Book Review: Sharing the Work
Strober, Myra. Sharing the work: what my family and career taught me about breaking through (and holding the door open for others). MIT Press, 2016.
Welcome participants in the Duke MBA Weekend for Women! You are already on the road to achieving power and purpose in your life, a road that was not always open to women. Those who came before you struggled to open the gates at work and at the university. While there are challenges ahead, you must achieve your dreams and break through the remaining barriers for others who will walk your road in the future.
Myra Strober is one woman who opened the gates in academia. In her 2016 memoir Sharing the Work, Strober completes a PhD in economics from the “quintessentially male” MIT in the 1969 and accepts a teaching position at the Univ. of MD. She follows her husband to Palo Alto, where he has a medical residency and assistant professorship at Stanford. Strober is offered a teaching position at Berkeley in 1970, but as a lecturer not assistant professor, because she is a woman. Soon after, the U.S. Labor Dept. begins investigating discrimination against women at universities and she is offered assistant professorships at both UC Berkeley (Economics) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, although at a low salary.
When Strober joins the all-male faculty at Stanford GSB, she finds her colleagues to be polite, but they exclude her from their informal networks. When she presents her research on the economics of the childcare market, they pronounce her arguments as outrageous. They take umbrage at having to move the annual faculty retreat away from a male-only club. She teaches macroeconomics to MBA students but the men who make up 98% of the class behave in a hostile manner.
Strober’s research on gender and employment is published in A-list journals and books. She develops an interdisciplinary course on women and work, which she teaches for 40 years. She launches and leads the successful Center for Research on Women at Stanford. She organizes conferences. But when she comes up for tenure, she is denied. Not long after, Strober accepts an offer from the Stanford School of Education as a tenured faculty member.
When this reviewer earned a BA in economics and an MBA in the 1970’s, all of my instructors in economics and business were men. Since that time, opportunities for women in academia and in the corporate world have improved, but more change is needed. Women need to open the remaining gates for themselves and for those who will follow.
Also available as an eBook.
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