Polly Myers

I am a scholar of U.S. History, Business, Capitalism, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. My research focuses on diversity, social inequalities, and power relations. More specifically I examine the relationship between employment discrimination laws, corporate cultures, ideas of social justice, and gender and sexuality. My scholarship uses interdisciplinary methods to understand the ways in which gendered inequalities permeate workplace policies in both legal and cultural ways. I recently finished a book manuscript, Capitalist Family Values: Gender, Work, and Corporate Culture at Boeing, to be published September 1, 2015 from University of Nebraska Press. The book examines the relationship between gender, corporate culture, and changes in organizational structure at Boeing from 1930 to the present. I argue that even as Boeing diversified, corporate culture upheld masculine heterosexual fraternalism as a vital corporate strategy in ways that excluded some workers and caused new debates over equality, worker empowerment, and economic organization. I use Boeing as a case study from which to study the everyday workings of race, gender, and sexuality in corporate management strategies. This research is based on my 2008 dissertation from the University of Minnesota, which won the 2009 award for best dissertation in Pacific Northwest History from the Institute for Pacific Northwest History. In 2009 I also published an article for the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies on Boeing's development of corporate policies on transsexualism that won the Feminist Studies Award. My teaching includes courses in History, Women's and Gender Studies, English, Freshman Seminars and Honors Seminars. I am currently teaching the core courses for the ISS program, including ISS 301:Introduction to Social Science Theory, ISS 350: Introduction to Portfolios, and ISS 355: Portfolio Seminars. I also teach English 281D: Writing in the Social Sciences.