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The wrenching decision facing successful women choosing between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. The professional level these women have attained requires a huge commitment of time, energy, and emotion that seems natural to employers and clients, who assume that a career deserves single-minded allegiance. Meanwhile, these women must confront the cultural model of family that defines marriage and motherhood as a woman's primary vocation. This ideal promises women creativity, intimacy, and financial stability in caring for a family. It defines children as fragile and assumes that men lack the selflessness and patience that children's primary caregivers need. This ideal is taken for granted in much of contemporary society. The power of these assumptions is enormous but not absolute. Competing Devotions identifies women executives who try to reshape these ideas. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.

Sociology analyzes how our opportunities and world views are shaped by social institutions. As individuals, we have some power to direct our lives but less control over our destiny than we might think. Even the significance of personal characteristics such as ethnicity, race, or gender is to a great extent assigned to us by social groups. This anthology presents a set of readings selected and introduced by Mary Blair-Loy to help students develop their own analytical perspective on society. It begins with classical readings by sociology s founders and then presents recent research on social class, race and ethnicity, immigration, and gender. Finally, it focuses on how these dimensions intersect in the lives of college students. Most readings are pieces of original scholarship. The volume also includes topical overviews written for a college audience as well as recent news articles. The selections in the anthology help readers learn to discern social and cultural structures throughout society, which are often hidden. By becoming aware of structural constraints in our lives, we will become more empowered to change them. Mary Blair-Loy teaches Sociology and directs the Center for Research on Gender in the Professions at UC San Diego. Her research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to study broadly-shared cultural schemas that help shape workplace and family institutions. These schemas frame some decisions and goals as morally and emotionally compelling while defining others as off-limits. Her award-winning book, "Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives," focuses on executive women, while other research investigates attorneys, scientists, stockbrokers, call center employees, and managers. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and an M.Div. from Harvard. She lives with her family in California."

An incisive study showing how cultural ideas of merit in academic science produce unfair and unequal outcomes. In Misconceiving Merit, sociologists Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech uncover the cultural foundations of a paradox. On one hand, academic science, engineering, and math revere meritocracy, a system that recognizes and rewards those with the greatest talent and dedication. At the same time, women and some racial and sexual minorities remain underrepresented and often feel unwelcome and devalued in STEM. How can academic science, which so highly values meritocracy and objectivity, produce these unequal outcomes? Blair-Loy and Cech studied more than five hundred STEM professors at a top research university to reveal how unequal and unfair outcomes can emerge alongside commitments to objectivity and excellence. The authors find that academic STEM harbors dominant cultural beliefs that not only perpetuate the mistreatment of scientists from underrepresented groups but hinder innovation. Underrepresented groups are often seen as less fully embodying merit compared to equally productive white and Asian heterosexual men, and the negative consequences of this misjudgment persist regardless of professors’ actual academic productivity. Misconceiving Merit is filled with insights for higher education administrators working toward greater equity as well as for scientists and engineers striving to change entrenched patterns of inequality in STEM.

The wrenching decision facing successful women who must choose between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.Table of Contents: Introduction 1 The Devotion to Work Schema 2 The Devotion to Family Schema 3 Reinventing Schemas: Creating Part-Time Careers 4 Reinventing Schemas: Family Life among Full-Time Executive Women 5 Turning Points 6 Implications Appendix: Methods and Data Notes References Acknowledgments Index Many professional women intuit that male colleagues whose spouse handle for them the details of everyday life are favored in the workplace. Blair-Loy confirms this intuition and shows us how it happens. She captures how the cultural schemas of "family devotion" and "work devotion" contribute to the reproduction of gender inequality, and how meeting the demands of a husband's job and other people's needs push professional women to progressively abandon their work to take care of others. Her analysis also gives us hope by comparing the fate of pre and post-baby boomers. This is both an important scholarly contribution and a book that will help readers think differently about their lives. It should be required reading for professional women who aspire to maintain multidimensional lives.--Mich'le Lamont, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and ImmigrationThis is a fascinating book with an important message. Blair-Loy's findings are surprising. She challenges conventional viewpoints. She is on to something really new when she writes about not only the interplay between cultural norms and individual actions (and institutional structures) but on the cultural schemas that evoke deep emotional resonances. An outstanding book.--Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein, author of Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social OrderMary Blair-Loy's book transcends old debates about work and family by examining the women who have beaten the odds and risen to the top. Her detailed examination of careers and strategies perfectly complements her subtle analysis of the schemas and visions these women have for their lives. Blair-Loy has given us not only a splendid view into a little known world, but also a new way of understanding the dynamic interplay of work and family. Looking beyond the static conflict we have studied so much, she shows how creative women put traditional schemas of family and work into a mutual transformation to build for themselves a new and more livable world.--Andrew Abbott, author of Time Matters.

Misperceiving merit, excellence, and devotion in academic STEM -- The cultural construction of merit in academic STEM -- The work devotion schema and its consequences -- Mismeasuring merit : the schema of scientific excellence as a yardstick of merit -- Defending the schema of scientific excellence, defending inequality -- The moralization of merit : consequences for scientists and science.

A provocative collection on women's paid and unpaid carework, examining the lives of the women at the center of new global dynamics.

An exploration of workplace participation and earnings patterns for diverse women in US STEM professions that upends the myth that STEM work benefits women economically. Seen as part economic driver, part social remedy, STEM work is commonly understood to benefit both the US economy and people—particularly women—from underrepresented groups. But what do diverse women find when they work in US STEM occupations? What do STEM jobs really deliver—and for whom? In Disparate Measures, Mary Armstrong and Susan Averett challenge the conventional wisdom that a diverse US STEM workforce will bring about economic abundance for the women who participate in it. Combining intersectionality theory and critical data theory with a feminist economic analysis, the authors explore how different groups of diverse women truly fare in US STEM professions. Disparate Measures is centered on eight unique, in-depth case studies, each of which provides an intersectional economic analysis (a term coined by the authors) of diverse women working in STEM occupations. Four case studies prioritize women of color and examine the STEM participation and earnings of Black women, American Indian and Alaska Native women, Asian and Pacific Islander women, and Hispanic women/Latinas; four additional case studies illuminate intersections that are frequently neglected by the STEM inclusivity literature: foreign-born women, women with disabilities, Queer women, and mothers. What the authors find in their groundbreaking, detailed analysis is that the promises of STEM are only partly true: when compared to women not working in STEM, most women are indeed economically elevated by STEM occupations—yet when compared to white men in the same STEM occupations, women’s second-class status is usually reaffirmed. The authors conclude by offering seven “big-picture” recommendations for rethinking STEM equity, showing just how we can successfully confront the entrenched patterns of economic disadvantage faced by diverse women in STEM jobs.

In the past few decades the number of women entering graduate and professional schools has been going up and up, while the number of women reaching the top rung of the corporate and academic worlds has remained relatively stagnant. Why are so many women falling off the fast track? In this timely book, Mary Ann Mason traces the career paths of the first generation of ambitious women who started careers in academia, law, medicine, business, and the media in large numbers in the 1970s and '80s. Many women who had started families but continued working had ended up veering off the path to upper management at a point she calls "the second glass ceiling." Rather than sticking to their original career goals, they allowed themselves to slide into a second tier of management that offers fewer hours, less pay, lower prestige, and limited upward mobility. Men who did likewise--entered the career world with high aspirations and then started families while working--not only did not show the same trend, they reached even higher levels of professional success than men who had no families at all. Along with her daughter, an aspiring journalist, Mason has written a guide for young women who are facing the tough decision of when--and if--to start a family. It is also a guide for older women seeking a second chance to break through to the next level, as Mason herself did in academia. The book features anecdotes and strategies from the dozens of women they interviewed. Advice ranges from the personal (know when to say "no," the importance of time management) to the institutional, with suggestions for how the workplace itself can be changed to make it easier for ambitious working mothers to reach the top levels. The result is a roadmap of new choices for women facing the sobering question of how to balance a successful career with family.