Christine Williams (sociologist)

Last updated
Christine Williams
Born1959 (1959) (age 65)
San Antonio, Texas, United States
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Known for Glass escalator
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Texas at Austin (1988-present)
University of Sydney (1992)
University of Oklahoma (1986-1988)

Christine L. Williams (born 1959) is an American sociologist. [1] She is a professor of Sociology and the Elsie and Stanley E. (Skinny) Adams Sr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialization include gender, sexuality, and workplace inequality. Her research primarily involves gender discrimination at work. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

In 1959, Williams was born in San Antonio, Texas. [1] [3] She graduated high school at the Colegio Nueva Granada, Bogotá, Colombia.

In 1980, she received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology at the University of Oklahoma and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Master of Arts in sociology in 1982 and her Ph.D. in sociology in 1986 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Academic career

From 1986 to 1988, she was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. [3] In 1992, she was visiting professor of Social Policy at the University of Sydney, Australia.

From 1988 to 1994, she was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She was subsequently promoted to the position of assistant professor of sociology at the university from 1994 to 1999. She was subsequently promoted to the position of Professor of Sociology at the university from 1999 to the present.

She was Adams Centennial Professorship in Liberal Arts fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 2006 to 2014, and was chair of the sociology department at the university from 2010 to 2014.

She has served on the editorial board of various academic journals, including Contexts , Gender & Society , and Qualitative Sociology . [2]

Awards and honors

Williams was 111th President of the American Sociological Association (from 2019 to 2020). [4]

In 2014, she received the Jessie Bernard Award “in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society," [5]

Her work has been featured in articles by The New York Times , The Washington Post , Nature , Fort Worth Star-Telegram , The Dallas Morning News , and Austin-American Statesman , among others. [3]

Major works

Glass escalator

In her 1992 article, "The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the "Female" Professions", Williams proposed the concept of the glass escalator. [6] [7] The glass escalator refers to the way men, namely heterosexual white men, are put on a fast track to advanced positions when entering primarily female-dominated professions. It is most present in "pink collar" professions, such as those in hands-on healthcare work or school teaching. Feminized care professions often pay lower wages than stereotypically male professions, but males experience a phenomenon in which they earn higher wages and have faster career mobility when they enter feminine careers. This idea is akin to the more well-known idea of the glass ceiling, which explains the reality that women face when they fail to advance in the workplace.

Williams revisited the concept in a 2013 article, "The Glass Escalator, Revisited: Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times, SWS Feminist Lecturer". [8] Williams suggests that the concept be more attentive to issues of intersectionality and changing market forces.

The concept of the glass escalator to describe barriers for female professional appeared in an article by Forbes [9] and has been reprinted in over 20 academic books. [3]

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glass ceiling</span> Obstacles keeping a population from achievement

A glass ceiling is a metaphor usually applied to people of marginalized genders, used to represent an invisible barrier that prevents an oppressed demographic from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy. No matter how invisible the glass ceiling is expressed, it is actually an obstacle difficult to overcome. The metaphor was first used by feminists in reference to barriers in the careers of high-achieving women. It was coined by Marilyn Loden during a speech in 1978.

The gender pay gap in the United States is a measure between the earnings of male and females in the workforce. When calculating the pay gap, non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap is utilized. The adjusted pay gap takes into consideration the differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience, whereas the non-adjusted pay gap is the overall difference of gross hourly earnings of males and females in the United States. The non-adjusted average female annual salary is around 80% of the average male salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raewyn Connell</span> Retired Australian professor

Raewyn Connell, usually cited as R. W. Connell, is an Australian sociologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, mainly known for co-founding the field of masculinity studies and coining the concept of hegemonic masculinity, as well as for her work on Southern theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvia Walby</span> British sociologist

Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Sociology, Director of the Violence and Society Centre at the City University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.

Occupational segregation is the distribution of workers across and within occupations, based upon demographic characteristics, most often gender. Other types of occupational segregation include racial and ethnicity segregation, and sexual orientation segregation. These demographic characteristics often intersect. While a job refers to an actual position in a firm or industry, an occupation represents a group of similar jobs that require similar skill requirements and duties. Many occupations are segregated within themselves because of the differing jobs, but this is difficult to detect in terms of occupational data. Occupational segregation compares different groups and their occupations within the context of the entire labor force. The value or prestige of the jobs are typically not factored into the measurements.

Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michèle Lamont</span> Canadian sociologist

Michèle Lamont is a Canadian sociologist who is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a contributor to the study of culture, inequality, racism and anti-racism, the sociology of morality, evaluation and higher education, and the study of cultural and social change. She is the recipient of the Gutenberg Award and the Erasmus award, for her "devoted contribution to social science research into the relationship between knowledge, power, and diversity." She has received honorary degrees from five countries. and been elected to the British Academy, Royal Society of Canada, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques, and the Sociological Research Association. She served as president of the American Sociological Association from 2016 to 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminisation of the workplace</span> The trend towards broader inclusive modes of working

The feminization of the workplace is the feminization, or the shift in gender roles and sex roles and the incorporation of women into a group or a profession once dominated by men, as it relates to the workplace. It is a set of social theories seeking to explain occupational gender-related discrepancies.

Mounira Maya Charrad is a Franco-Tunisian sociologist who serves as associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Joan Elise Robinson Acker was an American sociologist, researcher, writer and educator. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1967. Acker is considered one of the leading analysts regarding gender and class within the second wave of feminism.

Judith Lorber is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosalind Gill</span>

Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zillah Eisenstein</span> American political theorist

Zillah R. Eisenstein is an American political theorist and gender studies scholar and Emerita Professor of the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. Specializing in political and feminist theory; class, sex, and race politics; and construction of gender, Eisenstein is the author of twelve books and editor of the 1978 collection Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, which published the Combahee River Collective statement.

Barbara Risman is Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The term "glass escalator" was introduced by Christine L. Williams in her article "The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the "Female" Professions" published in August 1992. The glass escalator refers to the way men, namely heterosexual white men, are put on a fast track to advanced positions when entering primarily female-dominated professions. It is most present in "pink collar" professions, such as those in hands-on healthcare work or school teaching. Feminized care professions often pay lower wages than stereotypically male professions, but males experience a phenomenon in which they earn higher wages and have faster career mobility when they enter feminine careers. This idea is akin to the more well-known idea of the glass ceiling, which explains the reality that women face when they fail to advance in the workplace. However, it has been found that men of minority backgrounds do not reap the same benefits of the glass escalator as men in the majority.

Cecilia L. Ridgeway is an American sociologist and the Lucie Stern Professor of Social Sciences, Emerita in the Sociology Department at Stanford University. She is known for her research on gender and status processes, specifically on how large, societal-level gender and status inequalities are recreated in face-to-face interaction. Ridgeway served as president of the American Sociological Association in 2013. She also edited Social Psychology Quarterly from 2001 to 2003.

Adia Harvey Wingfield is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and the 2018 President of Sociologists for Women in Society. She is the author of several books, including No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men's Work, and articles in peer-reviewed journals including Social Problems, Gender & Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She has lectured internationally on her research.

Pamela Herd is an American sociologist. As a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Herd's research focuses on inequality and how it intersects with health, aging, and policy.

Jennifer L. Glass is Centennial Commission Professor of Liberal Arts in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She was previously Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, University of Iowa and the University of Notre Dame.

Joya Misra is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

References

  1. 1 2 "Williams, Christine L. 1959- (Christine Williams) | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  2. 1 2 "UT Experts : University Communications : The University of Texas at Austin". experts.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Williams, Christine L. (2021). "Christine L. Williams" (PDF). Retrieved 23 Aug 2021.
  4. "ASA Annual Meeting Video Archive". American Sociological Association. 2017-01-31. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  5. "Jessie Bernard Award". American Sociological Association. 2009-05-29. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  6. Williams, Christine L. (1992). "The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the "Female" Professions". Social Problems. 39 (3): 253–267. doi:10.2307/3096961. ISSN   0037-7791. JSTOR   3096961.
  7. Razavi, Omid (2020-02-03). "Do women in tech work experience a "glass escalator"?". Gender and the Economy. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  8. Williams, Christine L. (2013-10-01). "The Glass Escalator, Revisited: Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times, SWS Feminist Lecturer". Gender & Society. 27 (5): 609–629. doi:10.1177/0891243213490232. hdl: 10983/1211 . ISSN   0891-2432. S2CID   149362272.
  9. Goudreau, Jenna. "A New Obstacle For Professional Women: The Glass Escalator". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-08-23.