One size fits all? The social construction of dis-employ-abled women

This article is based on an evaluation of a labour-market training programme for women with ‘mental health problems’ in a social workplace in Belgium. The research team explored the retrospective insider perspectives on the work aspirations of the women involved in the programme to identify critical dynamics in their high drop-out from the social workplace. The central findings provide evidence of a prevalent one-size-fits-all discourse in these practices wherein complex and interrelated processes of discrimination take place that are based on both disability and gender. The findings demonstrate that the social workplace functions as a male bastion, in which the oversized overalls that women are forced to wear are symbolically relevant. In conclusion, we discuss and challenge the dominance of the neo-liberal norm of economic productivity and employability.     

RELATIONSHIP TRANSITIONS AMONG YOUTH IN URBAN KENYA

The process of courtship and marriage in sub-Saharan Africa has changed remarkably. These changes, however, have received scant attention, as recent research has focused on adolescent relationships' links to HIV/AIDS rather than to marriage. Drawing on detailed reports of 1,365 romantic and sexual partnerships from youths in Kisumu, Kenya, we find that marital aspirations, school enrollment, emotional attraction, pregnancy, and independence from kin are all predictors of getting engaged or married. Furthermore, though men and women are much more likely to marry partners they believe are sexually exclusive, men who have multiple partners are actually more likely to get married. By focusing on the contemporary process of marriage, this paper offers an alternative portrayal of premarital relationships in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Challenging midwifery care, challenging midwives and challenging the system

The purpose of this paper is to generate debate and discussion about the state of midwifery services in Australia today. While numerous reports have been published that highlight what women want in maternity care, widespread change has not occurred. This paper presents the story of Alice (a real woman with a fictitious name). Alice's story highlights the challenges that women face in dealing with a system that is often inflexible. While the health systems, and those who work within them, usually have the best intentions to try to provide the type of care that women want, they are not always successful. The paper summarises the evidence and support for models of continuity of midwifery care and outlines a series of strategies to ensure that change can occur. Finally, the paper challenges all midwives to work towards widespread, system-level change in Australian maternity services.     

The Precariat and the Pandemic: Assessing the Well-Being of Metro Orlando's Hospitality Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a catalyst for precaritization highlighting the instability plaguing many American workers. As the rapid spread of the virus led to the closure of businesses, both temporarily and permanently, the nation reached record high levels of unemployment. The effects of the pandemic have fallen unequally among different groups forcing women, people of color, and low-income, precarious workers to endure the brunt of the economic downturn. In particular, the hospitality industry, comprised of those employed in restaurants, bars, event/convention centers, theme parks, and the like, was and continues to be the hardest hit by the effects of COVID-19. We explore the experiences of 454 hospitality industry workers in the Metro Orlando, Florida area during the COVID-19 pandemic using data collected using an online survey. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, it seeks to identify the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic upon hospitality workers in the metro Orlando area across the dimensions of employment status, financial stability, mental health, housing, and food security. The second aim of this research adopts Kalleberg and Vallas' recommendation for analysis of hierarchies in precarious work by identifying differential outcomes across the aforementioned dimensions along the lines of race, gender, and income type (salaried, tipped, hourly) to explore stratification within the precariat. Findings reflect the potentially devastating consequences of precarity and expand upon conceptualizations of the precariat by offering empirical evidence of disparities within this group.     

The Slut-Shaming Instrument: Preliminary validation,correlates, and links with psychological distress among adolescent girls

Despite social awareness of the problem of slut-shaming for adolescent girls, no existing measure captures this construct. Using data from a sample of 202 girls from Québec, Canada (ages 14–17; 68% White), preliminary validation is provided for the Slut-Shaming Instrument, a seven-item measure of negative peer experiences related to being perceived as too sexually active, sexualized, or flirtatious. The measure showed strong psychometric properties including good reliability and factor structure, expected associations with daily experiences of slut-related victimization and sexual harassment, and links with number of sexual partners and other forms of peer victimization. Slut-shaming was associated with distress accounting for these other forms of victimization (including sexual harassment), suggesting the pertinence of addressing this type of gender-based victimization.     

The effect of masks on the visual preference for faces in the first year of life

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess how face masks modulate infants' attention to faces over the course of the first year of life. We measured 3, 6, 9, and 12-month-olds’ looking behavior using a paired visual preference paradigm under two experimental conditions. First, we tested infants' preference for upright masked or unmasked faces of the same female individual. We found that regardless of age, infants looked equally long at the masked and unmasked faces. Second, we compared infants' attention to an upright masked versus an inverted masked face. Three- and 6-month-olds looked equally long to the masked faces when they were upright or inverted. However, 9- and 12-month-old infants showed a novelty preference for the inverted masked face. Our findings suggest that more experience with faces, including masked faces, leads to efficient adaptations of infants' visual system for processing impoverished social stimuli, such as partially occluded faces.     

Hidden Markov Models with mixtures as emission distributions

In unsupervised classification, Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are used to account for a neighborhood structure between observations. The emission distributions are often supposed to belong to some parametric family. In this paper, a semiparametric model where the emission distributions are a mixture of parametric distributions is proposed to get a higher flexibility. We show that the standard EM algorithm can be adapted to infer the model parameters. For the initialization step, starting from a large number of components, a hierarchical method to combine them into the hidden states is proposed. Three likelihood-based criteria to select the components to be combined are discussed. To estimate the number of hidden states, BIC-like criteria are derived. A simulation study is carried out both to determine the best combination between the combining criteria and the model selection criteria and to evaluate the accuracy of classification. The proposed method is also illustrated using a biological dataset from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. A R package HMMmix is freely available on the CRAN.