Gender and Work Symposium
Gender and Work Symposium
We were a little more than a month away from holding this program when the world shut down in 2020. So much has changed since we last saw each other in person. However, we believe our theme speaks as loudly as ever to the need to think and act critically and radically. The Master’s Tools: Exposing, Rejecting, Appropriating, aims to engage with Audre Lorde’s provocative claim:
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.”
Our intent is to turn a critical eye toward current ideas about how to eradicate inequality and, in the process, to engender new ones. Even as many activists and academics continue to wrestle with whether and how “master’s tools” can be turned toward liberatory ends, powerful new strategies and technologies are reshaping work and life in potentially emancipatory ways. Many of these redeployments and innovations are aimed at advancing equality. Which of these tools hold promise, and which are fundamentally incompatible with that goal?
As educators, scholars, and practitioners, we participate in—and, in many ways, are of—systems of inequality. Our very venue, Harvard Business School, is, to many minds, the quintessential “master’s tool.” Our conference, therefore, will be an exercise in inhabiting the very question we pose as our topic. Our hope is that having this conversation at HBS will help push us to reckon with the theme in productive ways.
We aim to foster with you a wide-ranging, sophisticated, and substantive conversation. Throughout both days, we will strive to create opportunities for attendees to make meaningful connections, with the aim of generating new collaborations and initiating mutually beneficial projects. The conference will include themed panels that highlight important research insights, as well as shorter “flash talks” that feature new findings, ideas, and insights, and an experiential component that invites attendees to further explore the theme.
We’ll kick off the conference with an informal reception on the evening of May 4th. We will convene on the HBS campus at 8:30 AM on Thursday, May 5th and will officially conclude by 2:00 PM on May 6th.