Christine E. Bose and Glenna Spitze
The Sociology Department has a faculty of twenty-three, at least nine of whom include gender as a component of their research, allowing graduate students to pursue gender issues as an area of concentration for their degree.
Chris Bose is currently Chair of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Gender & Society. The two foci of her recent research include an examination of the economic status of Cuban, Mexican and Puerto Rican women in the United States, and a study of U.S. women's work at the turn-of-the century. In the last few years she has published the book Jobs and Gender and co-edited two others: Ingredients for Women's Employment Policy (with Glenna Spitze) and Hidden Aspects of Women's Work (with Roslyn Feldberg and Natalie Sokoloff).
Glenna Spitze's research has examined women's employment plans, changes over time in gender-role attitudes, effects of wives' employment on family and migration and on divorce, the division of household labor, patterns of intergenerational contact and assistance, and gender differences in pay satisfaction. Most recently, she is engaged in a National Institute of Aging-funded project with John Logan on the impact of changing gender roles, family structure, employment and divorce rates on adult intergenerational relations. She has published several books, including Sex Stratification: Children, Housework, and Jobs (with Joan Huber) as well as two others mentioned elsewhere in this article, and she serves as an Advisory Editor for Gender & Society.
In the area of work and organizations, Karyn Loscocco is engaged in a project with Richard Hall on small business ownership, with a focus on women, while her other work incorporates gender as a key social and contextual variable. Recently, she has examined the work attitudes of blue collar women and men, the impact of gender on pay satisfaction (with Glenna Spitze), and made U.S./Japan comparisons of age and gender patterns in work values. Meanwhile, Richard Hall has also written on the importance of gender and organizations in his classic book Dimensions of Work. Katherine Trent's research interests are in social demography and sociology of the family. Recently her research has focused on teenage motherhood in the U.S., particularly on the relationship between household structure and socioeconomic outcomes. She is also looking at the determinants of abortion in the United States and at comparative studies of women's status, the determinants of divorce, and women's fertility.
Two faculty are engaged in research on intergroup dynamics at different levels. David Wagner is interested in employment, with a focus on work groups and other situations in which tasks are performed, particularly where inequalities are reflected in and affected by differences in status, power, or rewards in a group. He stresses the implications of status, power and reward differences for reducing gender inequalities. Scott South's research is primarily concerned with how sex composition of social groups influences male-female interactions and women's roles. He has also examined networks and gender in a federal bureaucracy and, with Katherine Trent, studied cross-national determinants of women's status.
Two other faculty have interests which are less tied to the work/family nexus. Gwen Moore's research focuses on issues of gender and power, including cross-national studies of women's underrepresentation in senior decision-making positions in politics, business and elsewhere. She carried out a study of "Old boys" networks among national elites in three capitalist democracies, and has edited a book (with Glenna Spitze) on Women and Politics: Attitudes, Activities, and Office-Holding. Steven Seidman is particularly interested in the changing relationship between sex and love in both a heterosexual and homosexual context. He has just finished a book entitled Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830 to 1980, and recently published articles on "The Power of Desire and the Dangers of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered" and "Transfiguring Sexual Identity: AIDS and the Contemporary Construction of Sexuality."
In addition to their scholarly research, several members of the department are engaged in various projects to enrich the curriculum through greater attention to gender and race, and six have joint appointments in Women's Studies. Glenna Spitze actively works in the departmental and college diversity committees to this end, and Chris Bose is applying for a Ford grant, with Edna Acosta-Belen, to incorporate Puerto Rican women into the curriculum. Beyond these efforts to improve the undergraduate curriculum, the Sociology Department offers three graduate courses on gender issues and several more with significant gender components. Increasing numbers of graduate students have completed or are working on thesis topics ranging from reproductive technologies' impact on women through the effect of child care arrangements on women's mental health to Korean-American women's work and family roles. We anticipate many more gender-related projects in the future with the support of our expanded numbers of faculty interested in these issues.