Is gender equality in the workplace still making progress in the U.S.? This is the question that Dr. Francine Blau, prominent Labor Economist, professor at Cornell University, and the 2024 John A. Hogan Distinguished Lecturer will explore when she presents her paper, “Gender Inequality in the Labor Market: Continuing Progress?” to the University of New Hampshire community on March 28, 2024.
Her lecture will cover the decades post World War II when women went from increasing their participation in the labor market to, in the 1970s, increasing the number of occupations a woman could hold, to tackling the gender pay gap in the 1980s. Blau writes of this time, “cumulatively, these year-on-year increases redefined the role of market work in women’s lives.”
From there her lecture will tackle the big question, “Is there continuing progress in gender equality in the workplace?” Dr. Blau will address the plateau in the women’s labor force in the 1990s and how the U.S. went from being a leader in the advancement of the female labor force, to having one of the lowest participation rates among economically advanced nations. Her work will not only look at our history but “consider the prospects for the future, including policies that might be useful to get us back on track.”
In addition to teaching courses on Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University, Dr.Blau is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor, the Institute for Economic Research, and the German Institute for Economic Research.
Dr. Blau has contributed to multiple works on gender issues, wage inequality, immigration, and international comparisons of labor market outcomes. She co-authored “Equal Pay in the Office and Gender, Inequality, and Wages” with Lawrence Kahn, and “The Economics of Women, Men, and Work” (currently in its 9th edition with Oxford University Press) with Anne Winkler. She is co-editor of “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration”, “The Declining Significance of Gender?”, and “Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace.”
Highlights of her impressive list of honors and awards include being the first woman to receive the prestigious IZA Prize for outstanding achievement in labor economics in 2010. In 2017 Dr.Blau was awarded the Jacob Mincer Award by the Society of Labor Economists in recognition of a lifetime of contributions to the field of labor economics. She was also elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2018.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Blau to the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics in room G75 on March 28th at 4:00 p.m., with cocktail reception to follow. Please direct questions and inquiries to Dr. Reagan Baughman, John A. Hogan Distinguished Professor of Economics at reagan.baughman@unh.edu.
