Professor Mary Evans, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at SSPSSR, will be delivering the Annual Equality Lecture at the British Library this year, in partnership with the British Sociological Association. The title is ‘The Persistence of Gender Inequality’ and it will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre on 23 October 2017, 19.00-20.30 as a ticketed event.
Professor Mary Evans argues that demonstrable inequalities between women and men remain, and that definitions of ‘equality’ often fail to take gender into account.
Emeritus Professor at Kent and current Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics, Professory Evans will deliver the seventh annual British Sociological Association/British Library Equality Lecture. Referencing her recent work, The Persistence of Gender Inequality (Polity Press 2016), Professor Evans will show that there remain demonstrable inequalities between women and men, and that the very definition of ‘equality’ commonly used furthers forms of inequality.
Definitions of the ideal contemporary citizen, assumptions about sexual identity and parochial accounts of the ways in which we judge ‘our’ lives all serve to maintain not just gender but also social, inequality. Yet equally problematic is the way that gender is ignored as a constituent of inequality in academic as well as public discussions. This lecture will show how making these connections is as important to sociological work on inequality as it is to the wider current context of debate.
Professor Mary Evans has taught sociology and women’s/gender studies for four decades at the University of Kent and more recently at the Gender Institute of the LSE. Much of her work has been interdisciplinary and she has written about various literary figures (both real and imagined); most recently detective fiction. Her current project (with Dr Sarah Moore at the University of Bath) is called Detecting the Modern: What’s Going On?, which will be published in 2018. In January 2018 Professor Evans takes up a Leverhulme Emeritus Grant to work on the question of ‘respectability’.
The Inequality Lecture is delivered in partnership with the British Sociological Association. For more event details and to book tickets, visit the British Library event page.