Civil Rights Law at Work: Sex Discrimination and the Rise of Maternity

@article{Policies1999CivilRL,
  title={Civil Rights Law at Work: Sex Discrimination and the Rise of Maternity},
  author={Leave Policies and Erin L. Kelly and Frank Dobbin},
  journal={American Journal of Sociology},
  year={1999},
  volume={105},
  pages={455 - 492}
}
By the time Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, many employers had created maternity leave programs. Analysts argue that they did so in response to the feminization of the workforce. This study charts the spread of maternity leave policies between 1955 and 1985 in a sample of 279 organizations. Sex discrimination law played a key role in the rise of maternity leave policies. Building on neoinstitutional theory, this article explores how the separation of powers shapes… Expand
View on U Chicago Press
dash.harvard.edu
262 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
8
Background Citations
79
Methods Citations
4
Results Citations
3

262 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

The Struggle to Care: Negotiating Family and Medical Leave Rights in the Workplace
Recent research regarding the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) has focused on adoption of family leave policies by organizations in response to legislation and on patterns of leave taking in… Expand
Relational Power, Legitimation, and Pregnancy Discrimination
Pregnancy-based employment discrimination has long been a topic of interest for gender inequality scholars and civil rights agencies. Prior work suggests that employer stereotypes and financial… Expand
Debating employment law: responses to juridification
For much of the twentieth century, Britain possessed an essentially voluntarist system of job regulation. The terms of the employment relationship were set primarily through voluntary collective… Expand
Reducing Identity Politics in the Workplace: A Modest Proposal
Ever since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employers have complained that nondiscrimination laws constitute an additional regulatory burden on business, while civil rights advocates have argued… Expand
Afterward: A Comparative Look at the Status of Women in the Legal Profession
Today, young girls in many nations of the world may decide on a career in law in the same matter-of-fact manner as their grandmothers decided to become a teacher, social worker, nurse, or librarian.… Expand
Mechanisms of Disability Discrimination in Large Bureaucratic Organizations: Ascriptive Inequalities in the Workplace
Studies of workplace discrimination have typically focused on empirically unobservable motives to explain ascriptive inequalities associated with class, gender, and race. Such studies usually have… Expand
The Strange History of Employer‐Sponsored Child Care: Interested Actors, Uncertainty, and the Transformation of Law in Organizational Fields1
  • E. Kelly
  • Sociology
  • American Journal of Sociology
  • 2003
This article examines the development and diffusion of two “family‐friendly” employment benefits: dependent care expense accounts and employer‐sponsored child care centers. Using over‐time analysis… Expand
Editorial Essay
W hile overt expressions of racial and gender bias in U.S. workplaces have declined markedly since the passage of the original Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity… Expand
Workplace Regulation of Sexual Harassment and Federal and State-Level Legal Environments
Abstract This study investigates how federal and state-level laws designed to reduce workplace sexual harassment relate to the content of sexual harassment training programs in a sample of private… Expand
Discrimination, Sexual Harassment, and the Impact of Workplace Power
Research on workplace discrimination has tended to focus on a singular axis of inequality or a discrete type of closure, with much less attention to how positional and relational power within the… Expand
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 136 REFERENCES
The State, Courts, and Maternity Policies in U.S. Organizations: Specifying Institutional Mechanisms
We analyze the dynamic interaction of state institutions and organizational policies through an analysis of leave benefits in U.S. organizations. Following the Pregnancy Leave Act of 1978 and the… Expand
Mothers On The Job: Maternity Policy in the U.S. Workplace
"An impressive book...Vogel makes a wide range of perspectives on the equality/difference debate easily accessible to nonspecialists." --Ruth Milkman, UCLA, author of Gender at Work: The Dynamics of… Expand
Labor Supply Effects of State Maternity Leave Legislation
25% of all employed US mothers of newborns are on either paid or unpaid leave. The proportion of new mothers which is employed but not at work shrinks rapidly as the child ages so that virtually all… Expand
Protection for Whom?
Around the turn of the century, many states enacted laws restricting the hours women could work. Yet little research has been done on the impact of these laws on women's employment. Traditional… Expand
Pregnancy Discrimination Litigation: Legal Erosion of Capitalist Ideology Under Equal Employment Opportunity Law
The mobilization of equal employment law for pregnant workers in the 1970s and 1980s accomplished more than many legal scholars presently believe. In supporting this claim, this article argues that… Expand
Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization
What role has litigation played in the struggle for equal pay between women and men? This book explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform… Expand
The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions1
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal policy has revolutionized employment rights. Equal employment opportunity law, occupational safety and health legislation, and fringe… Expand
Equal Employment Opportunity and the Mobilization of Law
During the 1960s and 1970s the American social movement for equal employment opportunity (EEO) succeeded in getting Congress and the courts to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of… Expand
Professional Construction of Law: The Inflated Threat of Wrongful Discharge
Institutional theories of organizational behavior consistently implicate the professions in explaining the diffusion of new organizational practices, yet there has been little empirical study of… Expand
The Legalization of the Workplace
This study uses longitudinal data on nearly 300 American employmers over the period 1955-85 to analyze the adoption of disciplinary hearings and grievance procedures for nonunion salaried and hourly… Expand
...
1
2
3
4
5
...