WOMEN, POLITICS, AND GENDER INEQUALITY

Women’s representation in United States politics has increased but remains substantially lower than in many other countries. This Article first examines the structural impediments to higher levels of women’s representation, including how gender stereotypes may limit women’s electoral success. Then, the focus shifts to how women’s representation may and may not result in different kinds of policy priorities. Finally, the Article takes a more intersectional approach to consider how variations among women impact political priorities and approaches

Equitable Evaluation During COVID

Evaluating faculty must evolve, given that faculty experiences have differed during the pandemic. Yet, faculty need an opportunity to document their contributions and achievements, as well as the pandemic-related limitations they have experienced. The goal is to enter this information into the record in a way that recognizes how each faculty member’s workload (how much they were doing in different areas) and work context (where and how they did their work) have differed due to the pandemic, and that allows the university to account for the pandemic’s long-term effects. Memories are short. When faculty are evaluated years down the road, the constraints they operated under must be recognized

Equitable Faculty Evaluation Practices

Faculty evaluation is central to universities, but many strategies for evaluating faculty reflect gender and racial biases. These biases in evaluation help explain the lack of progress most academic institutions have made toward greater representation and inclusion. This makes it urgent for universities to create more equitable review procedures. It is also important to remember that faculty evaluation is a continual process, and not simply a set of discrete, formal, evaluative events. Thus, to improve evaluation of faculty, we need to target how we evaluate faculty in formal and informal ways. The good news is that relatively simple changes in process and practice can enhance equity and inclusion in faculty evaluation

Famililism and welfare regimes: Poverty, employment, and family policies

While many nations lay a claim to supporting 'family values', these values may be interpreted in a variety of ways. How do nations support families, particularly families with children? What strategies do different nations take, and how do these strategies lead to different outcomes? In this paper, we show how different combinations of policies that support family caregiving and those that de-familialize caregiving lead to significantly different outcomes. We show that nations with stronger levels of both kinds of policies have lower poverty levels than those with weaker levels of these policies, but that strong levels of policies that support family caregiving and weak levels of de-familializing policies have more varied results, with higher levels of poverty, particularly for families headed by single mothers. In addition, this research illustrates significant variation among 'continental Conservative' countries, and suggests the importance of a less static approach to welfare state regimes, which also fully recognizes the centrality of gender relations to labor market and welfare state policies

How care work employment shapes earnings in a cross-national perspective

This report investigates the effect of employment in a job involving care work - conceptualized as work in occupations where workers provide face-to-face services that strengthen the physical health and safety or the physical, cognitive, or emotional skills of those they serve - on the relative earnings of both men and women workers in twelve countries that represent a range of economic and political policy contexts. In addition, this report descriptively explores the characteristics of workers engaged in care employment and how these vary cross-nationally. We examine how much of the effects of care work employment on wages can be attributed to differences in worker characteristics such as educational attainment, age, gender, and nativity. Importantly, where possible, we disaggregate our category of care workers into smaller occupational groups, namely physicians, nurses, primary/secondary teachers, university professors, and domestic workers versus all other care workers to examine whether the effect of care work employment on earnings varies by the type of care work performed. We also discuss three major explanations for the potential differential pay of care workers: cultural devaluations of care work due to its association with 'women's work,' economic tensions due to the expense of high quality care provision, and political factors shaping labor market and social inequalities regarding care work. We consider how national context and social policies - including the degree of country-level earnings inequality, size of public sector, immigration, and labor union density - shape variation in the relative net effects of care work on earnings

Cross-national patterns in individual and household employment and work hours by gender and parenthood

We distinguish between overall employment rates and full-time employment rates among men and women, and examine total household employment hours for heterosexually partnered men and women, as well as women's share in total household employment hours, to investigate how gender, parenthood, and partner's employment are related to individual's employment patterns. We use data from LIS from around 2000 for 19 countries, examining former East and West Germany separately. With a sample restricted to adults aged 25 to 45 (prime years for childrearing), who are not in the military, we analyze employment patterns for individuals and patterns for households, to consider how gendered negotiations around employment hours plays out within households. We make three main arguments. First, gender is less salient than gendered parenthood in explaining differences in men's and women's employment rates. Secondly, it is important to consider both mothers' employment rates and average weekly hours of employment, in order to take into account how mothers' experiences vary cross-nationally both in terms of whether they are able to remain in the labor market, and, for those who remain, how many hours they work. Thirdly, we show that childless couples employment hours are relatively similar across countries, while coupled mothers' and fathers' employment hours vary more cross-nationally - suggesting that different policy contexts are particularly important for explaining cross-nationally variations in parents' employment patterns. We use these three arguments to develop our own models of work-time regimes for heterosexually partnered households that balance gender equity in the division of employment hours against total household hours, and illustrate the major cross-national differences in how men's and women's employment patterns are related

Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists

Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments, separated by faculty rank and gender (i.e., assistant professor men, full professor women). Participants were asked structured questions about the role of collaboration in research, career development, and departmental decision-making. Inductive analyses of focus group data led to the development of a theoretical model in which resources, recognition, and relationships create conditions under which collaboration is likely to produce more gender equitable outcomes for STEM faculty. Ensuring women faculty have equal access to resources is central to safeguarding their success; relationships, including mutual mentoring, inclusion and collegiality, facilitate women’s careers in academia; and recognition of collaborative work bolsters women’s professional advancement. We further propose that gender equity will be stronger in STEM where resources, relationships, and recognition intersect—having multiplicative rather than additive effects

Work-family policies and the effects of children on women's: Employment and earnings

Welfare state generosity around work-family policies appears to have somewhat contradictory effects, at least for some measures of gender equality. In particular, it appears that as work-family policies, in encouraging higher levels of women's labor market participation, have also contributed to higher levels of occupational gender segregation, and to lower wage-levels for women relative to men. We examine these apparent contradictions, and consider how they may differ based on particular policies, or on the effects of policies on the employment outcomes of particular groups of women. We emphasize how policies relate to employment and earnings outcomes among women, structured by their responsibilities for children. Moreover, we separate policies to consider their potentially unique relationships with women's employment and earnings (for example, parental leave versus childcare. With a few exceptions analyses use Wave 5 (representing the years 2000/2001) of the LIS data for 21 countries. For all countries, the sample is restricted to employed adult women, age 25 to 45 (prime years for childrearing), who are not self-employed and not in military service. We investigate: (1) differences in employment hours and earnings for women, based on their number of children in a broad range of countries across Eastern and Western Europe, North America, Israel, and Australia and (2) the distinct associations of maternity, paternity, and parental leaves, publicly funded child care for very young (0 to 2 years) and for older (3 to 5 years) children with estimated earnings and employment penalties. We show the importance of considering policy outcomes, recognizing the potentially countervailing consequences of different kinds of family policies. We believe that is crucial to recognize that inequalities among women, related to their care of children, are important, particularly when a significant proportion of women are forgoing motherhood in many of these countries. Our analyses also suggest the importance of designing effective leave policies - that promote parental attachment to the labor force rather than 'cooling out' parents, and public provisioning for high quality, employment-enabling childcare