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Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement
"In order to recruit new members on a scale that would be required to significantly rebuild union power, unions must fundamentally alter their internal organizational practices. This means creating more organizer positions on the staff; developing programs to teach current members how to handle the tasks involved in resolving shop-floor grievances; and building programs that train members to participate fully in the work of external organizing. Such a reorientation entails redefining the very meaning of union membership from a relatively passive sta...
Departmental Colloquium Series
Lauren Clingan "Defining women’s incomes: Household disruptions and gendered resolutions"
Monday, September 14, 2026 - 2:00 pm - Monday, September 14, 2026 - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Women increasingly work for pay, disrupting cultural expectations and relational dynamics tied to men’s breadwinning. Scholars have examined how women’s incomes impact measures of domestic gender inequality, yet there is limited research on the mechanisms underlying that relationship, including how households define and spend women’s wages. Adopting economic sociology’s relational work approach, this study shows how tandem processes, relational accounting of feminine consumption and relational obfuscation of women’s earnings, shape the meaning of women’s work—processes that extend beyond marital dyads to involve siblings, children, and parents. Drawing from interviews with sixty-four Emirati women and men, I show how households leverage contradictory feminine consumption norms to designate women’s wages as communal resources, while at the same time, they conceal women’s financial contributions and disproportionately recognize men’s breadwinning. I call these relational adaptations to the breakdown of patriarchal bargains predicated on men’s provision gendered resolutions, because they illustrate processes through which women’s wages may paradoxically uphold unequal gendered arrangements. This study, part of a larger book project, offers a framework to understand shifting gender relations during periods of economic change.
Bio: Lauren Clingan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. A cultural economic sociologist of gender, work, and family, her work examines how everyday relationships and emotions connect to economic inequality. In the United Arab Emirates, she studies the impact of “state-building feminism” on gendered subjectivities, class inequality, family economies, and citizen-state relations. Work from this research has been published in Social Forces and Social Problems. In the United States, other work focuses on the production of reproductive power and gig labor in the fitness industry. Collaborative work in Kenya, with an eye toward social policy interventions, investigates how financial relationships shape contraceptive decision-making. Cross-national, collaborative work in the United States and France focuses on information, the digital economy, and research methods.
Clingan completed her PhD in Sociology at Princeton University in 2025, where her work was supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po, Paris. Her work has earned recognition from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotions, Economic Sociology, and Sex and Gender sections. In 2025, Clingan was a Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award Finalist for “the best-of-the-best research about work and family from around the globe.” She earned a degree in Social Research and Public Policy and a minor in Economics from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2017