May 13, 2014
History + Accountancy = Workplace Culture and Womanhood
Dr. Jennifer G. Illuzzi, assistant professor of history, and Margaret P. Ruggieri, assistant professor of accountancy, taught Workplace Culture and Womanhood, a colloquium that focused on how the status of working women has changed through history.
Students researched their future career occupations, considered how gender shapes that workplace, whether the job has changed in the last 50 years, and what family policies and salaries are like in the field. Each then shadowed a woman in that profession to ask her questions relating to gender and the workplace. PC’s Career Education Center provided a workshop for students on successful job shadowing.
“A lot of Civ is about famous men,” said Lauren Thorpe ’16 (Lake Forest, Calif.), a sociology and women’s studies double major. “To have a course focus on women is so different.”
Illuzzi and Ruggieri “are a really good team, an unlikely team,” said Thorpe. “Professor Illuzzi focuses on sexism and gender roles, and Professor Ruggieri more on the reality of the workplace. They really worked well together.”
