Equity is Part of the Equation

President of Johnson County Community College, Terry Calaway, writes a forward emphasizing the importance of equity in the mission of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Gender Pay Differential: Choice, Tradition, or Overt Discrimination?

No one disputes that a male-female gender wage differential favoring men exists. This study seeks to unearth not only the sources of this differential but also the relative degrees to which the various sources impact the differential. The theories proposed by current literature suggest three principal causes: differences in human capital, crowding discrimination, and other forms of discrimination. This study estimates separate equations for men and women and then uses the regression results to decompose the gender wage differential into the three aforementioned components. We find, after isolating the effects of differences in individual human capital and choice characteristics as well as differences due to crowding, the residual surprisingly accounts for the largest proportion of the gender wage gap. Because the residual is so large, we believe that basic discrimination models must still be necessary and useful. Moreover, when one considers that the human capital differences that do exist may be reflecting feedback effects, the justification for combating societal stereotyping of gender roles becomes even stronger, to promote not only equity but also efficiency in today\u27s labor market

Organic Contamination Baseline Study: In NASA JSC Astromaterials Curation Laboratories. Summary Report

In preparation for OSIRIS-REx and other future sample return missions concerned with analyzing organics, we conducted an Organic Contamination Baseline Study for JSC Curation Labsoratories in FY12. For FY12 testing, organic baseline study focused only on molecular organic contamination in JSC curation gloveboxes: presumably future collections (i.e. Lunar, Mars, asteroid missions) would use isolation containment systems over only cleanrooms for primary sample storage. This decision was made due to limit historical data on curation gloveboxes, limited IR&D funds and Genesis routinely monitors organics in their ISO class 4 cleanrooms

The Effects of Statutory Minimum Wages

This discussion will explore the various theories regarding the effects of minimum wages on employment and relative earnings for the low-paid in an economy. Then, we will examine the research to consider which side the data supports—that is, if it does indeed conclusively decide the case one way or the other

Building Voters: Exploring Interdependent Preferences in Binary Contexts

In this thesis we develop a new method for constructing binary preference orders for given interdependent structures, called characters. We introduce the preference space, which is a vector space of preference vectors. The preference vectors correspond to binary preference orders. We show that the hyperoctahedral group, Z2 o Sn, describes the symmetries of binary preferences orders and then define an action of Z2 o Sn on our preference vectors. We find a natural basis for a preference space. These basis vectors are indexed by subsets of proposals. We show that when completely separable binary preference vectors are decomposed using this basis, basis vectors indexed by nontrivial, even sized subsets do not appear in the decomposition. We then use these basis vectors as building blocks for preference construction. In particular, we construct preference orders whose Hasse diagram of separable sets have a tree structure

THE ORNAMENTATION OF DEMOCRACY: HOW DONALD TRUMP AND AUGUSTO PINOCHET SHAPED AUTHORITARIANISM WITH THE NEO-LIBERAL HOME AND MIGRANT MOTHERS

The Trump administration’s war on “illegal” migration centered migrant mothers and their children as the biggest threat to the ever-enduring “border crisis.” Migrant mothers who arrive at the border space with or without their children represent a new wave of migration in which the woman leaves the realm of domesticity in her home country seeking to better the economic situation of her family in another. To provide her family with a sense of bodily comfort by way of financial support, the migrant mother abandons her sense of self, anchored in her home country, where she comes into being having her “child on one side, and [her] parents on the other.” In her home, she represents motherhood through her connection to the people who surround her in her community and her family, particularly her mother. When the migrant mother leaves her homestead to begin a new life in a new place, she also leaves the “intergenerational interaction” of mothering. Being a mother in Latin America is largely based on how she herself was mothered. When she migrates to the United States, the mother takes her perception of the home “across contexts, producing a cultural dislocation with no history that is recognized as “natural.”” To build one’s sense of home around a moving entity, unfettered by traditional notions of property is to break away from the interests of the United States government, which maintain the structure of the nation through the traditional structure of the home. Migrant mothers are constantly asked to negotiate change, re-defining cultural paradigms that determine how motherhood is embodied

Terry Calaway, JCCC, President

This is an introduction from Terry Calaway, President of Johnson County Community College. In this inaugural issue of Many Voices, Calaway discusses the issues of diversity on campus