Earning More and Getting Less

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Over the years it has taken to complete this project,I have written these acknowledgements in my head dozens of times.All along the way I have been acutely aware of the debts I owe to so many people, and eagerly looked forward to being able to thank them all in a public and meaningful way. Now that the work is complete, it is an enormous pleasure to recognize those who have helped move me along on this intellectual journey. First, I’d like to acknowledge the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Michigan: Linda Blum, Renee Anspach, and Abby Stewart. These individuals guided my work and offered tremendous support despite increasingly complicated logistics. (For example, I was living in Iceland as I began writing the dissertation.) A special thank you goes to my committee chair, Marty Whyte, who even now is one of my most enthusiastic supporters, and who never fails to meet a request for help with a speedy and cheerful reply. Tom Gerschick, a fellow Wolverine, also deserves special recognition. He, too, has been incredibly supportive, and his comments and insights from an earlier draft of this book helped sharpen my thinking and move the analysis forward. He also offered the one piece of advice that kept me going, through both the dissertation and the writing of this manuscript: “Just do what you can do each day, then put your work away and start again tomorrow.”That,Tom assured me, is how dissertations get done. Come to think of it, that’s how just about everything gets done. Several people have read drafts of this manuscript (in whole or part) along the way: Julia McQuillan, Pepper Schwartz, Mitchell Stevens, and Alphonse Sallett. The final product has benefited from your combined encouragement and feedback, and I thank you all. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Barbara Risman. I approached her at a meeting of the Sociologists for Women in Society, hoping to be able to introduce myself, xiii briefly explain my project to her, and get some quick advice on which publishers she thought would be most interested in it.Within five minutes , she was offering to read a chapter, as well as my prospectus, in addition to offering publishing advice. Barbara is one of the busiest women I have ever met,and yet she offered her help without a second thought;her energy and generosity continue to astound me. It was Barbara’s suggestion to use my data to highlight a gender-structure argument, and it is for that advice that I am most grateful. I also owe a special thank you to Kris Paap.As my friend, colleague, and intellectual partner, Kris has been my most reliable sounding board.We met as I began to transform the dissertation into the book, and I don’t know what I would have done without her. She has an uncanny eye for editing; to her, a manuscript is a puzzle, and she can see where the pieces should fit. She also has the ability to discover what I am trying to say, even when I don’t know myself. She has read more versions of my work than anyone and provided the most consistent support and feedback, and I am truly grateful. Kris and I also started a writing group, whose members have provided much needed encouragement along the way: Judy Owens-Manley, Judy Wolf, Gillian Gane, and Henry Rubin. Just knowing I would have to have something to report at our next meeting was often enough to keep me plugging along. Finally, I thank my editor at Rutgers, Kristi Long. Her excitement about this project made Rutgers my first choice for publisher, and her encouragement and helpful feedback have made the final stages of preparing this manuscript more painless than I thought possible. In any project like this, it is easy to see the intellectual debts one owes, but there are emotional debts as well.As I think about myself as a scholar, I realize that I owe my first thanks to Bob Stauffer, my undergraduate advisor at Kalamazoo College. He once asked me if I had ever thought about becoming a professional sociologist. I so highly respected his opinion that I began to seriously consider it, and here I am. I’m also grateful to my sister, Jennie, who is my best friend. She periodically pumps me up with the most inflated predictions of success for this book. On a daily...