Gender and Work
Job Authority and Breast Cancer
Tetyana Pudrovska
Using the 1957–2011 data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, I integrate the gender relations theory, a life course perspective, and a biosocial stress perspective to explore the effect of women’s job authority in 1975 (at age 36) and 1993 (at age 54) on breast cancer incidence up to 2011. Findings indicate that women with the authority to hire, fire, and influence others’ pay had a significantly higher risk of a breast cancer diagnosis over the next thirty years compared to housewives and employed women with no job authority. Because job authority conferred the highest risk of breast cancer for women who also spent more hours dealing with people at work in 1975, I suggest that the assertion of job authority by women in the 1970 s involved stressful interpersonal experiences, such as social isolation and negative social interactions, that may have increased the risk of breast cancer via prolonged dysregulation of the glucocorticoid system and exposure of breast tissue to the adverse effects of chronically elevated cortisol. This study contributes to sociology by emphasizing gendered biosocial pathways through which women’s occupational experiences become embodied and drive forward physiological repercussions.
It’s Who You Work With: Effects of Workplace Shares of Nonstandard Employees and Women in Japan
Wei-hsin Yu
Previous research on workplace composition has not addressed how the share of nonstandard employees affects individual workers’ opportunities and well-being. Moreover, existing studies generally assume that the effect of a group’s numerical representation is mediated through the group’s relative power and status within establishments. This study asks whether workplace composition matters when the size of each social group has little impact on its relative status. Specifically, I examine the economic and psychological consequences of the proportions of nonstandard employees and women in Japanese workplaces, where both groups are typically secondary workers who lack power regardless of their relative size. The results indicate that working in establishments with modest proportions of nonstandard employees enhances individuals’ wages and likelihood of promotion, but working in those with higher proportions is detrimental. Conversely, the greater the share of nonstandard employees in a workplace, the more likely all workers are to suffer psychologically. Workplace gender composition is also linked to Japanese workers’ reported chances of promotion and life satisfaction, but it is relevant to fewer worker outcomes than employment-status composition. This analysis underscores the need to consider workplace demography, even if the power and status gaps between different social groups vary little with each group’s share within establishments. In addition, the findings suggest that the global trend of increasing nonstandard work arrangements has a more extensive impact on disparities among workers than prior research implies.
Gender, Bilingualism, and the Early Occupational Careers of Second-Generation Mexicans in the South
Rubén Hernández-León, Sarah Morando Lakhani
Following two decades of Mexican migration to the southern United States, the second generation is entering the labor market. We analyze the early occupational careers of fifty-eight second-generation young adults in Dalton, Georgia, a global carpet-manufacturing center. We find intergenerational occupational mobility, with children of Mexican immigrants deploying human-capital skills to access better jobs than their parents. However, the Mexican second generation faces opportunity ladders structured along gender lines, with women working in services and men laboring as bilingual supervisors and crew leaders in the carpet industry. While bilingual skills play a critical role in the employment paths that members of the second generation have started to chart, their use of bilingualism is also shaped by gender dynamics in the workplace.
Sexual Orientation and Gender Typicality of the Occupation in Young Adulthood
Koji Ueno, Teresa Roach, Abráham E. Peña-Talamantes
Previous research has shown that sexual minorities are more likely than heterosexuals to work in occupations that are atypical for their genders. This study seeks to extend the literature by examining the association between sexual orientation and gender typicality at the occupational-title level. The analysis focuses on the young adult population and uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Consistent with previous research, people who report same-sex orientation and both-sex orientation tend to have more gender-atypical occupations than those who report other sex orientation. This difference is observed regardless of the sexuality measure used (attraction, dating relationships, sexual contact, or identity), although sexual minorities’ tendency to hold gender-atypical occupations is more pronounced for men than women and for people who report same-sex orientation than those who report both-sex orientation. Contrary to previous arguments and common belief, gender-typed behaviors in adolescence account very little for the difference. Instead, educational qualifications, marital status, and parental status help explain the difference. Much of the gap remains unexplained, highlighting the need to examine the role of sexuality discrimination in future research.
Stratification and Inequality
Variation in the Heritability of Educational Attainment: An International Meta-Analysis
Amelia R. Branigan, Kenneth J. McCallum, Jeremy Freese
To assess heterogeneity in the influence of genetic variation on educational attainment across environmental contexts, we present a meta-analysis of heritability estimates in fifteen samples and thirty-four subgroups differing by nationality, sex, and birth cohort. We find that heritability, shared environment, and unshared environment each explain a substantial percentage of the variance in attainment across all countries, with between-sample heterogeneity in all three variance components. Although we observe only meager differences in the total family effect by cohort or sex, we observe large cohort and sex differences in the composition of the family effect, consistent with a history of higher heritability of educational attainment for males and for individuals born in the latter half of the twentieth century. Heritability also varies significantly by nation, with the direction of variation specific by sample. We find a markedly larger impact of shared environment on attainment than has been found for other social outcomes, with the percent of variation in attainment attributable to shared environment exceeding the percent attributable to heritability in one-third of the studies in our sample. Our findings demonstrate the heritability of educational attainment to be environmentally contingent, affirm the widespread and enduring role of shared environment in determining ultimate socioeconomic attainment, and emphasize the importance of considering behavioral genetics techniques in models of social mobility.
Social Isolation of Disadvantage and Advantage: The Reproduction of Inequality in Urban Space
Lauren J. Krivo, Heather M. Washington, Ruth D. Peterson, Christopher R. Browning, Catherine A. Calder, Mei-Po Kwan
In this article, we extend research on neighborhood social isolation by (1) examining residents of disadvantaged and advantaged communities and (2) considering the character of neighborhoods where people conduct routine activities away from home. We contend that social isolation is experienced by residents of both highly disadvantaged and highly advantaged neighborhoods because the two groups spend time in largely nonoverlapping parts of the city. Individual and neighborhood race-ethnic dynamics exacerbate such social isolation. Data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey show that social isolation is experienced by residents of all areas of the city, whether highly disadvantaged or advantaged. African Americans, Latinos and residents of areas with many Latinos suffer additional penalties in the social isolation of disadvantage in where they conduct routine activities.
Politics
Strong Walk and Cheap Talk: The Effect of the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights on Policies and Practices
Wade M. Cole
Economic and social rights are understudied, and the core international treaty covering these rights—the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)—has rarely been analyzed. This paper examines the effect of the ICESCR on (1) labor rights in law and practice and (2) the constitutionalization of socioeconomic rights. Membership in the ICESCR paradoxically improves de facto labor practices but not de jure labor rights laws. This effect represents an instance of “substance without ceremony,” and is consistent with recent empirical findings on the effects of global institutionalization. Treaty membership also prompts countries to enact constitutional provisions regarding socioeconomic rights, albeit in purely aspirational language. Countries that ratify the ICESCR remain hesitant to formulate such rights in enforceable terms.
Religion and Interest in Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Nicolette D. Manglos, Alexander A. Weinreb
Since the 1980s, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has experienced a major wave of democratization, and concurrent expansions of independent Christianity and Reformist Islam. Scholarly narratives about the relationship between religion and politics have alternated between emphasizing religion’s inclusive and divisive political potential. Using data from thirteen countries, we evaluate competing hypotheses arising from these narratives. Focusing on the grassroots level, we analyze the effects of religious identity, active religious membership, and education on political interest. We find that active religious membership positively shapes political interest in almost all countries. Yet contrary to extant elite-focused literature, we find no tradition to be uniformly more “political.” Further, religious identity and religious minority status frequently condition the effects of education on political interest. The effects of religion on interest in politics are therefore context-dependent, exhibiting both inclusive and divisive potential.
Assessing the Significance of Cohort and Period Effects in Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Models: Applications to Verbal Test Scores and Voter Turnout in U.S. Presidential Elections
Steven M. Frenk, Yang Claire Yang, Kenneth C. Land
In recently developed hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models, inferential questions arise: How can one assess or judge the significance of estimates of individual cohort and period effects in such models? And how does one assess the overall statistical significance of the cohort and/or the period effects? Beyond statistical significance is the question of substantive significance. This paper addresses these questions. In the context of empirical applications of linear and generalized linear mixed-model specifications of HAPC models using data on verbal test scores and voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections, respectively, we describe a two-step approach and a set of guidelines for assessing statistical significance. The guidelines include assessments of patterns of effects and statistical tests both for the effects of individual cohorts and time periods as well as for entire sets of cohorts and periods. The empirical applications show strong evidence that trends in verbal test scores are primarily cohort driven, while voter turnout is primarily a period phenomenon.
Children
Competitive Threat, Intergroup Contact, or Both?: Immigration and the Dynamics of Front National Voting in France
Daniel J. Della Posta
Research on contemporary European politics has shown that immigrant population size is strongly associated with vote totals for anti-immigrant political parties. Competitive threat theories suggest that this association should be positive, whereas intergroup contact theories imply that it should be negative. A two-level analysis of vote totals for the French Front National (FRN) suggests that the direction of this association depends critically on the level of analysis. At the department (i.e., state or regional) level, large immigrant populations are associated with higher FRN vote totals. At the commune (i.e., town or city) level, however, large immigrant populations are instead associated with lower FRN vote totals. These findings challenge the conclusions of previous analyses of populist-right voting and provide further evidence that contact and threat dynamics often operate simultaneously, albeit at different levels.
The Implications of Family Size for Adolescents’ Education and Work in Brazil: Gender and Birth Order Differences
Letícia J. Marteleto, Laetícia R. de Souza
Numerous studies have found a negative association between family size and children’s outcomes, particularly education. The main theoretical frameworks that explain these negative associations posit that family resources mediate the relationship between family size and children’s outcomes, and children are resource receivers only. However, societies in which adolescents often work inside and outside the household and family resources are transferred unequally undermine these assumptions. We implement a twin birth instrumental variable approach and use the nationally representative 1997–2009 PNAD data to examine the impact of family size on school enrollment, labor force, and household work in Brazil. We propose a framework for understanding the implications of family size when adolescents both receive and provide resources in the family unit and these resources may be provided and/or received unequally depending on gender and birth order. While we find no evidence of gender or birth order differences in the effects of family size on education, the results indicate strong gender and birth order differences in adolescents’ contributions to their family units. We discuss the implications of our findings for the life course of adolescents.
Evicting Children
Matthew Desmond, Weihua An, Richelle Winkler, Thomas Ferriss
This study identifies children as a risk factor for eviction. An analysis of aggregate data shows that neighborhoods with a high percentage of children experience increased evictions. An analysis of individual data based on an original survey shows that among tenants who appear in eviction court, those with children are significantly more likely to receive an eviction judgment. These findings indicate that policy-makers interested in monitoring and reducing discrimination should focus not only on the front end of the housing process—the freedom to obtain housing anywhere—but also on the back end: the freedom to maintain housing anywhere.
Causal Effects of Parental Leave on Adolescents’ Household Work
Andreas Kotsadam, Henning Finseraas
We exploit two Norwegian parental leave reforms to investigate their effects on adolescents’ household work. The main reform increased the parental leave time by 7 weeks, 4 of which were reserved for the father, while the second reform raised only the general parental leave time by 3 weeks. We find a robust and substantial effect of the main reform implying that adolescent girls born immediately after the reform are less likely to do household work. By analyzing the two parental leave reforms together, we show that the father quota drives the results.
Identity
Embarrassment and Social Organization: A Multiple Identities Model
Omar Lizardo, Jessica L. Collett
We empirically evaluate the proposition that the very same situational mechanisms that tend to evoke multiple identities—the processing of cognitive and affective information from the standpoint of discordant self-identifications—also produce variations in the experience of embarrassment. We integrate the classic Goffmanian model of the social sources of embarrassment with recent theorizing on the ecological features of encounters that invoke multiple identities (audience size, multiplexity, and audience heterogeneity). We use survey data obtained via the experience sampling method to show that these same mechanisms are connected to the higher self-reported levels of embarrassment in systematic and predictable ways net of fixed individual-level factors. We close by outlining the implications of our results for the revitalization of sociological research on embarrassment, specifically an approach that connects systematic features of the structural and relational position of persons with the concrete characteristics of situations in which interaction occurs.
World Citizenship and Concern for Global Warming: Building the Case for a Strong International Civil Society
Katrina Running
Climate change shares many characteristics with classic social dilemmas. Social psychological studies of social dilemmas have found that individuals who identify as members of social groups are more likely to cooperate with other group members. Using multilevel models and the 2005–2008 wave of the World Values Survey, I test the effect of four social identities—world citizen, national citizen, local community member, and autonomous individual—on the odds an individual considers global warming a very serious problem. I find that identification as a world citizen increases the odds an individual judges global warming to be very serious, but only for individuals who also identify as autonomous individuals. I argue that awareness of the individual and collective nature of environmental risks may strengthen efforts to promote ecological citizenship.
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