S.D. Clark Lecture 2024: Is the Gender Revolution Stalling?

Reception Before: Department of Sociology, 17^th Floor, 700 University Avenue, from 4:00 pm until 5:45 pm.

Abstract:

The S.D. Clark Lecture 2024 will consider trends in gender inequality over the last 50 years, examining changing gender gaps in employment, educational attainment, segregation in fields of study, occupational sex segregation, and earnings. While there has been dramatic progress in movement toward gender equality, in recent decades change has slowed, and, on some indicators, stalled entirely. The slowdown on some indicators and stall on others suggests that further movement toward gender equality will only occur if there is substantial institutional and cultural change, involving men’s participation in household and care work, governmental provision of childcare, and employer policies that reduce gender discrimination and help both men and women combine jobs with family care responsibilities.

Biography:

Professor England has been Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi since 2021. Prior to that she was Professor of Sociology New York University where she was awarded a Silver Professorship in 2016, and Chair of the Sociology department from 2019 to 2021. She has held faculty positions at The University of Texas-Dallas, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, where she was Director of the Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women and Gender, Northwestern University, and Stanford University. 

Professor England is known for her influential and pioneering work on gender inequality at work and at home, the sex gap in pay, occupational sex segregation, the gendered division of labor in households, and the wage penalty for motherhood.

Her career achievement has been recognized by fifteen awards and honors from diverse groups and organizations, including the Jessie Bernard award in 1999 for career contributions to scholarship on gender, appointment as the Feminist Lecturer by the Sociologists for Women in Society in 2009, distinguished career awards from three different sections of the American Sociological Association, as well as from the Population Association of America for her contributions in Gender and Demography. She was Editor of American Sociological Review from 1994-1996, and President of the American Sociological Association in 2015. Professor England has been invited to give lectures at over 50 universities globally in just the last 15 years.