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Social justice and economics[]

The wage gap[]

  • The Enduring Gender Gap in Pay : "The gender gap in faculty pay cannot be explained completely by the long careers of male faculty members, the relative productivity of faculty members, or where male and female faculty members tend to work -- even if those and other factors are part of the picture..."

Women in STEM professions[]

  • The Feminist Engineering Classroom: A Vision for Future Educational Innovations. This paper discusses the changes necessary to create a more friendly classroom for women, introducing the idea of feminist science studies to the reader and discussing the concerns which someone accustomed to a traditional engineering classroom might have when confronted by the need for changes to pedagogy and practice in engineering classrooms.
  • Gender Disparity in STEM Disciplines: A Study of Faculty Attrition and Turnover Intentions. This study finds that the genders have no significant differences in intent to leave academia, but that women were significantly more likely to switch departments. Both genders were thought to demonstrate equal commitment to careers in the STEM disciplines. Women's high turnover as faculty in the STEM disciplines is highly correlated with dissatisfaction and the department culture where they are employed. The study results suggest that the lack of female faculty is better explained by department cultures which provide women fewer opportunities, limited support, and inequity in leadership, rather than by gender-based differences.
  • Identity Bifurcation in Response to Stereotype Threat. This paper explores the rejection of feminine identification in female mathematics students who were strongly and weakly identified with mathematics, in response to being presented with a scientific article asserting stereotype as a cause for sex differences in aptitude. The female students who were highly identified with mathematics tended to reject characteristics strongly identified with those stereotypes, and female students who were not strongly identified with mathematics displayed no difference in rejection of stereotyped characteristics.
  • Women in Physics: A Tale of Limits. This paper, sponsored by the American Institute of Physics, discusses the effects on the careers of female physics faculty access offered female physics faculty across countries with a highly and less highly developed countries. The study discovers systemic deficits in access to funding, students, equipment, lab access, clerical support, travel funds, office space, career-advancing experiences, career advancement lost to child-rearing and in the sharing of domestic chores in personal relationships.
  • Monitoring What She Is Saying is a post at Butterflies and Wheels discussing How Stereotypes Can Drive Women to Quit Science, a piece by Shankar Vedantam on NPR. Both pieces discuss a study in which researchers Toni Schmader and Matthias Mehl recorded samples of conversations between scientists. They found that when women scientists discussed their work with colleagues who were men, the women felt less engaged, and they sounded less competent than when they discussed their work with other women. This is an example of stereotype threat. An article on Jezebel discusses that NPR piece as well.

Sexual harassment in the workplace[]

Gender, race, and class intersections[]

  • Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. Theorizing and characterizing both organizations/businesses and the nature of work performed in those organizations has characterized jobs and businesses as essentially gender neutral, allowing the work demands made on individual workers to be cast after masculine models for productivity and performance. These tendencies do maintenance on gender segregation and continue to marginalize the work of women.
  • Division of Labor and Working-Class Women’s Well-Being Across the Transition to Parenthood. This study tracked working class women across the periods prior to and just after the birth of children. They were administered questionaires about their wellbeing and the division of labor in the home during these periods. Several trends were observed in the answers given: women whose expectations about what work should be done by their partner were violated reported losses in wellbeing. These losses were moderated by gender role expectations and the work status of the women interviewed. Child care concerns are thought to be a better predictor of distress for working class women than divisions of house work for this population.
  • Gender, Division of Unpaid Family Work and Psychological Distress in Dual-Earner Families. Evidence in previous studies indicates that unequal household work divisions cause significant distress in women, but does not articulate a mechanism or test the effect on men in the case of percieved inequality. This study demonstrates that distress is shared. Both men and women in domestic relations suffer distress as a result of unequal chore sharing, in dual-earner households.
  • Race, Economic Class, and Employment Opportunity. Even though the average income for Americans is middle class, at $50,233, this relative affluence is unevenly distributed across race and economic class, leading to a persistent and troubling gap for people of color in income and distribution. This paper suggests that people of color are uniquely vulnerable to the current state of the economy and to misconceptions about the way people from different demographic groups are affected by the state of the economy after 2009.
  • Getting Class. This paper discusses the effect of the emphasis on middle class white women in feminist theory and economic privileging in US law. The writer chides the tendency for some schools of feminist theory to focus exclusively on the working and harassment experiences of women with relative privilege when seeking legal and policy remedies, and offers an alternate approach to looking at the experience of wage work and harassment remedies, within the framework of laws which favor the affluent.

Reactionary economics[]

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