What Does the Research Teach Feminists about the Possibility of Organizational Change?

At the winter meeting of SWS [Sociologists for Women in Society] in 2019, Barbara [Risman] heard Julia [McQuillan] give her SWS Feminist Lecture and was totally fascinated. The U.S. National Science Foundation had been spending millions of dollars each year to promote gender transformation on college campuses, hoping to increase the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. What had we learned about the organizational policies that were changed to overcome gender bias? What interventions made the most change? What did not seem to make any difference? Julia presented data on 19 years (at the time) at her own school, where she had been a major player in the feminist change agenda. When she gave the Feminist Lecture, she also talked about the potential for valuable insights from the many feminist sociologists who were working on institutional change projects with and without ADVANCE funding. . . . This special issue shows that the insights from feminist sociological research are vital for attempts to create more equitable universities. We must change structures and policies. But we should also pay close attention to how those policies begin to change cultural logics, and how that cultural change can simmer undetected for years. And then those seeds planted with ADVANCE grants can produce fruit in new organizational policies years later

A review essay on Lisa Wade's American Hookup and Mark Regenerus' Cheap Sex: Is Recreational Sex a Social Problem? Or what’s wrong with kid’s today?

This is a review essay about sexuality in contemporary American society based on a review of two new books, American Hookup by Lisa Wade and Cheap Sex by Mark Regenerus. The review is forthcoming in Contemporary Sociology

The Complex Interventions Necessary to Push the Academy toward Gender Equality. A Commentary on the Symposium “Don’t Fix Women, Fix Academia? Gender Inequality in National Academic Contexts”

Women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines across the globe. For decades this has been recognized as a serious problem, and many governments have funded programs that address the issue. The earliest projects, towards the end of the 20th Century, attempted to “fix women” to help them succeed. These projects failed because the causes of women’s exclusion were not simply their socialization, but rather systematic institutional discrimination. Current attempts to include women in scientific disciplines focus on re-designing the institutions. In my brief introduction to the symposium, I introduce a way to think about gender that can help us evaluate what kinds of change each essay is describing and integrate their insights and findings so that they can inform future work in the area. To do this, I introduce the framework that suggests we must think about gender as a social structure. I then use the gender as a structure framework to briefly summarize the findings of each essay and suggest directions for the future for each project. I conclude with a summary of what we have learned overall from the essays in the Symposium and how this might inform future efforts at gender transformation in universities world-wide

Gender Matters: Bringing in a Gender Structure Analysis. A Comment on “Paternal and Maternal Gatekeeping? Choreographing Care-giving in Families” by Tina Miller and “Rethinking Family Socialization to Gender through the Lens of Multi-local, Post-separation Families” by Laura Merla

In this comment, Risman suggests that both papers show definitely that gender still matters, but how it matters in families is consistently shifting. Both papers provide glimpses into how new family dynamics both reinforce and challenge gender inequality. Risman presents her theoretical framework of gender as a social structure and applies it to each article to analyze what the research teaches us about these families, and what questions remain unanswered