Professor Bisom-Rapp Presented at Minneapolis Conference

June 4, 2014

On May 29th, Professor Susan Bisom-Rapp and her co-author Professor Malcolm Sargeant (Middlesex University Business School, London, UK) presented their paper “Age, Gender, and Lifetime Discrimination Against Working Women” at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, which this year was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The theme of the conference was “Law and Inequalities: Global and Local.”  Professors Bisom-Rapp and Sargeant appeared on a panel titled “Rethinking Elder Law’s Rules and Norms.”

Their paper, which is forthcoming as an article in The Elder Law Journal, establishes a model of Lifetime Disadvantage that analyzes the factors that over the course of their lifetimes slows the economic progress of girls and women. The end result is that women are much more likely to fall into poverty in retirement than are men.  How law and policy in the US and the UK lessens, makes worse, or ignores these factors is also considered.

“Our paper fit very well with the overall theme of the conference,” said Professor Bisom-Rapp. “Professor Sargeant and I are now expanding our thinking about the problem of women’s poverty in retirement, including possible life course-oriented solutions, and are planning to write a book on the subject.”  With a retirement crisis looming in both their countries, as the baby boom generation begins to leave the labor market, Professors Bisom-Rapp and Sargeant have selected a timely and important topic.

Professor Bisom-Rapp is an internationally known scholar in the field of comparative workplace law, who writes about globalization, equal employment opportunity, occupational safety and health, and the rights of migrants.