Race, class and gender at work

When Prof. Elizabeth Higginbotham delivers a prestigious series of lectures next winter, she says she will try to get her audiences to think critically about how race, class and gender affect people in the workplace.

Higginbotham, author of Too Much to Ask, a book about the college and workplace experiences of black professional women who graduated between 1968 and 1970, has been awarded the Robin M. Williams Jr. Lectureship for 2003-04. The Eastern Sociological Society awards the lectureship each year to an outstanding scholar in the field.

"It's an honor to be selected for this award, and I look forward to the opportunity of sharing my work with others," says Higginbotham, a professor in the College of Arts and Science's Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. She will deliver lectures at two schools during the year and will be a featured speaker at the Eastern Sociological Society conference next spring.

"We have a whole legacy of white supremacy and black inferiority and Latino inferiority, and those ideas still persist after laws change and white people hire people of color in workplaces," Higginbotham says. "You have black people who are left out of the informal social networks, so it's more difficult to advance on the job."

In conducting research for her book, Higginbotham also took class into account in her interviews with 56 black, female professionals. Coming from a working-class family in New York City, she says, she was sensitive to the fact that working-class women had fewer resources than middle-class women.

"I'm interested in how social class stamps
people," she says. "Not only do parents have different resources, but also young people from different classes start out with very, very different expectations of what they can do in life."

The women Higginbotham studied in Too Much to Ask entered various occupations, including education, the law and health care. She says race was a key life issue for all the women she interviewed, one they wrestled with daily, whether they were born into working-class or middle-class families.

Higginbotham says black women in the workplace still deal with discrimination. In future research, she plans to investigate the ways professional black women cope with obstacles in the workplace. She says some deal with it by redefining their expectations relating to work. Others challenge the notion that blacks are inferior. In all cases in Too Much to Ask, the women's racial identities affected their approach to the workplace as well as how they were approached in their workplaces.

"I'm interested in what happens once people are in the workplace, whether they are truly welcomed or just tolerated or put into a certain category," Higginbotham says.

Among the classes she teaches at the University is "Social Inequality and Film," which examines how the media present issues of race, gender, sexuality and social class. She says she shows films that present those issues, and a diverse group of students discusses them.

"I think that a lot of students think you deal with race by being colorblind, but the ideal is not to be colorblind. The ideal is to understand what people's varying identities mean to them," she says.

Higginbotham, who joined the University faculty in 1998 after teaching at other institutions, is the co-editor of Women and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Class and has contributed several articles to Gender and Society and Women's Studies Quarterly. With other scholars, she helped to establish the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis, noted as a hub of race, class and gender scholarship.

--Kathy Canavan