Originally published here.

Women’s engagement in paid work haschanged dramatically over the lastcentury—even as the shape of work undercapitalism itself has changed. The twoimportant volumes under review here provide important insights into both the historyof gender and labor and their potentialfuture. While Ruth Milkman’s On Gender,Labor, and Inequality draws together worksabout gender and labor over U.S. history,Elaine Ecklund and Anne Lincoln’s FailingFamilies, Failing Science: Work-Family Conflictin Academic Science focuses primarily on current U.S. academic science. Through theiranalyses, these authors demonstrate theimportance of sociologists’ engaging withgender and labor inequality to build moreeffective workplaces.

In On Gender, Labor, and Inequality, Ruth Milkman, the 2016 President of the Ameri-can Sociological Association, gathers togeth-er four decades of her pioneering research work that has defined the field—anddevelopsnew insight about how gender and classinequalitiesoperateintheUnitedStates.Milk-man’s research addresses big questions butremains clear-sighted and well-written. Whileshe has theoretical perspective, she allowsempirical data to challenge her expectations.As a result, her research makes enormouscontributions to knowledge.One key argument of this book is that it iscriticalto‘‘bringclassbackin’’totheanalysisofgender;Milkmanshowsthatgendersegre-gation in occupations and jobs powerfullyinfluencesstructuralgender inequalities.Gender segregation reflects the power of ideolo-gies about ‘‘woman’s place’’ found amongmanagers, union leaders, and workers. While women workers mobilize to gain ground, their early struggles tended to focus on  where boundaries between men and women’swork should be drawn, rather than on if boundaries should exist.

Milkman argues that while some genderinequalities have improved over the lastseveral decades, class inequalities have widened the gaps among women in the post-industrial era. Both class and gender arekey touchstones, though Milkman recog-nizes that race may also be implicated inthese inequalities. Early chapters focus onthe 1930s and 1940s, a period when classinequalities were declining but genderinequality showed remarkable resilience.Later chapters focus on recent decades,when gender inequalities have declined forsome but class inequality has been growing. 

You can read the complete article here.

Or you can listen to it on Spotify.