Mother's Day event to focus on discrimination in the workplace (May 8)

Women's Studies Research Center to host panel of working moms

“Working While Mother: What they don’t tell you… and should.”
Thursday, May 8, 2008, 12:30 – 2:00 pm
Women's Studies Research Center
Brandeis University

WALTHAM, Mass. (April 24, 2008) – Departing from the candy, cards and flowers of traditional Mothers’ Day celebrations, the Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC) at Brandeis University is bringing together a multi-generational panel of working mothers to share their personal stories of discrimination on the job, and to consider ways to improve conditions for working mothers going forward.

The May 8 discussion will be moderated by E.J. Graff, WSRC Resident Scholar, and participants will include Dana Gershengorn of the U.S. Attorney’s office, Neena Pathak (’08) and writer and activist Judith Stadtman Tucker.

To learn more about the Women’s Studies Research Center visit www.brandeis.edu/centers/wsrc.

WSRC Location and Hours:
Monday - Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Epstein Building, Brandeis University
515 South St., Waltham, Mass. (across from Brandeis/Roberts commuter rail stop)

 About the Participants:

E.J. Graff, a WSRC resident scholar, directs the Gender & Justice Project at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she investigates and reports on injustices facing women and children. Before joining the Institute, she collaborated on former Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy’s book Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Make As Much As Men--And What To Do So We Will, published by Simon & Schuster/Touchstone in October 2005. The book exposed the fact that the gender wage gap has remained steady for more than a decade, and that much of the gap is due to illegal discrimination.  Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, looked at more than 2,500 years of history of that central pillar of our social life. Her work is cited in legal journals, reprinted for use in courses, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

Ms. Graff is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a contributor to TPMCafe.com. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Los Angeles Times, Ms., The Nation, The New Republic, and more than a dozen anthologies.  She has appeared in several documentaries; been interviewed by such media outlets as NPR, BBC, PBS, MTV, satellite radio, and cable news; and spoken or debated in public forums in the U.S. and abroad.  She has been a visiting scholar at the Radcliffe Schlesinger Library and a liberal arts fellow at Harvard Law School.

Dana Gershengorn joined the United States Attorney’s office in the District of Massachusetts in September 2005. She has primary responsibility for the office’s child exploitation cases.  Ms. Gershengorn also works with the FBI on undercover operations targeting individuals who travel to Massachusetts for the purpose of sexually exploiting minors, and she is the Project Safe Childhood Coordinator in the District of Massachusetts. Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts, Ms. Gershengorn worked as a Trial Attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. While at DOJ, Ms. Gershengorn prosecuted child exploitation cases nationwide in a number of federal districts. Ms. Gershengorn assisted in creating the first advanced child exploitation course at the National Advocacy Center and she is a member of the Advisory Committee to the Attorney General’s Working Group on Child Exploitation. Ms. Gershengorn previously served as a state prosecutor in the child abuse unit in the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts, and as an attorney in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.

Neena Pathak ('08) is a current institute research assistant who is majoring in sociology and international and global studies and working towards a minor in Spanish. Ms. Pathak is a recipient of a Brandeis Presidential Scholarship. She worked with the Maharashtra Organic Farming Federation in Maharashtra, India as an Ethics Center student fellow in 2007 and she spent the summer of 2006 conducting independent research on international solidarity and the Zapatismo movement in Chiapas, Mexico. She will graduate this May, and then begin teaching secondary English in Philadelphia as a corps member for Teach for America.

Judith Stadtman Tucker is a writer and activist. She is the editor and founder of the Mothers Movement Online (www.mothersmovement.org), an independent media project covering topics related to women, work, family, gender equity, public policy, and maternal activism. She has contributed chapters on the objectives and political grounding of the twenty-first century mothers' movement to several academic anthologies, and has written for the Huffington Post, The American Prospect Online and Off Our Backs. Her personal essay, "Motherhood Made Me Do It! Or, How I Became an Activist," appears in the forthcoming collection, The Maternal is Political (May 2008, Seal Press). She also contributed to a chapter on advocacy for the workplace rights of pregnant and parenting women to the new Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth Book (March 2008).