Events

Mary Blair-Loy is Professor and Founding Director at the Center for Research on Gender in the Professions at the University of California, San Diego. She uses multiple methods to study gender, the economy, work, and family. Her award-winning book, Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives (HUP 2003), focused on these issues for executive women, while a new study addresses these issues among executive men.

Sigtona Halrynjo is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo. She studies the interface between family policy and working life, gender and career in business and academic life, gender balance in senior management and equality throughout the life course, including transitions between work and retirement. Halrynjo is also concerned with gender equality challenges in work and family life in the face of global competition, digitization and efficiency.

In their lecture, Mary Blair-Loy and Sigtona Halrynjo discuss three institutional logics defining careers and workplaces: the liberal capitalist economic logic in the US, the welfare state regulatory logic in Norway, and the moral mandate of single-minded work devotion. The market logic of liberal capitalism and the moral logic of work devotion schema coincide to push out workers who do not seem to meet intensive workplace demands and to privilege workers with a caregiving spouse. Even in the gender egalitarian welfare state of Norway, large companies compete in a globalized liberal marketplace. Professional women who take the generous statutory parental leave find themselves rendered replaceable at work, as colleagues without child rearing duties take over their roles. Further, they show that to cope with the uncertainty of future business needs, companies want to recruit “young, dynamic and tech-savvy high potentials” to top leadership. The ability to advance fast and gain exposure to challenging jobs throughout one’s 30s is seen as signaling quality and devotion. However, the ideal of “careers are built before 40” conflicts with the aim of extended work careers due to demographic changes in most market societies and the long parental leaves advocated in Nordic welfare states.