by Kim Hoque

Having a union representative in the workplace boosts job quality for employees by reducing their levels of stress, enhancing their job content and improving their work-life balance. These are the central findings of a study I recently published with Unite head of research John Earls and management scholars Neil Conway and Nick Bacon.

The article argues that the impact of onsite union representatives on job quality is important not just for workers but also for employers. In particular, better job quality is closely linked to higher job satisfaction, which in turn has been identified as an important antecedent of higher productivity, increased discretionary effort, lower workplace conflict, fewer quits and lower absenteeism.

The achievement of higher job quality thus has the potential to enhance a range of important socio-economic outcomes.

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by Lauren Alfrey and France Winddance Twine

How do women negotiate male-dominated workplaces of the tech industry? In the February 2017 issue of Gender & Society, we address this question by building upon foundational work on occupational inequality. Inspired by Joan Acker’s concept of inequality regimes, we offer the first qualitative study and intersectional analysis of women tech workers from a wide range of backgrounds. We show how race, class privilege and gender expression shapes the occupational experiences of “geek girls.”

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by Lara Maestripieri

Economic insecurity is a material condition that includes more than simply having a low income. It indicates a situation in which households have difficulties in autonomously attaining adequate living standards. It thus pertains to how labour-market participation, education and household structure impact on the material and living conditions of individuals in a family.

Women, more than men, are mainly affected by economic insecurity. Although increasing female labour market participation has helped in reducing the general level of poverty risk and economic insecurity of women over the last decade, it has also produced further differentiations among them, exposing women in specific conditions to higher vulnerability.

In a study recently published with my colleagues, Kairi Kasearu and Costanzo Ranci, we surveyed women 20-64 years old in seven European cities, to examine the factors explaining the higher vulnerability of some of them.

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by Carolyn Arcand

Our society’s ideas about who belongs on a construction site begin at birth. Take a look at the boys’ section of any major infant clothing retailer and you will find onesies and footie pajamas covered with cement trucks and earth movers. These symbols are absent from the clothing designed for baby girls.

Gendered ideas about construction extend to adults in the workplace, where men make up 97.5% of construction workers nationwide.

Construction is a growing sector of the economy that offers relatively high wages, paid on-the-job training for apprentice workers, and often an opportunity to be part of a labor union. Women, who are disproportionately likely to work in low-wage jobs, could benefit from the paid training and high wages provided by construction careers. So, why do women make up such a small segment of workers in this industry?

Prior research, often based on interviews with female construction workers, has sought to address this question. The answer is: it’s complicated. It likely starts in the infants’ section of the clothing store, where the boys are given the outfits printed with construction equipment and the girls are not.

In short, boys and girls are socialized differently.

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by April Sutton, Amanda Bosky and Chandra Muller

What should schools teach our nation’s youth? What type of training best prepares all students for labor market success? These questions have fueled contentious academic, political, and public debates for over a century.

While some argue that schools should prepare all students for a college degree, others advocate for a re-emphasis on career and technical training, especially in better-paying blue-collar jobs.

In the policy realm, states in the Rust Belt and Southeast have relaxed academic graduation requirements. Some states allow blue-collar-related training to satisfy math and foreign language requirements. Moreover, alongside his promises to revitalize U.S. manufacturing, President Trump and members of his cabinet have pledged to strengthen career and technical education, dismantle Common Core, and allow local decision-makers to govern what schools teach.

Gender gaps and economic opportunities for women have been glaringly absent from this discourse. This is disconcerting given that blue-collar jobs—some of the few remaining sub-baccalaureate jobs that provide living wages—are highly male-dominated.

What’s more, our estimates show that the small share of millennial women employed in blue-collar jobs earn wages that are only 78% those of their male counterparts.

In a recently published article, we add a gender and spatial perspective to reinvigorated high school training debates.

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by Kieran Bezila

One of the puzzles of contemporary voting behavior is why working class voters do not reliably vote for parties of the left that support redistributive measures that would directly benefit them. For example, as Figure 1 shows, one-third to one-half of the American white working class votes Republican, and this is true whether one defines working class by income, education, a combination of the two, or subjective self-identification (the data from the latest election are not yet available).  A common explanation, that moral or cultural values (such as attitudes on immigration, abortion, race, etc.) trump economic concerns, has been the subject of much debate among scholars, without a clear resolution. The vast majority of empirical work done on this question has drawn on survey data.

White working class support for Republicans

In new research, we provide a new direction for this debate by changing methods and offering a new argument.

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by Hana Brown

Each new wave of immigration to the United States has raised questions about whether immigrants will integrate into American society or undermine its core values. Public fears abound, but experts paint an optimistic portrait of immigrant adaptation. The available evidence suggests that incorporation proceeds apace, but that immigration integration trends are patterned by factors like geography, public policies, and legal status.

In a recent study, I identify another factor that influences immigrant incorporation: the physical body. I find that immigrants’ ability to incorporate economically and socially depends in part on their ability to incorporate bodily. That is, it depends on their ability to retrain their bodies to perform the kinds of physical movements required for full membership in the host society.

From a young age, individuals around the world learn how to perform the physical movements expected by their society. In the United States, children’s toys teach them to perform fine motors movements like pushing buttons on a telephone or tapping a keyboard with the appropriate level of force. These toys aren’t merely for entertainment. They teach children to perform the physical actions required to access the most influential institutions around them.

These socialized movements are so ingrained that we hardly notice them. But when people move between societies with radically different embodied expectations, the physical body can pose a real struggle in the adaptation process. This is precisely the situation in which the immigrants I studied found themselves.

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by Paula England, Jonathan Bearak, Michelle J. Budig, and Melissa J. Hodges

Most American moms go back to work after having a baby—sometimes almost immediately, sometimes after some hiatus. In the years after they have given birth, employed women suffer what sociologists call a “motherhood wage penalty.”

That is, their pay when working in the years after having the baby is lower than it would have been if they hadn’t had a baby. This is partly because they miss any raises or promotions they would have gotten during the period they were out of work. Another reason for the penalty is that some employers discriminate against mothers, treating them worse than they treat other women in hiring, pay, or promotion.

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by Mariana Craciun

“I think people have all sorts of fantasies … that [psycho]analysts have certain … special capacities to … see through [them].” – Adam, psychoanalytic therapist

That professions no longer enjoy the relatively uncontested authority they had during much of the twentieth century is no surprise. Medicine has received sustained attention in this regard. Physicians have seen their power threatened as their financial ties to patients are overwhelmingly mediated by third-party payers, while their work diagnosing, treating, and researching disease is increasingly shaped by patients themselves.

In medicine, as in other professional realms, internet-based knowledge-sharing has made it easier for potential clients to attempt to diagnose and solve problems themselves rather than rely on expert “opinion.”

These challenges are shared by practitioners of psychoanalytic therapy, but further exacerbated by their own slippage within the field of mental health. Over the last forty years, psychoanalysis has been progressively displaced from its dominant place. U.S. psychiatry has been challenged by psychopharmacology, alternative talk, and behavioral interventions.

Yet, despite these challenges—and arguably even because of them—psychoanalytic therapists continue to perform and enjoy a level of charismatic authority sometimes assumed to have existed only during the community’s beginnings.

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by Peter Ikeler

Many observers lament the bloated size of low-wage service employment in the U.S. They contrast high levels of precarity and minimal wages and benefits in retail, restaurant and personal services unfavorably with past standards in manufacturing, even if contemporary manufacturing has few of these traits.

Underlying such contrasts is often the assumption that frontline service jobs, since most don’t require a college degree, are low-skill. But is this, in fact, true? And how are their skill requirements changing?

In a recent study, I interrogated these questions and related ones about worker consciousness and organizing.

I honed in on Macy’s and Target, two iconic firms in the department store sector which is the largest division of the America’s largest low-wage service industry. I interviewed sixty-two workers from five stores in New York City.

What emerged were two key lessons: For one thing, not all service jobs are low skill. In fact, many Macy’s sales jobs require considerable knowledge, complexity and interpersonal know-how.

Second, the general trend in the department store sector is deskilling. Comparing Macy’s and Target as representatives of the full-line and discount models, there is undeniable simplification and routinization of salespersons’ tasks, with a related decline in their daily autonomy.

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