Due to forecasted inclement weather, this panel and all Commission on the Status of Women events scheduled for Tuesday, March 14, have been canceled.

The Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination's Project on Gender in the Global Community will sponsor a panel and roundtable discussion, "Gender and Work in the Global Economy: 21 Nations," as part of the UN's Commission on the Status of Women NGO Forum. This CSW parallel event panel will convene at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14, 2017, at the Community Church of New York, located at 30 E. 35th Street. The theme of the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women is "Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Changing World of Work," and will convene in New York at United Nations headquarters with parallel events held throughout the city for two weeks, from March 13-24, 2017. 

Through a post-2008 examination of women’s work in the new global economy the panel will address the priority theme of women’s economic empowerment in three broad areas: exploitation versus opportunity for women; women’s agency within the context of changing economic options; and women’s negotiations of unpaid social and reproductive labor. Panelists will include contributing authors to Gender and Work in the Global Economy (forthcoming, Routledge), co-edited by Beth English, Director of LISD's Project on Gender in the Global Community. They will represent the work of an interdisciplinary group of international scholars analyzing the varied effects of the 2008 global recession in 21 countries on women’s labor force participation and workplace activism, and evaluating the impact of current economic changes on the gendering of work in rural, industrialized, industrializing, and deindustrialized regions of the world. English will join co-editor Mary Frederickson on the panel along with chapter contributors Eileen Boris, Xiaodan Zhang, Kelly Pike, Alessandra González, and Brigid O'Farrell. Ellen Chesler, co-editor of Women and Girls Rising will provide comment.

To register for the NGO forum visit: https://www.ngocsw.org.

Panel Participants:

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice. An interdisciplinary historian, she specializes in women’s labors in the home and other workplaces and on gender, race, work, and the welfare state. She has authored numerous books, articles, and policy reports on the feminization of poverty, the wages of care, and welfare reform. Her non-academic writings have appeared in The Nation, LA Times, New Labor Forum, Labor Notes, Salon, Dissent, Women’s Review of Books, and the Washington Post.

Ellen Chesler is currently a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. From 2007-2010, she was Distinguished Lecturer at Roosevelt House, the public policy institute of Hunter College of the City University of New York, and for the decade prior, served as a senior fellow and program director at the Open Society Institute. She is co-editor of Women and Girls Rising: Progress and Resistance around the World, co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium, and author of the critically celebrated Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, a finalist for PEN’s 1993 Martha Albrand award in nonfiction. She is a member and former chair of the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, a former board member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and former chair of the board of the International Women’s Health Coalition. She served as a U.S. public delegate to the 2009, 2010, and 2015 meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Beth English is a research associate and Director of the Project on Gender in the Global Community at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Her research and teaching focus on historical and contemporary labor and working class issues, gender, deindustrialization, and the U.S. and global Souths. She is the author of A Common Thread: Labor Politics and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry, and her recent articles include, “Global Women’s Work: Historical Perspectives on the Textile and Garment Industries” (Journal of International Affairs). Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Mary E. Frederickson is currently a visiting professor at Emory University, where she has appointments in the Rollins School of Public Health and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and is Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where she taught from 1988-2015. Her research and teaching focus on gender, race, labor studies, and the social impact of disease. She was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in 2010, and the following year she published Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor. Her many published articles include works on labor and cultural history, new trajectories in women’s history, and the relationship between historical consciousness and activism. Her research has been funded by the National Council for Research on Women, Fulbright-Hays, the American Association for State and Local History and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Alessandra L. González is a Lecturer in Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of the Islamic Social Attitudes Survey Project (ISAS), a study in conjunction with Baylor ISR on Islamic Religiosity and Social Attitudes, including Women’s Rights Attitudes in the Arab Gulf Region. She has forthcoming book chapters in Women’s Encounter with Globalization (Frontpage Publications) and Islam and International Relations: Mutual Perceptions (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Brigid O’Farrell is an independent scholar and member of the National Writers Union/UAW, International Federation of Journalists Gender Council. Her research and writing has focused on employment equity, especially for women in nontraditional jobs. A sociologist by training, she delves into labor history to better understand the issues and barriers confronting today’s workers. Her latest book is She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, and is the co-author of, Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices 1915-1975, with Joyce Kornbluh. O’Farrell is currently director of the project “Using History Today” at Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is also affiliated with the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University. Previous positions include affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and study director at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences. She has written or edited seven books, including Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family, with Betty Friedan.

Kelly Pike is an Assistant Professor in the Work and Labour Studies program at York University in Canada. She specializes in the role of worker’s voice and participation in the regulation of international labor standards, with a particular focus on the global garment industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has published peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reports and discussion papers for the ILO. Before her appointment at York, she worked as a consultant for the World Bank, reporting on working conditions in the garment industry in Lesotho and Kenya. During this time, she also taught courses in negotiations and labor relations at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto.

Xiaodan Zhang is Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the City University of New York’s York College. She was previously a research scholar with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University. Her research focuses on changing labor relations resulting from economic reform in China, how women’s social movements in China adopt, apply and redefine feminist theories from the West, and more broadly, on the construction and reproduction of power relations in society. She centers her theoretical questions on the relations between institution, human action, and social change. She also examines cultural factors, particularly how and why certain cultural elements survive different social systems.