Socioeconomic Status and Health Disparity in the United States

Abstract

Low socioeconomic status (SES) has been associated with high rates of many chronic diseases. This study was a cluster analysis of data from 9,830 adults in the 1994-96 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by the Individuals (1994-96 CSFII) in order to characterize more fully the biologic and social factors that might be associated with chronic diseases. The study employed cluster analysis to define three SES groups (low, middle, and high) based on income, education, age, gender, and race. A significant increase was found in self-reported diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and stroke across these groups, being highest in the lowest SES group. Results revealed that health disparity in the U.S. may be substantial, with some population groups bearing a disproportionate burden of chronic diseases.     

Intersectional Identities and Conceptions of the Self: The Experience of Transgender People

Transgender people in the United States change genders in relation to androcentric, heterocentric, and middle‐class whitenormative cultural narratives. Drawing on ethnographic data primarily with transgender people of color, I analyze the ways in which gender, race, social class, and sexuality all combine to create specific background identities – intersected identity frames – which others attribute in interaction. We can better understand these intersected identity frames through the experiences of transgender people, who actively engage in identity management. The meanings others attach to specific combinations are foregrounded in the context of transitioning; some audiences employ dominant, white cultural narratives, while others draw upon ethnic cultural narratives. In all cases, transitioning throws the multi‐dimensionality of intersected identity frames into sharp relief against the background of intersecting social and cultural structural arrangements.     

Involuntary job loss and changes in personality traits

Economists consider personality traits to be stable, particularly throughout adulthood. However, evidence from psychological studies suggests that the stability assumption may not always be valid, as personality traits can respond to certain life events. Our paper analyzes whether and to what extent personality traits are malleable over a time span of eight years for a sample of working individuals. Furthermore, we specifically look at changes in personality traits after a major adverse life event: involuntary job loss. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 2004 to 2014 – a period over which individuals’ Big Five personality inventory was measured three times. Our dataset allows us to exploit detailed employment information, particularly reasons for job termination and unemployment spells. We focus solely on plant closures as a reason for job termination. Job loss due to plant closure is widely used as a relatively exogenous event to identify causal effects. Our results suggest that personality traits are indeed malleable during adulthood. Although the Big Five measures are relatively stable within the overall population of workers, we find an increase in openness, that is, the willingness to seek new experiences, for the average displaced worker. This increase, however, is fully driven by individuals with high educational attainment and by those who find a new job immediately after dismissal. The other dimensions of the Big Five personality inventory remain nearly unchanged after an involuntary job loss. Our findings hold for a number of robustness checks and are supported by the results of a falsification test using a placebo treatment.     

Race,threat and workplace sexual harassment: The dynamics of harassment in the United States, 1997–2016

Sexual harassment is a persistent problem for women in the workplace. Prior research has explored the effects of sexual harassment on the psychological, physical and economic wellbeing of the victims. Despite the extensive research exploring the causes, most studies focus on micro‐level factors, and few studies examine the role of macro‐level factors on sexual harassment in the workplace. Using public Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data and a separate dataset of individual level workplace sexual harassment complaints, we test two hypotheses about sexual harassment in American workplaces. First, we show that the decline in workplace sexual harassment complaints has been uneven, with African‐American women experiencing an increased relative risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, even as overall reported harassment complaints are down. Second, we show that economic threat — operationalized in this case through unemployment rates — drives increases in sexual harassment of women in American workplaces. While the data on harassment complaints is limited, data strongly suggests that the changes are driven by shifts in underlying levels of harassment, rather than changes in the likelihood of reporting harassment.     

Racial penal governance in Australia and moments of appearance: disrupting disappearance and visibilizing women on the inside

ABSTRACT

The paper considers the lives of women that are invisibilized by the racial penal governing mechanisms of the settler state. It demonstrates how a racial penal governance is configured historically by its interlockings with multiple and hierarchical systems of oppression that intervene differently in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and women, convict women, racialized diaspora and marginalized white women. The paper engages with four ‘moments of appearances’ that interrupt and speak back to racial penal governance. Mirzoeff’s The appearance of Black Lives Matter (2017, https://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/) theorization of decolonial spaces of appearance is integrated to the analysis of historical and recent moments of appearance visibilized in the testimonials of Thomas Brune, the Aboriginal youth Co-editor of the Flinders Island Chronicle in 1837 in the Wybalenna prison Camp and of Zoe, Alison and Pamela who have lived experience of prisons. These are embodied moments that make lives in prisons appear and matter.     

Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: (Re)Thinking Inclusion of Women and Scholars of Color in the Academy

ABSTRACT

In this #MeToo moment, many women of color have called out those in power, namely men, who engage in sexual harassment and toxic masculinity. Furthermore, scholars, whose personal identities and research interests lie at the margins of gender, race, class, and sexuality, have drawn increasing attention to issues of gendered and racialized biases and harassment in the Academy. During our pre-conference session at the 2018 meeting of the American Political Science Association, we discussed substantive methods for reckoning with these conditions. We worked through the theoretical frameworks of Black Feminist and queer scholarship to orient ourselves toward actions that center the most marginalized. We identified methods for generating transformative solutions to campus and departmental problems facing students, faculty, and staff with intersectional identities. In all, the workshop proved both effective and generative for all in attendance, providing those present with concrete tools to build more equitable departments and classrooms.     

Gender,Foreignness and Academia: An Intersectional Analysis of the Experiences of Foreign Women Academics in UK Business Schools

This article explores the experiences of a growing but hitherto under‐researched category of academics employed within UK higher education: women of non‐UK origin. Drawing on an intersectional approach, we examine how gender and foreignness act as dynamic, interrelating categories in producing particular subjectivities in the context of UK business schools. We employ a qualitative methodology based on narrative interviews with 31 foreign women academics. In the analysis, we outline the broader global forces that have shaped their trajectories in choosing the UK as their destination, and the place of gender and foreignness in the participants' narratives of their experience. Our findings point to how the discourse of internationalization conceals intra‐categorical differences among non‐national staff, further supported by a merit‐based system that promotes an individualized view. However, participants' narratives provide examples of how gender and foreignness are mobilized in different ways by different actors — including themselves — in the production of social locations. As such, the paper contributes to critical debates regarding the academic workplace and the changing conditions of UK academia.     

Sociological Theories of Low-Wage Work

This review addresses the use of sociological theories in the examination of low-wage work. Due to the vast volume of literature on this topic, only theories that help to explain the dynamics of low-wage work are described, along with the differences and controversies surrounding these theories. These theories are divided into four topic areas related to theories of work, racial and gender theories, immigration theories, and intersectionality theory. The theories of work include different models of wage determination, namely, functional, conflict, and structural models. The review concludes with a conceptual map that illustrates how these theories can inform and guide practice.     

Women bankers in black and white: exploring raced,classed and gendered coalitions

ABSTRACT

Black women constitute the majority of the population but they lag significantly behind white women and other groups in their participation in the labour market. Intersectionality requires that we recognise the differences in experience between black women and white women. This is not for the purposes of what some have called the “oppression Olympics” but to research the stratifications of social asymmetries in a manner that allows for an understanding of the complexity of inequality. Based on interview data and observations, we use employment equity discourses to explore the differential positions of black women and white women managers in a major bank’s headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. A historical analysis of black women and white women’s experience illustrates the systemic and institutional aspects of intersectionality as well as the difficulties in forming coalitions between black women and white women. In the final analysis we argue that the mutual advancement of women requires historicisation and renewed commitment to partnerships to eradicate sexism and racism.     

“Where the Danger Lies”: Race,Gender, and Chinese and Japanese Exclusion in the United States, 1870–19241

Race too often is used as the explanatory variable for understanding immigration exclusion, marginalizing the significance of race making, ethnic differentiation, and gender construction in particular. This article explores these processes by examining exclusionary policies implemented against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the mid‐1870s to 1924, the year the National Origins Act was passed. Politicians, intellectuals, and moral reformers used a gendered logic—the construction of idealized gender norms, roles, and sexual propriety and the attachment of these meanings to male and female bodies—to distinguish Japanese immigrants from the Chinese immigrants they followed, allowing for ethnic differentiation and dissimilar policies. The convergence toward exclusion rested on a racialized logic—the construction and attachment of inferior status and meanings to immigrant groups through discourse, formal and informal categorization, or social closure—which claimed that the Japanese were unassimilable and racially undesirable like the Chinese. Exclusionists focused on the immigrant women, decrying their sexual and gender impropriety as evidence of the groups’ threats to the sanctity of white families, which imperiled the nation. Gender and race both mattered in these logics and their meanings were constructed as their salience interconnected.     

At‐Home Father Families in the United States: Gender Ideology,Human Capital,and Unemployment

The rising population of stay‐at‐home fathers is driven by economic conditions, human capital, and changing gender ideology. When unemployment rates increase, women become breadwinners in these families. The growing gender education gap is a crucial factor in spousal work and caregiving arrangements. The authors test these propositions by tracking individuals using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth and the Current Population Survey. They find that unemployment rates are associated with having both caregiving and unable‐to‐work stay‐at‐home father families and that the probability that households choose stay‐at‐home father arrangements is greater when mothers have more education than fathers. Finally, individual differences in gender ideology have strong effects on the probability that families choose a caregiving stay‐at‐home father family structure.     

Racialized parenting in the United States

Contrary to anti-black, cultural deficit logics that frame Black parenting as tied to the reproduction of social disadvantage, research shows that Black parents, and other parents of color, are agentic as they parent in direct response to the dominant racial order of the United States. In this paper, I review this scholarship and primarily focus on how Black parents approach raising children in the racialized worlds that they live in. To mitigate the disadvantages caused by racism, Black parents use various intentional racialized parenting approaches to instill in their children a resilience to a racist social world. The strategies used to cultivate resilience to racism exist in varied social and institutional contexts, and intertwine with how parents understand race, class, and identity. Laborious racialized parenting techniques do not solely matter at the micro-level as such practices are unevenly recognized by white-dominant social institutions. This uneven dynamic indicates how hegemonic norms of American parenting culture fit within a project of racial neoliberalism. Consequently, Black parents are structurally pushed to burden more responsibility to prepare their children to survive a deeply racist and hyper-competitive social world with no guarantee that such intensive, strategic parenting will be rewarded.     

Women and plant closings: Unemployment,re-employment,and job training enrollment following dislocation

Major changes in the U.S. economy are leaving blue collar women vulnerable to extended unemployment, permanent job loss, or re-employment at lower wage and benefit levels. Consequently, retraining for other jobs may be a virtual necessity. Information about factors associated with women's employment status after job loss may be useful to policy makers and program planners providing assistance or training to dislocated women. This study of women workers, who are dislocated from jobs in textile and apparel plants in Georgia, identifies the differences between women who are unemployed, re-employed, or enrolled in job training programs following job loss. Findings suggest that stage of the family life cycle and the demands of combining production work and family responsibilities contribute to women's experience of unemployment and their labor market participation.     

上海外来白领生存压力与社会信心调查

上海外来白领生存压力与社会信心调查显示,外来白领对上海整体较为满意,对上海的社会信心较高,同时在工作生活中也面临住房、健康、经济收支、身份认同等四大突出压力。上海应积极出台有效政策措施,努力疏解当前上海外来白领工作生活中的突出压力。     

The Great Recession,Fertility, and Uncertainty: Evidence From the United States

The Great Recession produced the highest rates of unemployment and foreclosure in the United States since the Great Depression. In this article the author examines the consequences of these poor economic conditions for fertility in the United States by estimating the effect of area‐level economic conditions on state fertility in the years leading up to and including the Great Recession. The economic impacts of the Great Recession, captured by state‐level economic conditions, had a strong negative effect on fertility in models with state and year fixed effects. These reductions in fertility were likely caused both by increased economic hardship and increased economic uncertainty.     

Race,Gender, and Attitudes Toward War in Chicago: An Intersectional Analysis1

Although prior research has documented persistent racial and gender differences in public opinion on war across U.S. military conflicts, there is little understanding as to how race and gender simultaneously shape war opinion. Using data from the 2008 Chicago Area Study, this analysis locates gender within an intersectional examination of black‐white differences in support for the U.S. war in Iraq. “Structural” and “racialized” explanations for blacks’ lower level of support relative to whites are tested, first using all respondents, and then for men and women. Exploratory analyses show the race gap in war support to exist solely among Chicago women. Racial differences in partisanship and education are most strongly associated with black‐white differences in Iraq War support among Chicago women. In addition, while affiliation with the Republican Party increases the odds of support among both men and women, education and political alienation decrease the odds of support only among women and the odds of support increase with age only among men. Results highlight the utility of an intersectional lens to the study of public opinion on foreign policy.     

Gender Composition of Children and the Third Birth in the United States

Pollard and Morgan (2002) argued that the parental mixed‐gender preference (i.e., parents' preference to have at least one son and one daughter) will weaken in the United States as aspects of gender become increasingly deinstitutionalized. They presented evidence that mixed‐gender preference weakened in the 1986–1995 period compared to earlier and coined this change as emerging gender indifference. On the other hand, credible claims and evidence suggest that after 1985, the “gender revolution” has stalled. Such arguments suggest that weakened mixed‐gender preference will persist. In this study, the authors replicated and extended Pollard and Morgan using 4 waves of data from the National Survey of Family Growth that allow examination of the 1966–2009 period. The results show that the effect of same‐gender children on intending/having another child declined in the 1986–1995 period; however, no evidence that this effect has continued to weaken was found. Thus, these data show evidence consistent with a “stalled revolution.”     

American Indian Poverty in the Contemporary United States

Little sociological attention over the last two decades has focused on the deprivation experienced by indigenous people. Fusing insights from American Indian history and the race and labor market inequality literatures, we address this gap in this article through a historically informed labor market analysis of poverty—an analysis that considers the pervasiveness of contemporary Native poverty, its potential basis in labor market opportunities, and the extent to which it has been patterned by two major demographic and economic shifts: (1) the rapid urbanization of the American Indian population and (2) the proliferation of tribally owned casinos. Findings reveal, most notably, the incredibly rigid and durable character of poverty for this population, historically and currently and across geographic space, and with little overall impact of local labor market opportunity. The presence of tribal casinos reduces such poverty, but only to a small degree and not nearly enough to compensate for sizable American Indian and white poverty differentials. Group history is key, we conclude, to shaping how space, labor markets, and economic development reduce or buttress relations of inequality.     

Ethnocultural cleavages and the growth of church membership in the United States, 1860–1930

Recent research on the expansion of overall church membership in the United States has led to conflicting conclusions as to whether religious diversity or monopoly increases participation. This investigation helps resolve the debate by distinguishing among different religious traditions. It is hypothesized that differences in participation can be traced to racial, ethnic, and doctrinal divisions, and moreover, that these divisions also provide the contingent conditions under which competition or monopoly effects operate. Using pooled cross-sectional time series, comparisons center on Catholics, Baptists, and Mainline denominations. Separate analyses are presented for white and black Baptists, and for the Northern Baptist Convention that emerged in the early 20th century as a relatively liberal Baptist denomination. The results suggest that ecumenical and liberal religious traditions did accompany religious diversity, but membership in such churches grew very slowly. In contrast, groups that faced discrimination as well as those that shielded themselves from progressive currents of modernism sustained high rates of growth. Their monopoly situations are evident in the low religious diversity of counties in which they grew (as well as by low ethnic or racial diversity) and by their increasing spatial concentration over time.A version of this paper was presented at the 1992 American Sociological Association meetings.