Media consumption and psychological distress among older adults in the United States.

The consumption of news media covering national and global events, particularly those that invoke fear or worry, such as pandemics or terrorist attacks, may affect older adults' mental wellbeing. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, this research analyzes nationally representative data from older adults in the US to address the following research questions: (1) What is the relationship between COVID-19-based media consumption and psychological distress? (2) Does any relationship between media consumption and psychological distress vary by gender, race/ethnicity, education, and marital status? Results indicate that (1) older adults who closely followed the news about the pandemic scored higher on psychological distress than those following less closely and (2) this relationship was more pronounced among Hispanic older adults. These findings are contextualized in the broader stress process model with a focus on a macro-level stressor and differential exposure and vulnerability resulting in variability in the relationship between the stressor and psychological distress

Race and Workplace Integration: A Politically Mediated Process?

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stands as one of the greatest achievements in U.S. history.Although the law made discrimination illegal, its effectiveness, especially Title VII coveringthe employment domain, remains highly contested. The authors argue that legal shifts produceworkplace racial integration only to the extent that there are additional political pressureson firms to desegregate. They examine fluctuating national political pressure to enforceequal employment opportunity law and affirmative action mandates as key influences on thepace of workplace racial desegregation and explore trajectories of Black-White integrationin U.S. workplaces since 1966. Their results show that although federal and state equalemployment opportunity pressures had initial successes in reducing racial segregation inworkplaces, little progress has been made since the early 1980s. They conclude that racialdesegregation is an ongoing politically mediated process, not a natural or inevitableoutcome of early civil rights movement victories

An Organizational Approach to Understanding Sex and Race Segregation in U.S. Workplaces

This article examines the influence of resource dependence and institutional processes on post-Civil Rights Act changes in private sector workplace segregation. We use data collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1966 through 2000 to examine organizations embedded within their firm, industry, local labor market and federal regulatory environments. Sex segregation declines precipitously from 1966 through 2000, but we see little evidence that organizations in the same industrial environment have established a stable pattern of segregation and integration. In other words, sex segregation has not been institutionalized. Race segregation, on the other hand, shows strong and increasing evidence of institutionalization, but weak declines after 1980. Firm visibility, field concentration and federal contractor density, but not direct federal affirmative action reporting, prove to be particularly important for understanding changes in segregation levels and institutionalization within industries. Results point to the importance of organizational fields and labor queues for motivating both persistence and change in workplace inequality

Board Gender Diversity and Women in Senior Management

This study examines the influence of women’s board representation on the proportion of women senior managers in the United Kingdom (UK) from 1999 to 2019. We take a multi-theoretic approach, drawing on the trickle-down effect, critical mass theory, and agency theory, to explore several aspects of this topic. We find that more women on boards is associated with more women in senior management as suggested by the trickle-down perspective. We also find support for a critical mass effect; while one or two women on a board is beneficial for advancing women into senior management, three or more women directors is more advantageous. Consistent with agency theory expectations, the relationship between women on boards and senior management gender diversity is driven almost entirely by women in non-executive, rather than executive, board positions, presumably as a result of the relative independence non-executive directors have compared to their executive director counterparts. Our study suggests that increasing women’s board appointments is a potential solution to the underrepresentation of women senior managers and may assist in building a pipeline for future CEO and board appointments.</p

The [Human Resource Management] Revolution Will Not Be Televised: The Rise and Feminization of Human Resource Management and Labor Force Equity

Since the late 1970s, the profession of human resource management has grown in both size and influence. The number of human resource managers in 2010 is almost twice the number that existed in 1980. Furthermore, this profession has become increasingly feminized since the 1970s—today, around 60 percent of human resource managers are women. While previous research has found that women’s presence in certain occupations can improve gender equity, there has yet to be an examination of whether the increased representation of women in human resource management has affected gender equity more broadly. In this article, I analyze data from the U.S. Census from 1980 to 2000 and from the American Community Survey for 2010 to explore whether the rise and feminization of human resources has affected women’s representation in management. The findings reveal that the increased presence of both white and black women in human resources has been accompanied by greater representation of women in management, although the effects are much larger for white women’s presence in human resources. © The Southern Sociological Society 2017

Documenting Desegregation: Segregation in American Workplaces by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex. 1966-2003

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex illegal in the United States. Previous research based on analyses of aggregate national trends in occupational segregation suggests that sex and race/ethnic employment segregation has declined in the United States since the 1960s. We add to the existing knowledge base by documenting for the first time male-female, black-white, and Hispanic-white segregation trends using private sector workplace data. The general pattern is that segregation declined for all three categorical comparisons between 1966 and 1980, but after 1980 only sex segregation continued to decline markedly. We estimate regression-based decompositions in the time trends for workplace desegregation to determine whether the observed changes represent change in segregation behavior at the level of workplaces or merely changes in the sectoral and regional distribution of workplaces with stable industrial or local labor market practices. These decompositions suggest that, in addition to desegregation caused by changes in the composition of the population of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission monitored private sector firms, there has been real workplace-level desegregation since 1964