Lotte Bailyn
American social psychologist (b. 1930)
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Early life and education
Lotte Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna, Austria in 1930. She is the daughter of Marie Jahoda and Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. Her family fled Austria to New York City in 1937 after the Nazi occupation.
In 1951, she earned her BA in mathematics from Swarthmore College and her PhD in social psychology from the Radcliffe Graduate School in 1956.
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Career
Like many female academics of her generation, Bailyn had no serious career opportunities and got by in research with temporary contracts. In 1956 and 1957, she worked as a research associate at Harvard University, in 1957 and 1958 as an instructor in the Department of Economics and Social Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then again for the next few years without a permanent job as an assistant and lecturer at Harvard. In 1969, she returned to MIT and got a position as associate professor there in 1972 when she was 41 years old. She received a professorship at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1980.
From 1997 to 1999, she was Chair of the MIT faculty, succeeding Lawrence Bacow.
Bailyn carried out research on structural change in the world of work in industrial projects and, in her study published in 1993, came to the conclusion that the isolation between the world of work and family that arose in industrial society was a hindrance to work productivity and job satisfaction. Her research results received little attention at the time. Under the term “dual agenda”, it proposes measures with which this split can be broken. Years later, the questions and research results were taken up under the heading of compatibility of work and family.
Personal life
She married Bernard Bailyn on June 18, 1952. Together they had two children, Charles Bailyn, astrophysicist at Yale University, and John Bailyn, a linguist at Stony Brook University.