Race Composition and Earnings: Effects by Race, Region, and Gender

For more than 40 years, studies have reported that the higher the proportion of blacks in a community, the more white men earn, but the less black men earn. Researchers have speculated that black men earned less because earnings discrimination increases with percent black. Others have suggested that the negative effect of black representation on black men's earnings reflects black men's limited occupational opportunities. This study (1) investigates whether pay discrimination and regional location condition the relationship between black representation and workers' earnings and (2) examines the relationship between black representation and earnings for women. The results, based on 1980 Census data for black and white workers from 267 SMSAs, show that black representation was associated with higher earnings for white men and lower earnings for black men in both the north and south, and that part of the effect for southern black men stemmed from earnings discrimination. Southern black men's earnings gains from black representation offset some of the effects of discrimination, while northern black men encountered costs of black representation even in the absence of earnings discrimination. These findings reflect the disparate economic opportunities of black men in each region as manufacturing jobs have disappeared from the north and relocated to the south. For women, black representation led to higher earnings for blacks and whites. I argue that black representation does not lower black women's earnings because occupational sex segregation prevents black women from threatening white men's economic status.     

Status of women on faculty and status of women's studies in Israeli schools of social work

Although social work is a profession consisting mainly of women, social work education is dominated by men. In Israel, 75% of professional social workers are women, but women constitute less than half of the faculties of schools of social work, and are found chiefly in the middle level of academic rank. None holds a rank higher than senior lecturer, although there has been one professor who was a woman. This paper discusses the problems of social work as a women's profession from the point of view of women's developmental theory, and discusses the limitations of the curriculum in the area of women's studies.     

The effect of subsidized family planning services on reproductive behavior in the United States, 1969–1974

This paper evaluates the impact of federally subsidized family planning programs in the United States, from 1969 to 1974, on the reproductive behavior of ever-married women, 15–44 years old. The study began with an experimental design and the random assigment of areas to treatment and control but was completed as a multivariate analysis, treating program input as an interval-scaled independent variable. Using “before” and “after” area sample surveys and patient service data from operating programs, the demographic impact of the program was estimated. The impact detected was nonsignificant; according to our analysis, overall use of physician-administered contraception was not affected by the subsidized programs. The only program-induced change of activity related to reproduction that we recorded was increased use of subsidized services in study areas with high program input and increased use of private physician services where program input was low. These findings need to be interpreted with the caution usually exercised in evaluating imperfect field experiments.     

Fertility in botswana: The recent decline and future prospects

Recent estimates of fertility in Botswana suggest a rapid decline of more than two births per woman between 1981 and 1988. This paper proposes that the baseline fertility was overestimated but that nonetheless fertility declined by about one birth per woman during the 1980s. The decline in fertility was linked to a deterioration in social and economic conditions caused by a major drought in the early 1980s and to the increased availability of family planning services in the same period. Fertility apparently began to rebound in the late 1980s in response to improved conditions, which came about as a result of a successful drought relief program. Future declines in fertility depend on the continued success of the family planning program, particularly in rural areas.     

Gender as contradiction: From dichotomies to diversity in natural resource extraction

Given the varied nature of resource dependent communities, the gendered experiences of women and men may vary in unexpected and contradictory ways. Building on a review and critique of existing theoretical approaches and studies of US and Canadian extractive resource communities in both the feminist and rural social science literature, we provide an analytical approach to engage with gender in the context of these dramatic changes. Our framework, which integrates key insights from recent feminist theorizing, summarizes emergent constructions of masculinity and femininity in a given context by emphasizing the possible contradictions along three broad lines: material, material-discursive, and discursive.     

Connections and Constraints: The Effects of Children on Caregiving

This article assesses the effects of children on parents' involvement in caregiving. On the basis of interviews with 273 respondents, we address the effects of having children on care given to kin and nonkin; assess the effects of children's characteristics, especially age and gender, on the help mothers and fathers provide; and examine how these vary with mothers' employment. Overall, we find that the presence of children connects parents into networks of care more than it constrains them. The effects vary depending on the characteristics of the child (including age and gender) as well as characteristics of the parent (like gender and employment).