Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Last updated
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
Alma mater Columbia University
Known forWork on gender and labor
Scientific career
Fields Sociology
Institutions CUNY Graduate Center
Thesis Women and Professional Careers: The Case of the Woman Lawyer [1]  (1968)
Academic advisors Robert K. Merton

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein is an American sociologist and emeritus distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. [2] Fuchs Epstein served as president of the American Sociological Association in 2006. [3]

Contents

Professional

At Columbia University, Fuchs Epstein was able to study the changing American family after receiving a grant of $1,000 from the Institute of Life Insurance. [3] Her study showed that women were beginning to enter the workforce at higher rates than they previously had, but there still weren't many jobs considered appropriate for women. This locked women out of prestigious professions and prevented upward mobility. [3]

Fuchs Epstein's dissertation analyzed the various factors that affected whether or not women were excluded or included in the professional realm, focusing on female lawyers as a deviant case because they were rare. [3] She decided to study a sample of women lawyers who found a way around the prevalent gender discrimination. [3]

In 1966, she joined a number of other women who were in academics or other professional positions to form the National Organization for Women in New York City. [3] She also actively participated in professional women's groups such as Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) and the Professional Women's Caucus. [3]

Fuchs Epstein participated in various hearings on gender discrimination as a scholar and activist, testifying at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) where she spoke about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the barriers women faced in the professional world at the time. [3] Fuchs Epstein was a consultant to the White House under two administrations, one of which being President Ford's, [2] to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and General Motors. [3] She also served at the National Academy of Sciences on the Committee of Women's Employment. She conducted research that focused on the segregation based on gender and race at AT&T. [2] Furthermore, she served as an expert witness on the Citadel case where she argued women in this military school should be included. [3]

Fuchs Epstein's first book was published in 1971 and was titled Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers. [3] In it she focused on women's professional advancement as framed by the “opportunities offered them, the organizational limits placed on their ambitions, and the recognition and reward of their accomplishments.” [3] Specifically, she incorporated gender into a discussion of social structures and status. [3] Her work "made a crucial connection between traditional sociology and the emerging field of women's studies." [3] Her second book was published in 1981 and was titled Women in Law. In this work she provided empirical evidence that illuminated how these processes affected the careers of female lawyers. [3]

In 1981 Fuchs Epstein received the Merit Award of the American Bar Association for Women in Law as well as the SCRIBE's Book Award. [3]

For her first study after completing her graduate education, she studied specifically Black female professionals whom she interviewed about the various factors that made it possible for them to achieve their positions despite the discrimination they faced for their gender and skin color. [3] Out of this study came an article titled "Positive Effects of the Multiple Negative: Explaining the Success of Black Professional Women", which the American Journal of Sociology published in 1973 and explained that employers were willing to hire African-American women because they could look good for hiring them but not have to hire both a woman and an African-American person. [3] Fuchs Epstein uncovered that the thought behind hiring these women was essentially killing two birds with one stone to as artificially as possible satisfy the demand for opportunities for women and African-Americans. [3]

Fuchs Epstein's interest in women's professional lives led her to “explore the dynamics of stereotyping in all spheres of society,” [3] focusing on how boundaries are socially constructed. Out of this came the book Deceptive Distinctions, which was published in 1988. [3]

In the 1990s, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York's Committee on the Status of Women invited Fuchs Epstein to research why women's professional careers often ended mid-stream. [3] She conducted a study of the professional mobility of women in several corporate law firms. From this research emerged the concept of the “glass ceiling,” which is essentially women never attaining the highest status in their careers. In 1993 Women in Law was reissued with a new section discussing the glass ceiling effect in the legal profession. [3]

Fuchs Epstein was invited to meet with Hirsh Cohen, vice-president of the Alfred Sloan Foundation, in 1994. [3] She conducted research that discovered that a very small percentage of lawyers (less than three percent) chose to work part-time because this caused others to perceive them as less committed to their professional life and ultimately resulted in them not being given very meaningful work. [3] This research informed her next book, titled The Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender, published in 1999. [3]

She produced a paper titled "Border Crossings: The Constraints of Time Norms in Transgressions of Gender and Professional Roles," published in 2004, that examines how doing something professionally, which goes against the expectations for women, is prevented by time norms which create priorities in certain categories for people. [3] It looks at the ways in which ideologies of time, such as the idea that professions are greedy institutions, as well as gender ideologies, like the concept that women should take care of the family, restrict social change. [3]

Fuchs Epstein is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and has been since 1990. [2] She is a past president of the American Sociological Association. [2] She has been a visiting professor or scholar at the Russel Sage Foundation, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Stanford and Columbia Law Schools, among many other places. [3] She was chair of the ASA Occupations and Organizations, Culture, and Sex and Gender Sections and president of the Eastern Sociological Society. [3] She was also a Guggenheim Fellow. [3]

Among the many professional awards she has received are the ESS Merit Award, the ASA Jessie Bernard Award, and the first Sex and Gender Section award for distinguished contribution to gender scholarship. [3]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Bar Association</span> American association of lawyers

The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students; it is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. Founded in 1878, the ABA's stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation of model ethical codes related to the legal profession. As of fiscal year 2017, the ABA had 194,000 dues-paying members, constituting approximately 14.4% of American attorneys. In 1979, half of all lawyers in the U.S. were members of the ABA. The organization's national headquarters are in Chicago, Illinois, and it also maintains a significant branch office in Washington, D.C.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Hill Collins</span> African-American scholar (born 1948)

Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is an independent, nonprofit national research institute established in 1952 and located in Chicago, United States. Its mission is to expand knowledge and advance justice by supporting innovative, interdisciplinary and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes and legal institutions. This program of sociolegal research is conducted by an interdisciplinary staff of Research Faculty trained in such diverse fields as law, sociology, psychology, political science, philosophy, economics, history, and anthropology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Presidential Commission on the Status of Women</span> JFK-era advisory body to the U.S. president

The President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) was established to advise the President of the United States on issues concerning the status of women. It was created by John F. Kennedy's Executive Order 10980 signed December 14, 1961. In 1975 it became the National Association of Commissions for Women.

The gender pay gap in the United States is a measure comparing the earnings of men and women in the workforce. The average female annual earnings is around 80% of the average male's. When variables such as hours worked, occupations chosen, and education and job experience are controlled for, the gap diminishes with females earning 95% as much as males. The exact figure varies because different organizations use different methodologies to calculate the gap. The gap varies depending on industry and is influenced by factors such as race and age. The causes of the gender pay gap are debated, but popular explanations include the "motherhood penalty," hours worked, occupation chosen, willingness to negotiate salary, and gender bias.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cynthia Enloe</span> American feminist writer, theorist, and professor (born 1938)

Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in the workforce</span> All women who perform some kind of job

Since the industrial revolution, participation of women in the workforce outside the home has increased in industrialized nations, with particularly large growth seen in the 20th century. Largely seen as a boon for industrial society, women in the workforce contribute to a higher national economic output as measure in GDP as well as decreasing labor costs by increasing the labor supply in a society.

Barbara Reskin is a professor of sociology. As the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, Reskin studies labor market stratification, examining job queues, nonstandard work, sex segregation, and affirmative action policies in employment and university admissions, mechanisms of work-place discrimination, and the role of credit markets in income poverty and inequality.

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">Jessie Bernard</span> American sociologist (1903–1996)

Jessie Shirley Bernard was an American sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras. Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award. Jessie Bernard was a prolific writer, having published 15 sole-authored books, 9 co-authored books, over 75 journal articles, and over 40 book chapters. The final chapter of her book American Community Behavior is heavily based on Raphael Lemkin's work and is considered one of the earliest sociological studies of genocide.

Martha Smeltzer West an American attorney and legal scholar who served as general counsel for the American Association of University Professors and Professor Emerita at the UC Davis School of Law. In 1998, she won California's first federal grant under the Violence Against Women Act, using the money to found the Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic at UC Davis Law School. West was the lead author of the 2005 white paper "Unprecedented Urgency: Gender Discrimination in Faculty Hiring at the University of California" and of the 2006 AAUP report "Organizing around Gender Equity."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Rhode</span> American jurist, writer, feminist, and professor (1952–2021)

Deborah Lynn Rhode was an American jurist. She was the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the nation's most frequently cited scholar in legal ethics. From her early days at Yale Law School, her work revolved around questions of injustice in the practice of law and the challenges of identifying and redressing it. Rhode founded and led several research centers at Stanford devoted to these issues, including its Center on the Legal Profession, Center on Ethics and Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship; she also led the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She coined the term "The 'No-Problem' Problem".

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.

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in law</span> Involvement of women in the study and practice of law

Women in law describes the role played by women in the legal profession and related occupations, which includes lawyers, paralegals, prosecutors, judges, legal scholars, law professors and law school deans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Halperin-Kaddari</span> Israeli legal scholar and international womens rights advocate

Ruth Halperin-Kaddari is an Israeli legal scholar and international women's rights advocate who is known for her work on family law, feminist legal theory, women's rights in international law, and women and religion. She was a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women from 2006 to 2018, and was the committee's vice chair during several terms. She is Professor of Law at the Bar-Ilan University and is the founding Academic Director of the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women. She is also involved in international academic collaborations on the theme of women, state, and religion, and participates in international litigations as an expert on Israeli family law.

Rose Laub Coser was a German-American sociologist, educator, and social justice activist. She taught sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1968 until her retirement in 1987. She was interested in the effect of social structures on individuals, and much her work fell within medical sociology, role theory, and sociology of the family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Romero</span> American sociologist

Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association.

Christine L. Williams is an American sociologist. 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.

Mildred Bertha Thurow Tate was an American rural sociologist, educator, and advocate for women's education. She was one of the first females to obtain a PhD in rural sociology from Cornell University and was appointed the first Dean of Women at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

References

  1. Fuchs Epstein, Cynthia (1968). Women and Professional Careers: The Case of the Woman Lawyer (PhD). Columbia University. p. ii. OCLC   328060819. ProQuest   302297885.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Cynthia Fuchs Epstein". www.gc.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2018-02-14.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 "Cynthia Fuchs Epstein". American Sociological Association. 2009-06-04. Retrieved 2018-02-14.