Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP), the leading not-for-profit professional work-life association, in partnership with The Center for Families at Purdue University and The Center for Work and Family at Boston College, recently announced the recipients of the 2007 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research Award. Hadas Mandel and Moshe Semyonov are the 2007 honorees for the single best piece of work-family research published during a calendar year.  The article is titled,  "Family Policies, Wage Structures, and Gender Gaps: Sources of Earnings Inequality in 20 Countries."  Hadas Mandel, a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Moshe Semyonov, a professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Tel Aviv University , co-authored the article, which was published in the December 2005 issue of American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association.

By looking at the differences among 20 countries' family policies, the researchers found that gender earnings disparities are less pronounced in countries with developed family policies. Although "mother-friendly" policies enable more women to become economically active, they may also exacerbate gender occupational inequality.

The award is named for Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who has been identified by leading scholars as the person having the most influence on the modern research literature on work and family. The proposals contained in her 1977 monograph "Work and Family in the United States: A Critical Review and Agenda for Research and Policy" remain timely more than a quarter-century later.