Commentary

The continuing presidential campaign in the United States has been dominated by a number of noticeable trends, including contentious debates about reproductive rights specifically (what some have called the “war on women“) and, more broadly, about gender roles in American society (think about the recent commentary on Ann Romney, a topic Adia has blogged about). There has also been much discussion about the state of the economy in the United States and continuing issues of un- and under-employment (see my posts here and here).

An important intersection of these two political debates is the counting disparity in pay by gender. A recent article in The Economist, citing work done by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, documented this phenomena, noting that women continue to earn, on average, 82.2% of what men earn. This gap, as the graphic below shows, varies considerably by occupational category.

Image via The Economist (April 17, 2012)

In the following three pieces, our regular bloggers Adia Harvey Wingfield and Julie Kmec join guest blogger Rebecca Glauber in dissecting some of the causes and debates surrounding the gender wage gap, both within and outside of sociology.

Do Mothers Choose to Earn Less? Unlikely

By Rebecca Glauber

May 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Gender Wage Gap

12 Comments

I’ve been using a lot of air quotes in my classroom discussions, and I’m finding it a bit troubling. Not just because the quotes date me to the late 1990s, but also because they are inadequate stand-ins for something that needs to be said. Those gestures you make by your ears that slip out with little warning, shooting up from your hip mid-sentence as if to add irony, complexity, and intrigue. Women’s and men’s “choices” in work. Women’s and men’s “choices” in family.

Sex pay gap more than an hours gap

By Julie Kmec

May 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Gender Wage Gap

2 Comments

A recent WSJ article by Kay Hymowitz (Why Women Make less than Men, April 26, 2012 ) reports that “most people have heard that full-time working American women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Yet these numbers don’t take into account the actual number of hours worked. And it turns out that women work fewer hours than men.” Hymowitz continues, citing Labor Department statistics indicating more than half (almost 55%) of workers who work more than 35 hours per week (what the department defines as full time work) are men and suggests that the sex wage gap is “to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.”

Even in Female Dominated Jobs, Some Men Still Maintain Advantages

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

May 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Gender Wage Gap

3 Comments

Julie and Rebecca have cited important sociological analysis that documents the fact that net of hours worked, the gender wage gap remains such that men still outearn their female peers in the same occupations. One other piece of commonsense wisdom often cited to explain the wage gap is the argument that women select occupations that tend to be lower paying—teaching, nursing, and other positions that we tend to associate with women. According to this line of reasoning, women are more likely to self-select into the “feminized” positions within certain fields, which then contributes to gender inequality in the labor market.

Apple economics: Maximize profit, minimize employment

By matt vidal

May 3, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

6 Comments

Apple Inc. is the largest technology company in the world, in terms of both revenue and profit. Yet, the California-based company has just 47,000 workers on its payroll in the United States. Apple recently released a report in which it claimed responsibility for “indirectly” creating an additional 257,000 American jobs in industries that are part of its supply chain, a claim that was “disreputable,” in the words of MIT labor economist David Autor – as if Apple’s suppliers did not have any other customers. Or, as Wharton labor economist Peter Cappelli noted, as if the consumers spending their money on an iPad would not have purchased another product in its absence (see a New York Times article on debates over the report here, including comments from Autor and Cappelli).

While Apple’s claim to have created jobs for UPS and FedEx employees is questionable, however, there is some truth to the argument that Apple is responsible for the employment – and working conditions – at its key suppliers, particularly manufacturers for which Apple is the main customer. This may be the case for some Corning employees in the US (supplying glass for iPhones) and is very likely the case for, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of employees at Foxconn in China, which presumably has entire lines or buildings dedicated to Apple.

A recent report by political economist and accountant Karel Williams and his research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester looked at the Apple Business Model and its employment effects. They cite a study which found that Chinese workers add $6.50 in value to each iPhone 3, just 3.6% of the phone’s shipping price.

Ann Romney, Fake “Mommy Wars,” and the Real Problems Facing Working Class Moms

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

April 19, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

3 Comments

A few days ago, the top story on Huffington Post was an article titled “Women’s Jobs Axed by State Austerity Politics.” The piece argued that as public sector jobs are decreasing, women are disproportionately the ones losing work as many of the jobs that are affected by budget cuts—teaching, providing child care—are those that are typically filled by women. Inasmuch as jobs tend to be sex segregated, the female dominated jobs in the private sector that women tend to occupy (administrative services, secretarial work) are not in high demand, leaving women in a position where the sort of jobs in which they tend to be concentrated are declining or even disappearing.

The Soul of the University: When Outsourcing Hits Home

By Steven Vallas

April 13, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

2 Comments

National Labor Relations Board officials count votes at Northeastern University
April 12, 2012
Author’s Photo

There is by now a sprawling literature on the spread of precarious employment. Arne Kalleberg’s important new book on this topic, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, is a case in point. Guy Standing’s book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, is another. A few years ago, the harsher side of this phenomenon was documented by Annette Bernhardt and her colleagues, in The Gloves Off Economy, on the growing willingness of employers to violate even the basics of employment law.

But we academics often seem to assume that bad jobs exist largely outside our own institutions. So it’s worth asking: How are the terms and conditions of employment changing at our home institutions? How are the workers who support our universities faring in the current economy? What is work like for employees performing functions that have been outsourced by our universities? And what opportunities exist that might help workers reshape the terms and conditions of employment they currently face? In other words, what do we do when outsourcing hits home?

Save the Earth…Work Less

By Julie Kmec

April 4, 2012

Commentary

Kalleberg’s Good Jobs, Bad Jobs

By Don Tomaskovic-Devey

April 1, 2012

Commentary

3 Comments

Arne Kalleberg. 2011. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment. New York: Russell Sage Press.

We are all aware that the work world has changed and continues to evolve. Most of us tell stories in our classrooms and research that suggests that these changes have generated increased inequality and less secure work, but our stories tend to be unsystematic, based on disjointed and partial research. In his new book Arne Kalleberg systematically examines the entire range of change in work in the US since the 1970s. The book is comprehensive in its approach, examining trends in income, security, job complexity and autonomy, and flexibility. In doing so it generates a series of social facts that should become the basic knowledge base for all other stories of social change in employment.