Left Out? Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Poverty in the U.S.

This paper analyzes the risk of poverty for self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people from mid-2013 through 2016 in the National Health Interview Survey, a nationally representative survey of households that includes a sexual orientation question based on identity (n = 112,143). The study tests the role of family structure—living with a spouse or partner and having children—on the risk of poverty for LGB and heterosexual respondents. After controlling for education, demographic, and health measures in a probit model, lesbians and gay men are as likely to be poor as similar heterosexuals, but bisexual women and men are significantly more likely to be poor, regardless of relationship status. Single and childless gay men are also more likely to be poor than single heterosexual men. Being in a relationship reduces the likelihood of poverty for people of all sexual orientations, but the data show evidence of a gender composition effect: married male same-sex couples are less likely and unmarried female same-sex couples more likely to be poor than their married counterparts. Marriage reduces gay men’s poverty risk more and children increase their poverty risk less than for heterosexual men.     

Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being In and Out of Management Positions

This study used data from the German Socio-economic Panel to examine gender differences in the extent to which self-reported subjective well-being was associated with occupying a high-level managerial position in the labour market, compared with employment in non-leadership, non-high-level managerial positions, unemployment, and non-labour market participation. Our results indicated that a clear hierarchy exists for men in term of how status within the labour market was associated with subjective life satisfaction. Unemployed men were the least satisfied, followed by men who were not in the labour market, while men in leadership positions reported the highest level of subjective life satisfaction. For women, no statistically significant differences were observed among women in high-level managerial positions, women who worked in non-high-level positions, and women who specialized in household production, with no market work. Only women who were unemployed reported lower levels of life satisfaction, compared with women in other labour-market statuses. Our results lend evidence to the contention that men can ??have it all??, but women must still choose between career and family in Germany. We argue that interventions need to address how the non-pecuniary rewards associated with high-level managerial and leadership positions can be increased for women. Such policies would also likely serve to mitigate the ??pipeline?? problem concerning the number of women who are available to move into high positions in the private sector.     

The long-term effect of childhood poverty

This paper uses variation among siblings to identify the consequences of childhood poverty on both labour and marriage market outcomes. In the labour market, individuals who experienced childhood poverty are found to have lower earnings and lower labour market attachment and to have worse jobs both vertically in terms of low-paying industries and horizontally in terms of job positions. In the marriage market, childhood poverty is found to have negative consequences for the probability of marriage, cohabitation, and having children around the age of 30. The effect sizes are found to exhibit an inverse u-shape in the age of the child, peaking during adolescence. Results on educational choices suggest that the mechanisms behind these results can be that childhood poverty affects the skill formation, networks, and decision making of the child.     

Double jeopardy: Interaction effects of marital and poverty status on the risk of mortality

The purpose of this paper is to examine the hypothesis that marital and poverty status interact in their effects on mortality risks beyond their main effects. This study examines the epidemiological bases for applying an additive rather than a multiplicative specification when testing for interaction between two discrete risk factors. We specifically predict that risks associated with being nonmarried and with being poor .interact to produce mortality risks that are greater than each risk acting independently. The analysis is based on men and women who were ages 25–74 during the 1971–1975 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I (NHANES I) and who were traced successfully in the NHANES I Epidemiologic Follow-Up Study in 1982–1984. Overall, being both poor and nonmarried places nonelderly (ages 25–64) men, but not women, at risk of mortality greater than that expected from the main effects. This study shows that for all-cause mortality, marital and poverty status interact for men but less so for women; these findings exist when interaction is assessed with either a multiplicative or an additive standard. This difference is most pronounced for poor, widowed men and (to a lesser degree) poor, divorced men. For violent/accidental deaths among men, the interaction effects are large on the basis of an additive model. Weak main and interaction effects were detected for the elderly (age 65 +).     

Do Values Matter? The Impact of Work Ethic and Traditional Gender Role Values on Female Labour Market Supply

This article aims to gain a better understanding of the explanatory value of work ethic and traditional gender role values with regard to variation in female labour market supply. Although women’s labour market participation has increased dramatically over the past decades, it still lacks behind that of men. A high female participation rate is desirable for several reasons, for instance to cover rising costs due to the ageing of society. The existing literature has mostly focused on micro-economic and macro factors to explain differences between women in participation rate. However, more recently it has been argued that women’s values may also play an important role in women’s labour market decisions. Work ethic, expressing the moral duty to work in terms of paid employment, is argued to positively affect women’s labour supply. However, it is argued that it can have negative implications too if women who hold more traditional gender role values interpret work and work ethic in terms of housework or in terms of paid employment for men only. This exemplifies the need to study both values at the same time. We used longitudinal Dutch data (LISS panel, 2007–2010) and estimated both cross-sectional and longitudinal models. Both types of models revealed a similar pattern: work ethic is positively associated with women’s labour market participation, but only if we take into account women’s gender role values, which negatively relate to women’s labour market supply.     

The Social Patterning of Work-Related Insecurity and its Health Consequences

This study examines the association between work-related insecurity and health, with a focus on how this relationship is moderated by social location (gender, age and race). Drawing on longitudinal data from a Canadian labour market survey (1999–2004) the findings show that certain groups have a higher prevalence of exposure to certain types of work-related insecurity including (among others) low earnings, poor job mobility and the absence of union protection. Results from regression analyses indicate that the negative health impact of work-related insecurity is also unevenly distributed across different social locations. In some cases, older age and visible minority status significantly elevated the health risk posed by work-related insecurity. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of major shifts in the demographic composition of the labour market due to workforce ageing and the increased participation of women and visible minorities.     

The Role of Family Behaviors in Determining Income Distribution: The Case of South Korea

In this article, we examined what has contributed to the worsening income inequality and poverty between 1996 and 2011 in South Korea. We used a rank-preserving exchange method and a conditional reweighting method to assess the roles of family behaviors—including female labor force participation and family structure—characteristics of household heads, and men’s earnings. The results showed that the change in men’s earnings was a dominant factor in accounting for the increasing income inequality and poverty. The change in age and education among household heads also contributed significantly to the worsening income distribution. The change in family structure mainly affected the income disparity among lower-income families and increased poverty. The rise in women’s labor force participation improved the income distribution but not considerably. The distributional roles of family have not worked to prevent or reverse the worsening income distribution in the past few decades in South Korea.     

Paid Work and Unpaid Work: Diary Information Versus Questionnaire Information

Time-use information is preferably obtained from diaries, as this method is considered more reliable than information from questionnaires. Data from the Danish Time Use Survey 2001 thus indicate differences in the level of unpaid work, whereas only minor differences appear for paid work. That is: people reporting many hours of paid work tend to over-report the actual number of hours worked, while those reporting a small number of hours tend to underreport their contribution. For unpaid work, the same pattern appears. Moreover, men are found to be more unreliable than women in evaluating their amount of work on the labour market, while the opposite is the case for the unpaid/household work, with women underreporting their contribution more than men. The implication is that labour supplystudies based on questionnaire-information, i.e. Labour Force Surveys, are less accurate than studies based on diary-information.     

The effect of women’s participation in the labour market on the postponement of first childbirth: a comparison of Italy and Hungary

This paper analyses the effect of increasing female participation in the labour market on the transition to first childbirth. Regional perspectives are considered to help us understand how postponement behaviour is changing over time and at different paces in each region. The analysis is based on the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey of Italy and Hungary. We use a multilevel event history random intercept model to examine the effect of individuals’ positions in the labour market on the transition to motherhood, controlling for differences in macrolevel factors related to regional backgrounds in the two countries. The regional data for Italy came from the Italian National Statistical Institute, and for Hungary from our imputation developed from the time series available at the national and the regional levels (Hungarian Central Statistical Office, KSH). The postponement of first childbirth is strongly linked to the increasing involvement of women in paid work, but with opposite effects in the two countries. Even if we control for changes in women’s levels of education over time and for shifts in women’s aspirations and levels of attainment in the labour market, we find that being employed remains a risk factor for the postponement of the first birth among Italian women, and a strong protective factor among Hungarian women. At the contextual level, the variables that take into account the regional socio-economic changes provides evidence of important effects on individual behaviour among Italian women, and of only minor effects among Hungarian women. All of the regional breakdowns in both Italy and Hungary show that the postponement of motherhood goes hand-in-hand with the acceptance of deep cultural and socio-economic changes.     

How Do Traditional Gender Roles Relate to Social Cohesion? Focus on Differences Between Women and Men

The aims of the present paper are to explore how traditional gender roles (focusing mainly on attitudes towards the division of labour between men and women) relate to social cohesion and to examine whether this relationship differs among men and women. The multi-dimensional concept of social cohesion is measured by two general components: a behavioural dimension (consisting of civic and political participation and the intensity of non-kin social relations) and an attitudinal dimension (institutional trust and solidarity). The analysis, based on the data of the European Values Study from Luxembourg, reveals that being more traditional is related to higher attitudinal cohesion: i.e. higher institutional trust and solidarity. Conversely, traditional attitudes are associated with less cohesive behaviour, namely with a lower intensity of non-kin social relations and political participation. Tradition-oriented women show significantly lower levels of political participation than their male counterparts, whereas traditional men tend to demonstrate less solidarity than women.     

Socioeconomic Differences in Multipartner Fertility Among Norwegian Men

This article analyzes male fertility, with a particular focus on multipartner fertility, for cohorts born 1955 to 1984 in Norway. We find that socioeconomically disadvantaged men have the lowest chance of becoming fathers and the lowest likelihood of fathering multiple children in stable unions. Multipartner fertility, on the other hand, is positively associated with both disadvantage and advantage: higher-order birth risks with a new partner are more prevalent among men with low as well as high socioeconomic status. An intervening factor among disadvantaged men may be a higher union dissolution risk, and an elevated risk among advantaged men may be associated with their higher preferences for children and other features that make these men more attractive to women as partners and fathers of future children.     

Female status among soviet central Asian nationalities: The melding of Islam and Marxism and its implications for population increase

Summary Marxist ideology has emphasized the rights of women to a degree perhaps unparalleled among political movements, whereas Islamic ideology has confined women to the traditional role of wife and mother. In Soviet Central Asia these two ideologies have clashed for more than 50 years. Data from the 1959 and 1970 censuses of the U.S.S.R. are used to show three aspects of the position of Soviet women of Islamic nationality as compared with the position of Soviet women of non-Islamic nationality, namely, educational attainment relative to men, non-agricultural labour force participation relative to men, and the burden of child dependency. The hypothesis is put forward that the status of women among Soviet Islamic nationalities should be lower than among Soviet non-Islamic nationalities, but that the difference between the two groups in the various aspects of female status should diminish over time. The position of women among the Soviet Islamic nationalities was also compared with that of women in various Islamic nations with the hypothesis that female status should be higher among the former than the latter. The predictions were upheld, with the notable exception of two of the three pedictions concerning the burden of child dependency occasioned by the finding that child dependency increased substantially, from 1959 to 1970 for Islamic nationalities but not for non-Islamic, and by 1970 was higher for Soviet Islamic nationalities than for the Islamic nations of the Middle East and North Africa. Several possible explanations are advanced for the above-mentioned unpredicted findings.     

The demography of American Indian families

This paper uses data from the decennial censuses to examine family structure and changes in family structure over time among American Indians. The information about the national Indian population indicates that the trends in family structure among American Indians are parallel in many respects to those in the general US population. That is, the percentage of young American Indian women who have never married has increased over time, the percentage of American Indian women who are divorced has increased over time, and the percentage of American Indian children who reside with a single parent has increased as well. The percentage of American Indian women who have never married and who are divorced and the percentage of American Indian children who live with a single parent are higher than those among the general population. The incidence of children living with single parents is especially high on some reservations which also have high levels of poverty and unemployment. Family patterns, however, vary considerably across reservations in ways that are not easily explained by differences in other demographic characteristics. These variations may be due to cultural and historical differences that are not captured in data collected in the censuses.     

A Comparison of US and Canadian Mortality in 1998

On average, Americans die earlier than Canadians. An estimate based on comparing the number of actual US deaths with the number that would have obtained had Canadian age‐ and sex‐specific death rates applied to the US population shows an excess number of US deaths in 1998 amounting approximately to 253,000. Excess US deaths were especially numerous among older women, middle‐aged men, and nonwhites. Circulatory diseases were the major cause of excess deaths. Prevalences of two of the major risk factors for circulatory deaths—smoking and hypertension—were higher in Canada than in the US. But obesity was higher in the US, suggesting a likely important role that obesity plays in higher mortality in the US relative to Canada. Comparisons of the level, age pattern, and causes of US and Canadian mortality, however, raise more questions than currently available data can answer.     

Displaced and segregated: The socio-economic status of the second generation of internally displaced Palestinians in Israel

This study investigates the effects of displacement on the socio-economic status of second-generation Palestinian internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Israel. The results show that members of this group do not differ from non-displaced Palestinians in their educational or occupational attainment, but that displaced households experience higher rates of poverty and poorer housing conditions than non-displaced households. I find that the relationship between displacement and the prime indicators of social mobility—education and jobs—was weakened by three factors: extreme spatial segregation between Palestinians and Jews, the concentration of disadvantage among Palestinian IDPs within the host communities, which were Palestinian spaces, and a high level of dependence on resources concentrated in Jewish spaces among all Palestinians, not just IDPs. These three conditions, however, do not eliminate gaps in assets and land ownership between IDPs and non-displaced Palestinians, which, I argue, contribute to higher poverty rates among displaced households.     

Gender-specific trends in the value of education and the emerging gender gap in college completion

Analysis of March Current Population Survey data from 1964 through 2002 shows that white women overtook white men in their rates of college completion and that this phenomenon occurred during a period in which women's standard-of-living gains from college completion grew at a faster rate than those for men. We assess whether these trends are related to changes in the value of education for men and women in terms of earnings returns to higher education, the probability of getting and staying married, education-related differences in family standard of living, and insurance against living in poverty. Although returns to a college education in the form of earnings remained higher for women than for men over the entire period, trends in these returns do not provide a plausible explanation for gender-specific trends in college completion. But when broader measures of material well-being are taken into account, women's returns to higher education appear to have risen faster than those of men.     

Economic Independence and Union Formation in Sweden

Although sociologists, demographers, and economists are generally agreed that economic independence enhances the likelihood that men will marry, there is disagreement concerning its effect on women. The view that economic independence weakens women's incentive to marry has probably been the most influential, although it has been subjected to few rigorous empirical tests with individual-level data. In the present paper we examine the predictors of forming a first cohabiting union, of progressing from this union to marriage, and of marrying without previously cohabiting by applying hazard regression to event-history data from the 1992 Swedish Family Survey, supplemented by earnings data extracted from the national taxation register. We test a battery of measures that reflect people's past, current, and potential attachment to the labour market. We find that the correlates of union formation for women are largely indistinguishable from the correlates of union formation for men, and that far from being less likely than other women to cohabit or to marry, women with a greater degree of economic self-sufficiency are more likely to do so.     

Evolution of an urban epidemic: The first 100,000 AIDS cases in New York City

Between 1981 and August 1997, 100,000 AIDS cases were reported in New York City (NYC): 77,067 men, 20,818 women, 307 teenagers, and 1,808 children. This report examines AIDS trends in NYC as the epidemic evolved from a predominantly white male epidemic among men with same sex contact (MSM) mostly from a single borough to a geographically diffuse epidemic that includes injecting drug users (IDU), persons of color, and women infected heterosexually. Case data were collected by active surveillance methods augmented by electronic laboratory based reporting. Mortality data were obtained from NYC Vital Statistics. 1990 Census data were used to derive incidence rates and prevalence by neighborhood income. Rates per 100,000 adults by neighborhood ranged from 260 to 5,500. Total AIDS incidence peaked in 1993 and has subsequently declined. Among men there was a shift from MSM to IDU as the predominant risk group, and increasing incidence among men reporting heterosexual contact. IDU was the leading risk factor among women, and women increased from 8 to 30 percent of all cases between 1982 and 1997. Unlike incidence, AIDS prevalence is rising among socially and economically marginalized populations, and will remain a major public health challenge well into the next century.     

Work in Transition: Labour Market Life Expectancy and Years Spent in Precarious Employment in Spain 1986–2016

Social Indicators Research - In this paper, we measure the number of years that men and women have been expected to spend in the labour market at age 16 and at age 50 during the period...