hewitt, Anastasia Higginbotham, Lisa Johnson, Alison Piepmeier, Vanessa Raney, Amy Richards, Deborah Siegel, and Jessica Valenti.
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