Lotte Bailyn

Academic Careers and Gender Equity: Lessons Learned From MIT

This article describes the experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the publication of its report A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT. It starts by describing aspects of the academic career that make it difficult for women, or anyone with responsibilities outside of their academic work. It then outlines three definitions of gender equity based on equality, fairness, and integration, and probes the reasons behind persisting inequities. The MIT results fit well into the first two definitions of gender equity, but fall short on the last. Finally, the article analyses the factors that came together at MIT to produce the outcome described and indicates the lessons learned and those still to be learned.

Toward the perfect workplace

The experience of home-based systems developers is compared with their office-based counterparts in a UK computer firm. The analysis produced two major patterns: the home-based workers find intrinsic value in the job, whereas office-based employees view it more instrumentally and find it interferes with satisfaction on a personal level.

The hybrid career: An exploratory study of career routes in R&D

Abstract This paper deals with an exploratory study of four career routes in the R&D lab. Data stem from interviews with selected employees in a number of different central R&D labs of large successful companies. Analysis points to the idea of a hybrid career as a useful way of thinking about the management of technical employees in R&D. This idea was tested on a number of representatives from technical organizations and revised according to their input.

What Grounded Theory Is…A Critically Reflective Conversation Among Scholars:

Grounded theory (GT) is taught in many doctoral schools across the world and exemplified in most methodological books and publications in top-tier journals as a qualitative research method. This limited view of GT does not allow full use of possible resources and restrains researchers’ creativity and capabilities. Thus, it blocks some innovative possibilities and the emergence of valuable theories, which are badly needed. Therefore, understanding the full reach and scope of GT is becoming urgent, and we brought together a panel of established grounded theory scholars to help us in this endeavor through a reflective conversation.

Redesigning work for gender equity and work–personal life integration

This paper describes a series of intervention projects in the conditions and design of work geared to increasing gender equity in organizations and the ability of employees to integrate their working lives with their personal lives. It shows that approaching work with a work–family lens tends to lead to changes in the temporal conditions of work, in what has come to be known as flexibility in the workplace. With a gender lens, more nuanced aspects of the institutions governing the workplace come into sight allowing the possibility of greater actual change in the way that work is designed and accomplished, thus leading to a better fit between the current workforce and the workplace. Although such intervention projects are being done in multiple countries, the discussion is most relevant to the USA, with its limited – almost non-existent – national support for the reconciliation of work and family needs.

Designing organizational solutions to integrate work and life

In September 1996, Fleet Financial Group and the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute undertook a one‐year pilot project addressing a “dual agenda” – reexamining work processes to achieve positive business outcomes while also helping employees better integrate work responsibilities with life outside of work. The chosen sites for the experiments were a retail/small business banking unit and a portfolio management unit. Radcliffe‐Fleet Project researchers employed two key methods: dual context and action research. Using this methodology, interventions and measures of success of the interventions were developed collaboratively with management and employees. Even in these competitive, deadline‐driven work environments, quantitative measures and qualitative assessments at each site showed a positive relationship between business outcomes and quality of life outcomes. The researchers develop guidelines for companies interested in replication of this project. Several principles are also identified for sustaining the success of effective work‐life integration interventions and institutionalizing the “dual agenda” in the workplace.

Time in careers - careers in time

This article deals first with the temporal patterns of everyday career activities - time in careers - and then with the life-long career line - careers in time. In the former, it introduces the concept of grandmother time and uses telecommuting as an example. In the latter, it builds on the concept of a life-stage responsive career and uses the academic career as an example. The article argues that the accepted notions of time in both daily activities and the life course need serious modification if people are to be productive in the public professional-occupational world as well as in the private world of family and community.

FAMILY CONSTRAINTS ON WOMEN'S WORK

The “immediate objective” of the Conference on Successful Women in the Sciences was “to convene successful professional women . . . who have managed to work actively in predominantly male professions and to evaluate the parameters in their lives that were determining factors in their subsequent careers.” But a second goal, one described by the planners as “ultimate albeit utopian,” is “to salvage the tremendous natural resources currently being wasted by the neglect of talented women in our society.” There is no doubt that the first of these goals has been served. We are learning something about a group of exceptionally talented women. But will knowledge about this group of remarkable women generalize to the vastly larger proportion of les\ exceptional women whose waste of talent is deplored in the statement of the second goal? Partly, of course, it will-and in any case, the determinants of success of such an unusual group are of great interest in their own right. But exceptional talent is always a rare commodity, and if we want to understand the constraint5 operating on less remarkable but still talented, trained, and committed women, we may have to redesign our investigation. Studies of women in the sciences. women actively engaged in the pursuit of a scientific career, deal with women who are exceptional not only in their energies and abilities. both scientific and managerial, but in family circumstances as well. Most studies comparing the careers of men and women in science consistently show that a much larger proportion of the women are not married. Generally, close to half the women scientists are unmarried: the figure for men is closer to ten percent. Further, even when married, the women scientists have fewer children: between one third and one half of such women’s families are childless, whereas the childless men generally comprise no more than 10% of the total group.’ By studying such groups, we may miss the pattern of constraints operating on less exceptional women: women with families who are trained, and willing to participate in professional work, but whose contributions are not on the level of the most accomplished group of either sex. By identifying the constraints on the work of such women we may be able to localize those conditions in need of change, those circumstances which today still require exceptional individual effort to overcome. It is at those points that social intervention will be most fruitful in the pursuit of our “ultimate albeit utopian” goal. For this reason I shall deal here not with a group of extraordinary women, but with a more varied group, a group of women that is defined only by the fact of marriage to educated men. It is among such women that we characteristically find the greatest waste of talent, and the factors that influence their participation or lack of participation in the occupational world may be very different from those that propel the most gifted group. Speaking quite generally, we can identify three overall sources of constraints on women’s professional work: those stemming from the woman herself, those from the professional world, and those from her adult family. The first dependent on her early socialization by parents and teachers, and influenced by such

Effects of cross-cultural experience on national images: a study of Scandinavian students in America1

Experience in a foreign country exposes an individual to a variety of influences that may challenge his existing attitudes and values. He is confronted with new cultural patterns and solutions to life problems; he is expected to take on new roles and experiment with new forms of behavior; he interacts with different people and becomes involved in new groups; he is faced with challenges to some of his preconceptions; and he is able to observe himself in unfamiliar situations. These experiences may lead to varying degrees of attitude change, or to a confirmation of earlier attitudes and images, or, perhaps, to a defensive resistance to change. Changes that do occur may

Rejoinder Moving the Management Field Forward

It has become essential and urgent that significant actors in the management field of research become aware of the current rejection of previously accepted philosophical caricatures. The unrealistic though “tidy” paradigmatic dichotomy, positivism/quantitative/deduction versus interpretivism/qualitative/induction, is being rejected. Instead, a growing and “untidy” consensus is emerging that helps to position grounded theory (GT) in the research landscape. This growing consensus includes perspectives that range from nomothetic to idiographic and highlights data-driven exploratory approaches in opposition to theory-driven confirmatory approaches. While the foundational pillars of GT (emergence, theoretical sampling, and constant comparison) have to be respected when conducting a GT study, there certainly is plenty of room for creativity in the implementation of a data-driven exploratory GT approach. GT is not limited to an all-encompassing method for qualitative or interpretive research: It is much broader ...It has become essential and urgent that significant actors in the management field of research become aware of the current rejection of previously accepted philosophical caricatures. The unrealistic though “tidy” paradigmatic dichotomy, positivism/quantitative/deduction versus interpretivism/qualitative/induction, is being rejected. Instead, a growing and “untidy” consensus is emerging that helps to position grounded theory (GT) in the research landscape. This growing consensus includes perspectives that range from nomothetic to idiographic and highlights data-driven exploratory approaches in opposition to theory-driven confirmatory approaches. While the foundational pillars of GT (emergence, theoretical sampling, and constant comparison) have to be respected when conducting a GT study, there certainly is plenty of room for creativity in the implementation of a data-driven exploratory GT approach. GT is not limited to an all-encompassing method for qualitative or interpretive research: It is much broader and may be applied from various philosophical perspectives that range from nomothetic to idiographic.