2.1.10

NEED SUMMER INTERNSHIP FUNDING?
Cultural Bridge Fellowship and Roy Family Internship
Applications Available

Cultural Bridge Fellowship application [pdf]
Roy Family Internship application [pdf]

The application period will close on Friday, March 19, 2010 at 12pm.  All applications must be submitted in hard copy to Naisha Bradley in the Taubman Building, 1st floor, Room 105A. Recipients will be notified of the status of their application no later than Friday, April 9, 2010. If you have any questions, please contact Naisha Bradley via email at naisha_bradley@harvard.edu.

2.4.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

NYE A, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Determinants of Risk Preferences

Anna Dreber, WAPPP Fellow and Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Financial Research (SIFR)

Individuals vary to the extent that they are willing to take risk, with women and older individuals typically being more risk averse than men and younger individuals. This talk will focus on the association between biological variables and risk preferences. Dreber will discuss the role of hormones and specific genes in explaining individual variation in financial risk taking as well as other types of risk taking, including risk taking in the card game contract bridge.

Anna Dreber is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Financial Research (SIFR) in Stockholm, Sweden, and a Fellow at WAPPP.  Her research interests lie in the intersection of economics, biology and psychology, and focuses on biological and cultural determinants of individual differences in risk preferences and competitiveness.

2.5.10

12-5pm
Lunch provided

Running Your Way to the Top: An Express Seminar for Future Elected Leaders

Kate Coyne-McCoy, WAPPP Fellow, Regional Director, EMILY's List and Jesse Mermell, Town of Brookline Board of Selectman

You know you’ve thought about it…Now come learn why, how and when to run for public office!

The Women and Gender Caucus and the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) invite you to attend a half-day seminar on: 1) Making the decision to run for office; 2) The first steps to running and financing your campaign; 3) What you need to build a good message. Led by Kate Coyne-McCoy, WAPPP Fellow and Regional Director of EMILY’s List, this hands-on workshop/practicum will delve into the reasons for running and jump start your move towards the campaign trail.

If you wish to attend, please RSVP to Megan Kearns at megan_kearns@harvard.edu. Participation is limited and RSVPs will be accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Sponsored by WAPPP, the Women and Gender Caucus, and the Kennedy School Student Government.

2.11.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Room 401, Taubman building, 4th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Securitizing Sex: Towards a New Theory of the Utility of Wartime Rape

Megan MacKenzie, Lecturer of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and WAPPP Affiliate

This talk will explore dominant approaches to wartime rape and offer a new framework from which to consider why rape is used as a tool of war and why it has been a part of militant strategies through history. In particular, this talk will focus on the use of rape during the civil conflict in Sierra Leone and the relationship between the strategy of wartime rape and domestic law, including marriage and paternity laws. Furthermore, the “collateral damages” of rape, or the broader social and security implications of wartime rape are explored as a significant consideration for international politics and security studies.

Megan MacKenzie is a lecturer of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for International Security and the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Working through security studies, development studies, and international relations, her research interests include securitization discourses, gender and war, critical development studies, and transitional justice. Recent publications include "Securitization and Desecuritization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone," in Security Studies; "Empowerment Boom or Bust? Assessing Women's Post-Conflict Empowerment Initiatives," in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs; and “De-Securitizing Sex: War Rape and the Radicalization of Development in Sierra Leone,” International Feminist Journal of Politics Forthcoming 2010.

2.11.10

6:00-9:00pm

Harriet Tubman House

566 Columbus Avenue Boston, MA 02118

Peace in Focus and Thaddeus Miles present a Celebration of Peace through the Arts

Despite being on the front lines of disaster, civil war, and urban and gang violence, youth voices and perspectives are rarely found in mainstream media. Peace in Focus works to train young people in photography, media, community leadership, and innovative peacebuilding practices with the aim of elevating youth voice and emphasizing the role of creativity in building community. The Celebration of Peace through the Arts exhibit and celebration will showcase a selection of photos taken by young photographers in Boston, Burundi, and Liberia -- giving us a window into their lives, struggles, and undeniable talent as visual storytellers. This event invites community members interested in photography, youth and community work, and global peace to celebrate youth efforts at creating visible social change.

2.18.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Allison Dining Room, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Intersectionality, Public Health and Health Care Reform for Women: An Analysis of the Recent Debates

Ange-Marie Hancock, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Southern California (USC) College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

What does health care "reform" mean for women in the U.S. system?  How might an intersectional approach to public health illuminate multiple paths to meaningful change in health care delivery?  This talk will provide an initial foray into the recent public celebration of the Cleveland-Mayo Clinic models by President Obama and the implications for gendered analyses of public health care.

Ange-Marie Hancock, an internationally recognized scholar of intersectionality (race, gender, sexual orientation and class), came to USC in 2008, after five years as Assistant Professor of Political Science & African American Studies at Yale University. In 1992 Hancock conducted the original research and wrote the business plan for the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), now entering its 13th year.  Her 2004 book, The Politics of Disgust and the Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen,” won 2 national awards and has been widely used as a textbook. She is a sought-after media resource on issues of race and gender in American society. Hancock’s next book is entitled, Beyond the Oppression Olympics is due to be published in 2010.

2.25.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Allison Dining Room, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Baby Dolls, Superheroes, and Babysitting: Gender Issues and Challenges in Early Childhood Education

Sophia Pappas, Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School

Early childhood education as a professional field and programmatic delivery system is incredibly diverse.  But walk into any early childhood classroom, administrative office, or government agency across the country and you will notice a quality shared by a significant portion of staff: they are women.  Sophia Pappas will discuss the historical origins and implications of these gender dynamics for the prioritization and funding of early childhood education in the United States.  She will also touch on the opportunities and limitations of challenging gender norms at the outset of a child’s formal education she experienced as a pre-Kindergarten teacher in Newark, New Jersey. 

Sophia Pappas graduated from Georgetown University in 2003. She then joined Teach For America as a Newark corps member, and taught public school pre-K. In 2007, Sophia left the classroom to help expand Teach For America's early-childhood education initiative in urban and rural areas across the country. Sophia is currently pursuing her Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She participated in the Women and Public Policy Program's "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office Program," last year, where a select group of students is given training and support to prepare for electoral races on the local, state-wide and national-level.

3.4.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Allison Dining Room, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Gender and Policy Seminar

Rebecca Thornton, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Michigan

3.11.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Room 401, Taubman building, 4th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Shall I Stay or Shall I Go? Cooperative and Competitive Effects of Demography on Turnover

Kathleen L. McGinn, Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Director of Faculty Development at Harvard Business School.

Kathleen L. McGinn is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Director of Faculty Development at Harvard Business School. Professor McGinn teaches courses on negotiations, power and influence, and interpersonal decision making to MBAs and Executives. Before coming to Harvard, Professor McGinn taught at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management and Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. She received her Ph.D. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

3.25.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

NYE B, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

One of Us:  Multilevel models examining the impact of descriptive representation on civic engagement

Pippa Norris, Paul. F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Harvard Kennedy School

Pippa Norris will discuss her paper which she co-authored with Mona Lena Krook.  This paper examines the impact of descriptive representation in comparative perspective. The goals are to establish (1) whether descriptive representation mobilizes attitudinal and behavioral indicators of civic engagement; (2) whether the strength of any such relationship differs for women and young people; and (3) whether this relationship is evident cross‐nationally.  The first section of the paper provides an overview of existing research on descriptive representation and the civic engagement of women and young people. The second section presents the research design. The third reports and discusses the findings of the multilevel models and what these suggest about relationships between descriptive representation in national parliaments and patterns in civic engagement among citizens. The paper concludes with a summary of the major findings and reflects upon their implications for understanding and altering long‐standing inequalities in civic engagement.

3.30.10

4:10-5:30pm

124 Mt. Auburn St.
Suite 200N

Does Women’s Proportional Strength Affect their Participation? Governing Local Forests in South Asia

Bina Agarwal, Professor of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi

The gender and politics literature has long debated how women’s proportional strength affects policy formulation within legislatures. Studies on gender and environmental governance have focused mainly on women’s limited participation in local institutions.Both bodies of work leave important aspects unexplored. The former neglects the in-between process — the impact of women’s numbers on their effective participation, such as attending and speaking up at meetings, and holding office. The latter neglects to ask: what impact would increasing women’s proportions have on participation and what proportions are effective? Rigorous empirical analysis is also scarce. Addressing these gaps, this paper, based on primary data for community forestry institutions in India and Nepal, statistically tests if a group’s gender composition affects women’s effective participation, and if there are any critical mass effects. The results support the popularly emphasized proportions of one-quarter to one-third, but women’s economic class also matters, as do some factors other than women’s numbers.

4.1.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Fainsod Room, Littauer building

WAPPP Seminar Series

Gender in Decision Making and Negotiation Seminar

Barbara Annis, Barbara Annis & Associates Inc.

Barbara Annis is a recognized leading expert in Inclusive Leadership and Gender Initiatives.  Barbara and her associates are dedicated to removing organizational and leadership barriers by bringing the latest research and thinking on Leadership, Gender Diversity and Inclusiveness into the workplace, so that organizations can turn gender diversity into a powerful technology of success.  Over the last 20 years, Barbara Annis & Associates has facilitated over 3,000 corporate workshops, keynotes, and executive coaching sessions on Gender Intelligent Leadership to Fortune 500 Corporations, including Deloitte & Touche, IBM, Smith Barney Citigroup, UBS, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Intel.

Barbara is Chair of the Women’s Leadership Board at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (www.hkswomensleadershipboard.org). Her extensive studies have included work with exceptional thinkers such as linguist Dr. Fernando Flores at Berkeley, neuroscientist Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Virginia Satir,  Dr. W. E. Deming, and  Dr. Willis Harman, Founder of the Noetic Sciences Foundation and The World Business Academy. She was recently awarded the International Alliance for Women Word of Difference Lifetime Achievement Award.

Barbara is also a recognized author – her first book, Same Words, Different Language, uncovers groundbreaking insights and tools for creating powerful win-win relationships between the genders, and provides ways to break through gender barriers.  Her new book, Leadership and the Sexes, published last month by John Wiley, reveals the latest brain-based research on gender differences in leadership, and shows how to maximize the innate talents of both genders in the workplace and in the world.

4.8.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Allison Dining Room, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Dignity and Dreams: The Social Psychological Benefits of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

Jen Sykes, Doctoral Fellow in Sociology and Social Policy, Inequality and Social Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School

4.15.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Allison Dining Room, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Women Soldiers: History and Recent Experience

Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, American University (Washington, DC); and Research Scholar, University of Massachusetts

Throughout history and across cultures, combatants in the world’s many wars have overwhelmingly been male. Why this is so has been an enduring puzzle for various academic disciplines. On the whole, the evidence shows that when given the chance women have performed quite well in combat. Currently, women soldiers, especially from the United States, are playing critical specialized roles in counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Aftghanistan. European militaries and peacekeeping missions have begun to use gender advisors to help adapt to new gender realities of warfare. This talk reviews women’s past and present experiences as war fighters.

Professor Joshua S. Goldstein is an interdisciplinary scholar of war, and author of the best-selling textbook International Relations (with Jon C. Pevehouse). His book The Real Price of War (NYU, 2004) discusses war and the economy. Prior books include War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, 2001), Three-Way Street: Strategic Reciprocity in World Politics (Chicago, 1990; with John R. Freeman) and Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (Yale, 1988). Goldstein has published articles in The American Political Science Review, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Studies Quarterly, among others, and Op Ed pieces in The New York Times and elsewhere. His research on great-power management of regional conflicts, funded by the National Science Foundation, includes articles on the Middle East, Kosovo, and Bosnia. Goldstein has won a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the International Studies Association's Karl Deutsch Award for research, and the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award, among others.

4.22.10

11:40-1pm
Lunch provided

Allison Dining Room, Taubman building, 5th floor

WAPPP Seminar Series

Status, Class, and Creed: The Different Logics of Policy Change on Women's Rights

Mala Htun, Associate Professor of Political Science, The New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College

Professor Htun will discuss her paper “When and Why Do Governments Promote Gender Equality? Violence Against Women, Reproductive Rights, and Work-Family Issues in Cross-National Perspective.”  This paper explores policies on violence against women, abortion, and parental leave across 71 countries. Based on a concept of gender as an institution, Professor Htun and her co-authors argue that these policies promoting gender equality challenge historical patterns of state-society interaction concerning the organization of the economy, the respective roles of the state, religion, and cultural groups, and the authority of the state to protect citizen rights. Different policies pose different challenges however gender equality is not one issue but many. Each policy involves a distinctive logic of change. The data analysis reveals that models explaining variation on violence against women do not apply to variation on abortion or parental leave, for example. The role of actors like women’s movements and religious organizations is different and the weight of contextual factors (such as degree of democracy or fertility) also varies.

Mala Htun is associate professor of political science at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. She is the author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Latin American Research Review, and Politics and Gender, among other journals and edited volumes. She is currently writing two books: one analyzes the representation of women and ethnic and racial minorities in Latin America and worldwide and the other explains when and why governments promote women’s rights. Her article, “Is Gender Like Ethnicity? The Political Representation of Identity Groups” won the Heinz Eulau award from the American Political Science Association in 2005 and she has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and National Security Education Program. A former fellow of the Kellogg Institute of the University of Notre Dame and the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard, she holds a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard and a A.B. in international relations from Stanford. In 2006-07, she was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in Japan and a visiting fellow at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo.