Bio: (1933-) American sociologist. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein belongs to the current of liberal feminism, and her main field of study is the position of women in various professions. During her career, she performed various jobs, both at several universities and in other institutions. Her first study Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers (1970), examines women's ability to pursue the most prestigious professions, with the greatest focus on the legal profession.

The theoretical framework of this research was Merton's neo-functionalism. In the 1960s, the share of women in the labor force in the United States was significant, but they were pushed to occupations "appropriate" for women and were almost excluded from the most prestigious professions. Epstein concluded that men, who were leaders in prestigious professions, were very openly opposed to the inclusion of women in those professions. In addition, there were very limited quotas for women's enrollment in medical and law schools. Discrimination continued for women who managed to graduate from college, because the men who decided on employment, both in private companies and in state institutions, refused to hire women.

In a later study on African-American women in prestigious professions, Epstein found that female respondents who did not work in government institutions were able to find employment and advance in private companies because some employers wanted to fill officially required employment quotas for two minority groups (women and African-Americans). In a study of female lawyers who worked in large companies, which she conducted in the early 1990s, Epstein found that there were changes, but they still did not achieve equal status. Instead of actively opposing the employment of women and openly doubting the intellectual abilities of women, as was the case three decades earlier, women most often experienced a halt in their career advancement at the middle levels of the hierarchy. This kind of "glass ceiling", which is mostly reflected in the differences in salaries, was conditioned by the stereotype that states that female lawyers display different attitudes toward their clients. 

Main works

Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers (1970);

The Other Half: Roads to Women's Equality (1971);

Women in Law (1981);

Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order (1988);

Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender (1999);

Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life (2004).