Learning about inequality from kids: Interviewing strategies for getting beneath equality rhetoric

There are three main analytic challenges to studying kids, especially where the core focus is inequality: (1) minimizing the power imbalance between adults/researchers and kids/participants, (2) attending to the active and imaginative communication styles of young people, and (3) getting beneath the superficial rhetoric of meritocracy, colorblindness, and post-feminism. In this chapter, we draw from our own qualitative insights when studying middle school kids (grades 6-8, ages 11-14) in providing a systematic analysis of the effectiveness of distinct visual strategies and their respective strengths and limitations for producing rich, useful, and specific data. The insights gleaned are applicable to analyses of kids, understandings of inequality, and even methodological training

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

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