President Chopp's Charge to Lotte Bailyn '51
Lotte Bailyn - the T. Wilson Professor of Management Emerita and professor of organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management - you are a leading authority on workplace conditions and a lifelong activist in promoting gender equality in academic and workplace settings; a renowned expert on the relationship between managerial practice and employees' lives; and a powerful influence in shaping workplace innovations like telecommuting, flexible scheduling, family benefits, and work redesign. You have helped to make the workplace a fairer and more humane setting for women and men alike.
You graduated from Swarthmore in 1951 with high honors in mathematics, and then received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Radcliffe College. In 1957, you began your academic career as an instructor in the department of economics and social science at MIT, became a research associate and lecturer at Harvard, then returned to MIT to teach at the Sloan School of Management as research associate, senior lecturer, associate professor, and T. Wilson Professor. While chair of the faculty at MIT from 1997 to 1999, your research on gender inequalities at the School of Science led to significant institutional changes. You served as co-director of the MIT Workplace Center from 2001 to 2008, and have been a Charter Fellow for the Association of Psychological Science, a member of the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering for the National Academies, and a member of the editorial board of Transactions on Engineering Management.
Your many professional awards include the Graduate Society Medal from Radcliffe in 1998, the Everett Cherrington Hughes Award for Careers Scholarship from the Academy of Management, the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute, and in 2009, MIT's Gordon Y. Billard Award.
You have written or co-authored eight books and more than 75 scholarly articles on such subjects as mass media and children, the uses of television, living with technology, advancing gender equality and workplace performance, work-family balance for women and men, workplace discrimination, the cross-cultural experience of women in technical and scientific careers, and career and family orientations in relation to marital happiness.
Your book Breaking the Mold: Women, Men, and Time in the New Corporate World, first published in 1993, broke new ground in its examination of the complex relation between the needs of the workplace and those of the family. You revised this classic text in 2006, retitling it Breaking the Mold: Redesigning Work for Productive and Satisfying Lives. Described by reviewers as "a blueprint for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a postindustrial society," it carries your powerful argument that competitive industries will fail if they do not take into account the changing nature of the professional workforce that includes more women and family-oriented men.
Lotte Bailyn, you are one of the world's leading scholars of work and family and have helped to reshape both academia and industry into fairer, more productive, and more humane work spaces. You are a model and a beacon for our students, indeed for all of us who seek to lead rich, productive lives at home and work.
Upon the recommendation of the faculty and by the power vested in me by the Board of Managers of Swarthmore College and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I have the honor to bestow upon you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
