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Working Lives: Renegotiating Public and Private

Introduction to the Series

In this symposium, we seek to continue discussions begun in WFF’s 2003-2004 seminar series, “Structures of Work and of Families.” That series generated great interest and energy around issues of work/life balance in the university setting. In this series, we shift the focus toward national and international contexts. Where past sessions have looked at how parents and other family members negotiate the relationship between the joys and the demands of family life and work life, here we will examine ideas of public and private spheres that govern those negotiations. How do contemporary concepts of individual and collective responsibility impact the work/life policies that we envision? How does one change those over-arching ideas in order to effect change in the workplace? How do we articulate our collective vision, and who is responsible for that change?

We incorporate a mix of scholarship and policy-relevance to craft a program with appeal to many constituencies in the university. Speakers consider current policies and change initiatives in the areas of social security and pensions, healthcare, and child and dependent care. We will focus not only the balancing acts of parents with small children, but also analysis of the ways in which individuals balance care for themselves, their parents, and others in their lives and how society balances care for its citizens.

Streaming Video from Working for Care: Families and the Workplace

Streaming Video from Working for Care: Families and the Workplace, the third session of this year’s seminar series, co-sponsored by Yale ACS, Yale Law Women, and the Yale WorkLife Program, is now available for those who couldn’t join us on February 28. (You need RealPlayer to view the video, which you can get here.)

Surviving after Work: Pensions and Social Security 

October 5, 2005
Cosponsored by Yale WorkLife Office

  • Kim Gandy, President, National Organization of Women
  • Karl Ulrich Mayer, Director, Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course, Professor, Sociology Department, Yale University
  • Robert Shiller, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics, Yale University
  • Sharon Oster, (moderator) Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics & Management, Yale University

As the step out of our working lives, social security and pensions become primary issues.  Within the context of the United States, we look at issues of privatization and the long-term solvency of traditional Social Security benefits. We place this national discussion in a comparative conversation with global perspectives on occupational structures.   How might national changes benefit or harm persons of varied socio-economic background? What social structures bear on how pension and social security systems are designed? What options can be collectively put forward to address how the work done in our lives ensures security? 

 

Taking the Series Home, Brown Bag Discussion

October 6, 2005

In collaboration with Women Mentoring Women and the WorkLife Program, the WFF will hold brown bag discussions on the day following the seminar. This is an opportunity for members of the university community to come together informally to discuss work-life issues and to continue the discussion raised by the panelists during the seminar. This will also be a time to shift the focus locally to the Yale community and how “Working Lives: Renegotiating Public and Private” affects us as individuals. Please come prepared with your questions and comments.

Recommended Readings and Resources

Placement on the readings and resources list does not constitute and endorsement of the materials by the WFF or Yale University.

Web Resources

American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) - Social Security Network

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Economic Policy Institute

Institute for Women’s Policy Research

International Labour Office, Geneva

National Organization of Women

Independent Articles

How Health Works Out: Healthcare Challenges throughout the Lifecycle 

November 16, 2005
Cosponsored by Yale WorkLife Office

  • Sherry A.M. Glied, Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
  • Jacob Hacker, Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University
  • Jennifer Ruger, Assistant Professor, Division of Global Health, Yale University
  • Carolyn Mazure, (moderator) Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University

This session addresses a variety of health infrastructures and their effectiveness in creating health throughout the lifecycle.  In a global context, health disparities continue to grow often disproportionately affecting women, children and the elderly.  How can burdens of care be managed by addressing issues of access (coverage, cost, location, availability)?  How do current national and global government-provided health systems and funding impact healthy lives? What possibilities exist for reform and what social values play a role in prioritizing future plans? 

 

Taking the Series Home, Brown Bag Discussion

November 17, 2005

In collaboration with Women Mentoring Women and the WorkLife Program, the WFF will hold brown bag discussions on the day following the seminar. This is an opportunity for members of the university community to come together informally to discuss work-life issues and to continue the discussion raised by the panelists during the seminar. This will also be a time to shift the focus locally to the Yale community and how “Working Lives: Renegotiating Public and Private” affects us as individuals. Please come prepared with your questions and comments.

Recommended Readings and Resources

Placement on the readings and resources list does not constitute and endorsement of the materials by the WFF or Yale University.

Web Resources

Working for Care: Families and the Workplace

February 28, 2006
Cosponsored by Yale WorkLife Office, American Constitution Society, Yale Law Women

  • Kathleen Christensen, President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
  • Chai Feldblum, Professor of Law, Georgetown University
  • Nina Pillard, Professor of Law, Georgetown University
  • Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California-Hastings College of Law
  • Reva Beth Siegel, (moderator) Nicholas deB Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale University Law School

This session will consider child care and other related issues affecting individuals as they balance the demands of their work and family lives. In addition to looking at how parents and other family members negotiate the relationship of family life and work life, we will examine understandings of public and private spheres that govern those negotiations. How do contemporary concepts of individual and collective responsibility impact work/life policies? How can legal and policy interventions create more family friendly work relations and better name discrimination biases? To what extent are our goals shared or conflicting, and if so, can different visions be reconciled?

Recommended Readings and Resources

Placement on the readings and resources list does not constitute and endorsement of the materials by the WFF or Yale University.

Web Resources

Numerous web resources are available on this topic. We have noted only a few, though many link to each other and further investigation as well as report summaries can be found on the websites in PDF format.

Speaker Bios

Kathleen Christensen is Director of Program on the Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in NYC. Dr. Christensen has published extensively on the changing nature of work and its relationship to the family. Her books include Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition (Cornell University Press, 1998); Turbulence in the American Workplace (Oxford University Press, 1991); Women and Home-based Work: The Unspoken Contract (Henry Holt, 1988); and The New Era of Home-based Work: Directions and Policies (Westview Press, 1988). Dr. Christensen has served as a consultant to American businesses interested in rethinking their staffing and scheduling arrangements for employees and regularly serves as an advisor to federal and state committees on work-family issues. She has also served on a number of national work-family advisory boards.

Chai Feldblum is the Co-Director of Workplace Flexibility 2010. She is responsible for overseeing the strategy, legislative lawyering, policy research, media, and constituent outreach components of the effort. Professor Feldblum joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in 1991 and established the Federal Legislation Clinic in 1993. Feldblum coined the term "legislative lawyer" to describe a lawyer equally skilled in law and politics who can research, draft and negotiate legislation and administrative regulations. She has specialized in civil rights law with an emphasis on disability rights and gay rights, and on the legislative process. A leading scholar and speaker on gay and lesbian issues, AIDS, and disability, Professor Feldblum has been actively involved in federal legislative issues such as challenging the military’s ban on service by LGBTQ individuals, opposing anti-gay and anti-AIDS amendments, and serving as lead drafter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Kim Gandy is President of the National Organization for Women and Co-Chair of NCWO's Women and Social Security Task Force. The task force published, “Strengthening Social Security for Women: A Report from the Working Conference on Women and Social Security” (1997). NOW continues to work and organize around the issue of women and social security in the U.S. As President, Gandy is the CEO, CFO and principal spokesperson for the organization. As Executive Vice President, Gandy was responsible for NOW's legislative agenda and litigation docket. In the legislative arena, Gandy served on the drafting committees for two groundbreaking federal laws:  the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which gave women the right to a jury trial and monetary damages in cases of sex discrimination and sexual harassment, and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which has dramatically decreased the daily violence at abortion clinics. Prior to taking on a national post at NOW, Gandy had been active in women's rights in Louisiana for more than a decade, using her skills as an organizer and an attorney to advance issues of importance to women.

Sherry A.M. Glied is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In 1992-1993, she served as a Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, under both President Bush and President Clinton. In the latter part of her term, she was a participant in President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force. Professor Glied’s principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. Her research on health policy has focused on the financing of health care services in the U.S. She is an author of recently published articles and reports on managed care, women’s health, child health, and health insurance expansions. Her book on health care reform, Chronic Condition, was published by Harvard University Press in January 1998. She is a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award through which she has been studying the U.S. employer-based health insurance system. She is currently conducting research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund on the characteristics of uninsured Americans and on strategies to expand health insurance coverage. She holds a B.A. in economics from Yale University, an M.A. in economics from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Jacob Hacker, Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale, is a Fellow with the New America Foundation. He continues to work on U.S. social policy, looking at the relationship between public social programs and private welfare benefits provided by employers and nonprofits and the effects this public-private interrelationship has on family well-being and income dynamics. In his current research, he seeks to shed new light on the development and future of U.S. social policy by examining long-term household income data, asking whether public and private transfers are better or worse than they once were at protecting American families against the financial costs of such major life events as unemployment, family dissolution, disability, and sickness. He is also the author of two books: The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security (Princeton, 1997) and The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge, 2002).

Carolyn Mazure, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University anddirector of Women’s Health Research at Yale, an interdisciplinary program focusing on sex differences in health and disease. She also leads several National Institutes of Health-funded initiatives on women and health. Her research and writing focuses on factors determining illness onset and treatment response, particularly in depression and addictive disorders. Carolyn Mazure joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 1982 after completing her postdoctoral training at Yale University. She has been the Clinical Director of the Adult Inpatient Psychiatry Service and the Chief Psychologist for the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital.  Her research efforts have focused on predictors of illness onset and treatment response, particularly in depression and, more recently, in addictive disorders.

Karl Ulrich Mayer is Chair of the Sociology Department and Director of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale University. Until 2005 he was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, heading the Center for Sociology and the Study of the Life Course. He was born in Eybach, Germany and received his training in Sociology at the University of Tubingen, Gonzaga University (BA, 1966), Fordham University (M.A., 1967), the University of Constance (Dr., 973), and the University of Mannheim (Habilitation, 1977). Prior to his arrival at the Max Planck Institute in 1983, he held positions at the University of Mannheim as Program and Executive Director of the National Survey Research Center and as Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College. Oxford.Dr. Mayer also served as Section Editor of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences which was published in 2001. From 1996 until 2004 he was co-editor of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. He is a Member of the European Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Natural Sciences (Leopoldina) and of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Founding Member of the European Academy of Sociology, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course in 1999. Dr. Mayer's Research is in the areas of social stratification and mobility, sociology of aging and the life course, social demography, occupational structures and labor market processes, and methods of survey research.

Sharon Oster, Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics & Management at the Yale School of Management, specializes in competitive strategy, microeconomic theory, industrial organization, the economics of regulation and antitrust, and nonprofit strategy. She has taught at the Yale School of Management since its founding in 1974. She has written extensively on the regulation of business and competitive strategy. Professor Oster's book, Modern Competitive Analysis, used widely at management schools, integrates a broad range of views in its analysis of management strategy and emphasizes an economic approach to strategic planning. Her second book, Strategic Management for Nonprofit Organizations, takes the same economic approach to managing nonprofit organizations. Professor Oster has consulted widely to private, public, and nonprofit organizations.

Nina Pillard is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law School. After clerking and serving as the Marvin M. Karpatkin fellowship at the ACLU, Ms. Pillard worked for several years as an employment discrimination lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. She served in the U.S. Department of Justice as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel. She was lead Supreme Court counsel for plaintiff William Hibbs in Nevada v. Hibbs, which sustained the full range of Family and Medical Leave Act remedies for state workers against a constitutional challenge. Her teaching areas include Constitutional Law, and Employment Theory, Law, and Policy. Her recent article considers the role of equality rights in reconciling work-family conflict.

Jennifer Prah Ruger is an Assistant Professor in the Yale School of Epidemiology and Public Health. Her research focuses on the political economy of health and include the economic evaluation of addiction programs and emergency and humanitarian services; health, health systems and development; and health and social justice. She has co-authored a WHO report that examined the microeconomic and macroeconomic linkages between health and development and recently received a career development award (K-01) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study economic evaluations of addiction services.

Robert J. Shiller is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, and fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. He has written on financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, statistical methods, and on public attitudes, opinions, and moral judgments regarding markets. His 1989 book Market Volatility is a mathematical and behavioral analysis of price fluctuations in speculative markets. His 1993 book Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society's Largest Economic Risks proposes a variety of new risk-management contracts, such as futures contracts in national incomes or in real estate that would permit the management of risks to standards of living. His book Irrational Exuberance is an analysis and explication of speculative bubbles, with special reference to the stock market and real estate. His book The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century is an analysis of an expanding role of finance, insurance, and public finance in our future.

Reva Beth Siegel is Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law and Professor of American Studies at the Yale University. She writes and teaches about constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, legal history and inequality from diverse disciplinary perspectives. She is co-editor, with Catharine A. MacKinnon, of Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (Yale University Press, 2004). In her work, Professor Siegel often employs the methods of legal history to explore contemporary questions of civil rights law. Her journal articles analyze the modernization of gender and racial status law during the 19th and 20th centuries in areas ranging from abortion and domestic violence to voting rights, affirmative action, and federalism. Much of her recent work draws on the civil rights conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s to examine the life of the Constitution outside the courts–in Congress, and in social movements seeking constitutional change. As faculty chair of Yale’s chapter of the American Constitution Society, has been working on a variety of projects concerning the Constitution in 2020.

Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law at University of California-Hastings College of Law, is a prize-winning author and expert on work/family issues, is the author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Founding Director of WorkLife Law (WLL), she is also Co-Director of the Project on Attorney Retention. She has played a leading role in documenting workplace bias against mothers. Her "Beyond the Maternal Wall: Relief for Family Caregivers Who Are Discriminated Against on the Job," 26 Harvard Women's Law Review 77 (2003), (co-authored with Nancy Segal), was prominently cited in Back v. Hastings on Hudson Union Free School District, 2004 U.S. App. Lexis 6684 (2d Cir. April 7, 2004). She also has played a central role in organizing social scientists to document maternal wall bias, notably in a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues (2004), which she co-edited with Monica Biernat and Faye Crosby. Her current work focuses on social psychology, and on how work/family conflict affects families across the social spectrum, with a particular focus on how caregiving issues arise in union arbitrations. For more information visit www.worklifelaw.org and www.pardc.org. Professor Williams earned her B.A. in history from Yale University, her Master's Degree in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

 
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