On Friday, Oct. 18, the first of three lectures in an MIT series on "The Politics and Technology of Motherhood" will take place at 3 p.m. in Room E51-345. The series is sponsored by the Technology and Culture Forum, the Program in Women's Studies, MIT Medical and the MIT Workplace Center.
Next Friday's speakers will be Lotte Bailyn, co-director of the MIT Workplace Center, and Mona Harrington, the center's program director. They will be questioning social and work structures, looking especially at two difficult dimensions of the problems women face in dealing with motherhood and work. One is reliance on the rhetoric and policies of gender neutrality; the other is the question of social responsibility for children.
Bailyn is the T Wilson (1953) Professor in Management at the Sloan School and the author, most recently, of "Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance" (Jossey-Bass, 2002). Harrington's latest book is "Care and Equality: Inventing a New Family Politics" (Routledge, 2000).
The remaining lectures in the "Motherhood" series are "Making Babies: Should There be an Open Market and Anonymous Donation of Human Eggs and Sperm?" on Nov. 14, and "Women As Egg Factories? The Health and Freedom of Choice of Women in the Face of Stem Cell Research and Cloning" on March 4.
For more information, contact the Technology and Culture Forum at 253-0108.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 9, 2002.
