UMass Lowell - The Center for Women & Work (CWW)

Core Projects





CWW Associates Program

At the heart of CWW is the Associates Program, which serves as a hub for innovative scholarly projects and helps expand the overall resource base for exciting and consequential work that forwards the mission of CWW and the University. Over the past several years, Associates have represented the disciplines of psychology, sociology, public health, economics, labor relations, and anthropology. Each year, the program is imbued with new vitality as the CWW welcomes new Associates, each actively involved in pursuing distinctive projects related to the gendered conditions of work. The Associates Program provides a supportive intellectual community that both supports these individual projects and fosters unique interdisciplinary collaborations and grant proposals.


"Gathering at the Well" Forum on Women & Work

CWW sponsors an annual forum entitled "Gathering at the Well" that is attended by many from the greater Lowell community as well as UMass Lowell faculty, staff, and students. We selected this imagery because historically women gathered at the well to collect water and share common issues. They turned what is often an onerous task into a source of strength. The CWW forum, "Gathering at the Well," is designed to tap into that strength by promoting dialogue on timely issues of women and work and striving for awareness and solutions. Each spring, the Forum addresses a different theme that is relevant to CWW's mission.


Center-Sponsored Research Programs
In addition to the wide spectrum of projects conducted by individual center associates, CWW has three core, center-sponsored research endeavors, each of which involves interdisciplinary collaborations:


Carework: People, Policies and Politics
The research focus of several CWW Associates revolves around the theme of "carework," or paid and unpaid caring for other people, in various forms. For example, Jean L. Pyle's work exposes the growing care deficits in the lives of women who migrate transnationally to provide care services to others as nannies, domestics or health-care workers. She documents the double-bind their home governments face, needing women to migrate for economic reasons but not wanting citizens abused abroad or the accompanying adverse publicity.

Andrew Hostetler and Susan Thomson received a Healey/Public Service Endowment Grant for a project entitled "Redefining Aging, Redefining Community." The project focuses on better understanding of the needs of the aging population in Lowell, with particular attention to differences according to gender, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity.

One aspect of Mignon Duffy's research is a large historical quantitative study of paid care workers, focusing on the intersections of gender, race, and immigration with care in the paid labor market. She is particularly interested in the historical occupational mobility of child-care workers and the different constructs of childcare over time in the United States.

Sharon Wasco leads a group study for and about those who care for rape survivors. Her community-based research program includes attention to both the emotional reactions of rape victim advocates to the difficult nature of their work and the effect of organizational support on their self-care strategies. Laura Punnett has been studying occupational health and safety problems in the healthcare sector for several years, documenting the range of exposures across the socioeconomic spectrum that affect both direct-care and other workers.

Given this convergence of interests, CWW is exploring several new initiatives on this theme, including spearheading an inter-campus carework policy agenda and compiling an edited volume on women, work, and caregiving.


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Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

The Working WISE Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a visionary project that has brought together intergenerational scholars from diverse disciplines in order to foster dialogue among leading experts regarding workplace factors associated with women's success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

The Project originally centered around a working conference held in April 2007. Working in intergenerational, interdisciplinary groups, conference attendees identified what has changed for women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields and developed specific proposals for future research, public policy, and workplace action. An edited conference volume will summarize results and be distributed widely to academic, industry, and public policy audiences.

Members of the team that organized the conference were Professor Paula Rayman of Regional Economic and Social Development (RESD), principal investigator; Psychology Professor Meg Bond, co-principal investigator; Assistant Professor Maria Brunette of Work Environment, co-principal investigator; Jody Lally, Project Director; and May Elewa and Padmaja Sistla, Research Assistants.

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Gendered Work Climates, Discrimination, and Health

This research program is a multi-year, multi-study collaboration between CWW and the Kerr Ergonomics Institute (KEI) and now also includes the new Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) at UMass Lowell. It focuses on researching the links between work climate, discrimination, and harassment against women in the workplace, levels of stress, adverse health outcomes, and increased business costs (due to higher absenteeism, increased turnover, lowered productivity, and higher worker healthcare costs). Studies have been done in manufacturing firms, university settings, and health care organizations.
 

 

Workplace Chemistry: Promoting Diversity Through Organizational Change

Based on her interest in addressing discriminatory work climates, Meg Bond has written a book entitled Workplace Chemistry: Promoting Diversity Through Organizational Change (2007, University Press of New England). The book summarizes a case study of a manufacturing firm undergoing a process of organizational change aimed at increasing diversity and fostering a work climate that supported the increasingly diverse workers. It traces the complex dynamics involved as organizations make a commitment to help all employees work to their fullest potential and to provide insights useful to others who share such goals.

Part of the research agenda in this core area is to encourage greater study of biased work climates among other researchers. Toward this end, with funding from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Meg Bond, Laura Punnett, and several students developed a catalog of workplace measures that assess aspects of the work environment relevant to ethnicity, race, and gender diversity such as harassment, discrimination, work-family balance, and general organizational climate for diverse groups of workers. The compendium is introduced with an essay on the rationale for including these domains in occupational health research. This is followed by a series of detailed entries that describe currently available organizational measures, their psychometric properties, and an analysis of their usefulness for occupational health research. The published compendium is available free of charge from the NIOSH website and NIOSH is putting the compendium on line to make the measures even more accessible to interested researchers.

Order Workplace Chemistry: Promoting Diversity Through Organizational Change

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