Gender Forum 2005-06
The Gender Forum offers informal, open, interdisciplinary discussion of Faculty work-in-progress which includes gender issues. While the Institute is in temporary accommodation, the Gender Forum will meet in different venues around campus. Please check each entry for details. Seminars run from 5pm to 6pm, unless noted below.
The Gender Forum is open to all Stanford faculty and graduate students.
Fall Quarter 2005
- November 15
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Lisa Wolf-Wendel
Author, The Two Body Problem: Dual Career Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education
"Dual Career Couples in the Academy"
This Fall, the Institute launches a national, multi-year study of dual-career couples in the academy. The project aims to provide practical assistance to universities who need to recruit and retain greater numbers of highly qualified women in leading faculty and administrative positions. Attendees will be invited to participate in a round-table discussion of problems facing, and perceptions of, the dual-career couple.
Winter Quarter 2006
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- January 26
Wallenberg Hall, room 127 -
Yoshiko Matsumoto
Associate Professor of Asian Languages
"Discourse of Elderly Japanese Women" - From common beliefs about Japanese culture and the place of old women, it might be expected that conversations among elderly Japanese women would include many instances of negative self representation, indications of (Confucian) good wife behavior toward their husbands, and gender neutral or asexual expressions, reflecting the speakers' being outside the (hetero)sexual market. Collected actual verbal interactions of elderly Japanese women reveal that the reality goes beyond these stereotypes. Discursive practices of elderly Japanese women will be examined with particular attention to ways in which their age, gender, and individual personae are reflected and performed in their verbal interactions.
- February 28 Wallenberg Hall, room 127
- Melissa Brown
Assistant Professor of Anthropological Sciences
Hill Gates
Independent Scholar
Laurel Bossen
Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, Montreal Hill Gates
"Women's Labor, Footbinding and Household Production in China's Economic Transformation" - How important was female labor to China's pre-industrial economy? How did its deployment change with industrialization? What was its connection with footbinding? Our previous research in inland southern China suggests that footbinding was not driven by cultural ideals of beauty and sexuality and did not limit girls' and women's contributions to China's pre-industrial economy. Rather, it was a form of labor control, encouraging productivity in lucrative forms of light labor that underlay China's massive domestic and international commerce. We propose to test whether the southern pattern holds in north and central China.
Spring Quarter 2006
- April 25 - 12:15 to 1:15pm Wallenberg Hall, Peter Wallenberg Learning Center
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Louise Fortmann
Residential Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute, and Rudy Grah Chair in Forestry and Sustainable Development, University of California, Berkeley.
"So Who's Going to Save the Planet? The Contributions of Gender Analysis to Environmental Sciences"Co-sponsored by the School of Earth Sciences
- The environmental sciences are not biophysical high-tech practices located at a great intellectual distance from mere mortals. Rather they are a set of (sometimes more, sometimes less) interconnected ways of producing knowledge about the environment drawn the humanities and the social and biophysical sciences as well as civil sciences. At their best, their analyses recognize that the biophysical and social structures and processes that produce our environment can not be adequately understood unless they are addressed together. Louise Fortmann will describe how gender analysis contributes to these sciences through framing new questions, producing new knowledge, and developing new policy approaches. She suggests we consider: What's bad for mother is often bad for Mother Nature.
- May 4 - 4:15pm to 5:30pm Lane History Building, Room 307
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Alison Wylie
Michelle R. Clayman Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Professor of Philosophy, Departments of Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Washington
"Standpoint (still) Matters: Research on Women, Work and the Academy"Co-sponsored with the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
- Feminist standpoint theory offers a framework for making sense both of the substantive insights generated by thirty years of research on the status and experience of women in the academic workplace, and of the persistent controversy that surrounds this work, especially when it concerns women in the sciences. The 1999 MIT report on the status of women scientists, juxtaposed with the debate touched off by Larry Summers' remarks a year ago, provides a point of departure for analysis of how a subject matter and a field of research has been constituted that embodies and, at the same time, puts epistemically consequential pressure on standpoint theory-inspired guidelines for doing (social) science as a feminist.
- May 18 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm Wallenberg Hall, Room 120
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Michele Tertilt
Assistant Professor of Economics
"Women: From Wife to Citizen"Co-sponsored by the Department of Economics
- Women's rights appear to be highly related to economic development. This seems
to be true both across countries, where women have most rights in the richest countries,
and in time series data: women have slowly improved their legal position in parallel with
fast improvements in the standard of living. In her research Tertilt investigates this link from an economic perspective.
Specifically, she analyzes the incentives for men to share power with women.Ê
She shows that as education becomes more important, men may want to voluntarily
relinquish some power to women. The reason is that men face a trade-off between how
they would ideally treat their own wives and how they want other women to be treated.
One channel is that while men might want little rights for their own wives, they
may actually care about their daughters and hence want their daughters to have
a better bargaining position with future husbands. A second channel she investigates
is that a wife's education is important for producing high quality children. Then,
a husband might want to give his wife rights to provide better incentives
for her father to invest into his wife's schooling (prior to marriage).
The analysis is based on several asymmetries between men and women: women are more altruistic towards all children than men, women care relatively more about girls than men, and women are more important for children's education than men. In her work, Tertilt investigates which of these asymmetries are most important.
U.S. cross-state data is used to empirically verify the model's predictions. Tertilt shows that states with more education, higher GDP per capita, and lower fertility extended suffrage and other rights to women earlier than states with a lower average education, lower GDP and higher fertility.