Daily Pioneer News

PLATTEVILLE - When University of Wisconsin-Platteville professor Marge Karsten developed a Women in Management course in 1983, maybe 15 students took the class. Today, some 20 years later, there are three full sections of the Gender, Race and Management course at UW-Platteville, and additional students take the class online through distance education.

This semester, Karsten is teaching two sections of the course as well as a distance education section, for which she culls from her upcoming book on race and gender issues in business. Karsten worked on the book, titled "Management, Gender and Race in the 21st Century," during a fall 2004 sabbatical.

"It was a wonderful opportunity to devote myself to that project," she said.

"There still is no comprehensive text that deals with both gender and race in management."

Karsten had written books on the topic in 1992 for UW-Extension and in 1994 for Greenwood Press. During the late 90s, she was busy fulfilling duties as chair of the UWP Department of Business Administration and managing UWP's print-based business administration distance education program. Ten years later, she thought the time was right to update the text, but changes in gender and race issues over the years called for a whole new book, which will be published through University Press of America in December.

In the 20-plus years Karsten has been teaching at UW-Platteville, she has seen changing societal attitudes toward women and minorities in management positions. Mainstream business management has shifted from the top-down autocratic approach in favor of participative, team-based techniques, for example, and the business culture has become more flexible in regards to familial and other responsibilities outside of work.

"Some things have changed, but others could have changed more," she said. "There is much greater acceptance of women in leadership positions."

When Karsten began her research for the book in the summer of 2004, she was surprised there was still so little literature related to individuals of specific minority groups in management, such as Native American women in leadership positions. Minorities haven't fared as well as women in obtaining management roles.

"Statistically, I think that's definitely the case," Karsten said. "But that doesn't mean you have to agree with it. I think it's important that everybody gets a chance."

In her Management, Gender and Race classes, Karsten encourages debate on such issues as affirmative action, reverse discrimination, and possible reasons for the shortage of women in some disciplines in higher education. She draws from material written for her upcoming book and, using computer technology, assigns online readings. With her online class, she required her students to complete case studies. Karsten will include many of these case studies, credited to the students, in the book.

Karsten looks forward to opportunities to collaborate with the industrial studies department to offer events dealing with women and minorities in industry. She attended the UW Executive Education Women's Leadership Summit last fall, and will have a paper resulting from work done during her sabbatical presented at the Midwest Business Administration Association conference in March.

Karsten will be finishing "Management, Gender and Race in the 21st Century" by her June deadline prior to the book's publication in December. She is also editing a three-volume set of essays, entitled "Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Workplace," for Greenwood Press. That book is expected to be published in the summer of 2006.

Contact: Marge Karsten, professor, business administration, 608-342-1749, karsten@uwplatt.edu

Prepared by: Dan Lehnherr, UWP Public Relations, 608-342-1194, lehnherd@uwplatt.edu