Sex stratification in the workplace: Male-female differences in economic returns to occupation

Employing data from the 1974–1977 NORC General Social Surveys, I investigate differences in the earnings attainment of currently employed white men and women age 25 to 64. I focus special attention on the explanatory effects of job characteristics other than those traditionally employed in prestige and status-defined earnings models. The results, based on a multivariate regression analysis and a regression standardization procedure, suggest that a nontrivial portion of the earnings gap between men and women is due to women's concentration in jobs which are low-paying and heavily female and because women are less likely than men to exercise authority in their jobs or to control the means of production. Including these factors in an earnings model statistically increases women's earnings as a percentage of men's by over 7%, accounting for approximately 13% of the earnings gap. Net of these job characteristics, gender differences in industry distribution are not substantively important in explaining why women earn less than men, accounting for only 0.4% of the earnings gap. When single women's earnings are adjusted to take account of their occupational concentration, 10% of the male-single female earnings gap is explained, providing preliminary evidence that the job characteristics I specify are not mere proxies for work experience. Including job characteristics as measures of the context of employment thus usefully extends the human capital and prestige or statusdefined models traditionally employed in explanations of the male-female earnings differential.     

Motivation vs. relevance: Using strong ties to find a job in Urban China

While the idea that contacts matter in finding a job is intuitively appealing, we still do not know—after decades of research—how and why strong ties benefit job seekers. To resolve this confusion, we need to theorize how specific characteristics of ties are related to the mechanisms that make job search through contacts effective. We have reasons to expect that, while a contact’s motivation influences the likelihood that a job seeker receives an offer, her homophily with the job seeker on occupation and other job-relevant attributes influences the quality of the offer. The use of strong ties among university students to find jobs in China provides a unique opportunity to empirically isolate the relationship between contact characteristics and the mechanisms through which contacts benefit the job seeker. I tested my hypotheses with data on both the successful and unsuccessful job searches of 478 graduates of China’s flagship universities, who, as first-time job seekers, primarily used strong ties. Survey results are consistent with my hypotheses: job seekers who used strong ties to look for jobs had more offers—but not better offers—than those who used only formal methods.     

政府借助投资基金推动家庭农场发展刍议

近年来,我国各地政府纷纷把扶持家庭农场发展作为推动本地农业现代化的重要工作,出台了多项扶持其发展的金融政策,农业产业投资基金作为其中一种,与其他措施相比,具有独特优势,能够将引导与扶持结合起来推动家庭农场的发展,因此,应成为发展家庭农场的一大助力,但是,许多地方对农业产业投资基金的作用认识不足,没有能充分发挥其作用。     

The mental health consequences of the economic crisis in Europe among the employed,the unemployed,and the non-employed

Applying a multi-level framework to the data from the European Social Survey’s Round 3 (2006) and Round 6 (2012), we assessed the crisis by increases in rates of unemployment, while also controlling for countries’ pre-crisis economic conditions. We found a positive relationship between depression and an increase in national unemployment rates. This relationship can be only partly ascribed to an increase in the number of unemployed and those employed in nonstandard job conditions—with the exception of the self-employed and women working part-time. The crisis effect is more pronounced among men and those between 35 and 49 years of age. Moreover, in strongly effected countries, the crisis has changed the relationship between part-time work and depression, between depression and certain subcategories of the unemployed (looking for a job or not looking), and between depression and the non-employed.     

Labor Market and Socioeconomic Effects on Marital Stability

This paper reports an investigation of the effects of socioeconomic and labor market factors on the dissolution of marriages since the mid 1960s. We examine the effects of possible sources of marital disruption, including poor labor market opportunities for young adults; the economic independence and improved labor market opportunities of women; and changes in the labor market roles and expectations of women within marriage. Using the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Men, Young Women, and Youth, we estimate the effects on marital stability of husbands′ and wives′ levels, differences and changes in educational attainment, income, and annual weeks worked. Our results suggest that average levels of couples′ educational attainment and recent work experiences positively affect marital stability. The degree to which husbands and wives differ on educational attainment and income does not affect marital stability, but the more that wives work relative to their husbands, the greater the chances of disruption. Positive changes in wives′ socioeconomic and labor force characteristics over the course of their marriages increase the odds of marital disruption.     

The Dynamic Interdependence of Women′s Employment and Fertility

Research on the causal relationship between women′s fertility and their employment patterns has yielded contradictory findings. In order to shed some light on the confusion that has resulted, hazard models are used to investigate the possibility these two variables are dynamically interdependent. Transition rates among combined states of pregnancy and fertility are analyzed for a data set consisting of joint work and fertility event histories for a national sample of young white and black women. The results lend support to the interdependence thesis. Pregnancy and motherhood increase the rate at which women leave employment and decrease their reentry rate. Furthermore, I find that women′s wages, and for white women, employment status as well, are negatively and significantly related to their rate of becoming pregnant.     

Unemployment and men's entrance into female-dominated jobs

Despite the contraction of many male-dominated occupations, men have made limited progress in entering female-dominated jobs. Using monthly employment histories from the SIPP, we examine whether individual economic conditions—such as a period of unemployment—are associated with men subsequently pursuing female-dominated work. Specifically, we ask whether men are more likely to enter female-dominated jobs after unemployment, compared to men who take a new job directly from employment. We find that unemployment significantly increases the odds of men entering female-dominated work among men who make job transitions. By examining changes in occupational prestige as well as wage differences before and after unemployment, we also find that entering a female-dominated job (compared to other job types) may help men mitigate common scarring effects of unemployment such as wage losses and occupational prestige downgrades. Accordingly, this study reveals a critical occupational route that may allow men to remain upwardly mobile after involuntary unemployment.     

Gender Inequality and Economic Growth in Rural China

This article joins the debate over the effect of market-driven economic development on women's work opportunities and household gender inequalities. It assesses women's opportunities for off-farm employment, the relative contributions of female off-farm workers to household income, and the distribution of power in families whose male members have left for off-farm jobs, leaving women behind in agricultural work. We find that women are not uniformly excluded from opportunities for off-farm employment and that economic development does not uniformly increase gender inequalities within Chinese households. Although men are more likely than women to obtain off-farm employment in China, women's opportunities for off-farm work improve significantly when the coexistence of local and regional marketization creates a shortage of male workers and compels employers to hire women. The relative size of contributions to household income for male and female nonfarm workers also narrows incrementally with increased marketization. In addition, women who are left in agricultural work are more likely to become heads of household, a position which brings greater household decision-making power to female family members.     

Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process

While much research has documented the pattern and extent of sex segregation of workers once they are employed, few studies have addressed the pre-hire mechanisms that are posited to produce sex segregation in employment. While the notion of a labor queue—the rank order of the set of people that employers choose among—plays a prominent role in pre-hire accounts of job sex sorting mechanisms, few studies have examined the ways in which job candidates are sorted into labor queues. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms by which labor queues contribute to the gendering of jobs by studying the hiring process for all jobs at a call center. Being placed in a queue has a clear gendering effect on the hiring process: the sex distribution of applicants who are matched to queues and those who are rejected at this phase diverge, and among those assigned to queues, women are prevalent in queues for low pay, low status jobs. The screening process also contributes to the gendering of the population of hires at this firm. Females are more prevalent among hires than they are among candidates at initial queue assignment. Among high status jobs, however, males are more prevalent than females. Moreover, there are important wage implications associated with matching to queues. While there are large between-queue sex differences in the paid wages associated with allocation to queues, once allocated to queues the wage differences between male and female candidates are nil. Consequently, the roots of gender wage inequality in this setting lie in the initial sorting of candidates to labor queues.     

Educational inequalities in parental care time: Cross-national evidence from Belgium,Denmark, Spain,and the United Kingdom

This study uses time-diary data for dual-earner couples from Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and the United Kingdom to analyze educational inequalities in parental care time in different national contexts. For mothers, education is significantly associated with parenting involvement only in Spain and the United Kingdom. In Spain these differences are largely explained by inequalities in mothers' time and monetary resources, but not in the United Kingdom, where less-educated mothers disproportionally work in short part-time jobs. For fathers, education is associated with parenting time in Denmark, and particularly in Spain, while the wife's resources substantially drive these associations. On weekends, the educational gradient in parental care time applies only to Spain and the United Kingdom, two countries with particularly large inequalities in parents' opportunities to engage in parenting. The study shows country variations in educational inequalities in parenting, suggesting that socioeconomic resources, especially from mothers, shape important variations in parenting involvement.     

浅析高校大学生兼职现象

随着我国高等教育的进一步深入,特别是高校扩招政策的实施,大学生就业形势日益严峻。当前各大高校都出现了一个类似的现象,大批刚刚进入校门的学子第一件事就是找一份好的兼职工作,他们以各种不同形式的兼职来磨练自己的意志力和勇气。在锻炼自己的同时,又很好地为家庭分忧解难。     

Occupational Gender Segregation and the Earnings Gap: Changes in the 1980s

The 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census data confirm the decline in the earnings gap between men and women. Occupational segregation by gender also declined during the 1980s. Cross-sectional decompositions show that 15% of the earnings gap would be eliminated if women′s occupation distributions were the same as men′s. Over-time decompositions show that declining occupational segregation accounted for about 36% of the decline in the earnings gap; most of the declining earnings gap resulted from more equal pay within occupations.     

知识型员工离职倾向的心理解构及其影响机理

心理契约主要通过工作满意度和组织承诺的双重中介效应影响离职倾向。组织承诺是工作满意度影响离职倾向的非完全中介变量,工作满意度对离职倾向的解释程度高于组织承诺。变量之间的影响关系,揭示了知识型员工离职倾向的动因及其形成的心理过程。从心理契约构面对离职倾向的影响程度来说,人际型责任影响最大,反映了我国人际关系文化的深刻影响。     

农产品地理标志保护的意义及其路径

农产品地理标志保护有利于保护农民知识产权,增加农民经济收入;有利于促进农产品质量标准化,提高农产品国际竞争力;有利于农业产业化经营,促进中国特色农业的发展;有利于开发和拓展农业的综合功能,发扬传统农业文明。农产品地理标志保护的路径主要包括:大力做好宣传工作,积极营造理念氛围;完善法律法规,统一注册主管机构;明确政府职能,发挥行业协会作用;加强注册保护,强化产品质量和市场监督;研究国际上相关立法规定,积极开展国际注册和保护。     

Sexual inequality in the workplace: An employer-specific analysis of pay differences

This paper reports an analysis of employer-specific sex differences in the processes governing the salary attainment of personnel of a large company. The two dominant theories of inequality both view discrimination as the operative cause of pay differences, but locate the structural source of discrimination at different points in the employer-employee exchange space. The wage discrimination hypothesis asserts that the economic disadvantage of women issues directly from the pay practices of employers, with women receiving “unequal pay for equal work.” The crowding, or employment segregation, hypothesis asserts that inequality issues from the employment practices of employers; disparities in the allocation of jobs and promotions results in segregation along sexual lines, with women relegated to lower-paying positions. The findings show that both wage discrimination and sexual segregation of the company's job and rank structures contribute to inequality, but that the latter is more important. The implications for the issue of discrimination are briefly discussed.     

企业员工组织承诺表征与测度研究

以企业员工组织承诺表征为切入点,从情感承诺、持续承诺和规范承诺三个方面阐述了企业员工组织承诺的表征变量体系及内涵,并运用层次分析法,研究了某企业员工组织承诺及其重要程度二维矩阵。结果表明,通过对组织承诺的表征变量及其重要程度的科学测度,可以将企业员工对组织目标与价值的认同状态,以及员工促进组织发展的内在动因客观地表现出来,此项研究为企业人力资源管理部门制定决策提供了科学依据。     

影响当前土地流转与合作经营的几种灰色预期论析

土地合作是培育农民经合组织重要依托。然而,在当前推进土地流转与合作中却遭遇到了来自转出土地农户方的不合作。这些不合作与这些农户的灰色心理预期有很大关系。这些灰色预期包括由于安于现状的思想观念、害怕沦为基层政府追求地方政绩的牺牲品、顾虑未来生存保障没有着落、对规模经营后土地收益不公平后果与转出土地后产生的＂不经济＂的可能后果的担忧等原因而产生的一系列灰色预期。要通过发展出真正符合合作社原则与治理机制的农民专业合作组织并给普通农户带来实实在在的实惠来消除他们的这些灰色期望。     

The skill-divide in job quality: A cross-national analysis of 28 countries

This study focuses on the skill divide in job quality and the role of social institutions in structuring the relation of workers’ qualifications to the attributes of their jobs. Four measures of job quality are examined: job security, job achievement, job content and work schedule flexibility. The study is based on the 2005 ISSP module on work orientations and encompasses 28 countries. Obtained through multilevel modeling, the findings show that low-skilled workers are disadvantaged in all aspects of job quality. However, skill inequality in the quality of employment depends on countries’ characteristics, with declining inequality in countries at higher levels of technological development and to some extent also in times of technological growth. At times of high unemployment, skill disparities in job security widen while on other measures of job quality they decline. Under high market regulation, the low skilled enjoy better job security but on other measures, skill inequalities increase.