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February 14, 2000
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Mark Allyn is your typical rookie professor, except for one thing-he took a 30-year detour between earning a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford in 1971 and his first teaching job. But at 57 Allyn's discovered that the indirect route has made him a better teacher.
"There weren't many attractive positions in colleges at the time," said Allyn. "I had just gotten married, and since I wanted to stay that way, I got a job in industry." Allyn began his career at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, later switched to New York Telephone, Corporate Marketing at NYNEX Corporation, and in 1997 opted for early retirement as vice president of Business Development for NYNEX Entertainment and Information Services.
"Once you get down a certain path it becomes difficult to switch-especially when you have a family," said Allyn. "You get committed economically to a certain course of action and you ride that out-which I did."
Now, Allyn said, he's having the time of his life teaching and is eager to discuss his research in human resources practices and the gender wage gap.
INSIGHT: How has a career in industry helped you in the classroom?
Allyn: A lot of what I teach is based on my view of reality rather than a strictly academic view. Most textbooks are not fundamentally incorrect, but a lot of the information that gets played up is irrelevant to what actually goes on in business and fails to prepare students for the environment they are about to enter.
INSIGHT: Tell us about your current research.
Allyn: Dr. [Byung] Min [of Management] and I have become interested in some gender issues that pervade the workplace, including women choosing occupations based on how many children they want; wage inequalities that may or may not exist in the workplace; and the conflict that most women experience in attempting to allocate their time and energy between the workplace and the home.
Dr. Min and I are not on a justice campaign. We're simply trying to observe how the allocation of role responsibilities affects women differently than men, and how those responsibilities make a woman a different worker than a man.
INSIGHT: How do you plan to gather that information?
Allyn: By following a sample of women and men graduating from Montclair State, collecting data before they enter the workplace in terms of their career and domestic expectations. Do they plan on getting married? Do they plan on having children? What kinds of jobs are they looking for? Then, having collected that information before the students go off to the workforce, track their progress in one, two and five years after they graduate to discover what has happened to them.
Dr. Min and I have also been going through public domain survey information that government and private foundations sponsor. We've stripped out a lot of data from the current population survey to find out if occupational choices are related to the number of children women expect to have and how those two factors are involved with a third-how much they get paid.
INSIGHT: How will this project benefit your students?
Allyn: This type of research is valuable in terms of the quality of education we offer. We, as teachers, will be able to offer better counseling based on what we see happening to our graduates. Our students have misperceptions about their futures that we need to correct. A woman may think she can take two years off to raise a child and not be damaged by dropping out of the workforce, but, in fact, it may be damaging to her career. That may still be a choice she prefers to make. We're not here to tell students what their morals and ethics should be. We're interested in this from the standpoint of workers and employers.
INSIGHT: Are other universities involved in similar research?
Allyn: There's a multidisciplinary and inter-university interest in workforce, gender and family issues. We'd like to participate in that intellectual community and develop a research stream. We already have one research paper out for comments from some university colleagues who have similar interests.