by Wei-hsin Yu and Janet Chen-Lan Kuo

Mothers have been shown to receive lower pay than childless women across industrial countries. In the United States, research based on women born in the 1960s or earlier indicates that mothers earn 4-5% less per child, compared to childless women with similar education, length of work experience, and frequency of employment interruptions.

The pay gap between mothers and non-mothers who are otherwise similar—the so-called “motherhood wage penalty”—has been shown to differ in size for women with different marital status, skill level, and age. We know relatively little, however, about how the characteristics of occupations shape the degree to which women are penalized for having children. Occupations, by design, differ in their required training, schedules, and activities. The different work conditions and requirements across occupations may empower or hinder mothers, thereby narrowing or widening the pay gap between mothers and non-mothers.

How exactly should occupational characteristics affect the extent of the motherhood wage penalty? The answer to this question depends on why mothers receive lower wages than childless women in the first place. Because mothers face greater family obligations and time constraints, they may not be able to meet job demands the way childless women can—e.g., being very flexible in making work-related plans—resulting in mothers’ worse job performance and lower pay. If work-family conflict largely accounts for the motherhood wage penalty, then this penalty should be greater in occupations that enable workers less autonomy and more teamwork, as the job performance for such occupations depends more on workers’ ability to perform a certain task at a certain time. Because more autonomous occupations enable greater decision-making latitude, which is thought to lessen job strain, they may also decrease the work-family conflict mothers frequently face, thereby reducing mothers’ wage disadvantage. Likewise, because occupations that require workers to compete intensely with peers tend to be more stressful and time-demanding, mothers in more competitive occupations should be especially likely to suffer from job strain and work-family conflict, resulting in a greater motherhood penalty.

Alternatively, mothers may receive lower wages because they are willing to sacrifice pay for certain amenities their jobs provide, if the amenities enable them to better balance work and family. If this is the case, because mothers likely prefer occupations that enable greater autonomy, require less teamwork, and impose less competitive pressure, they should be willing to sacrifice wages more in such occupations. Consequently, these occupational characteristics should be associated with greater motherhood wage penalties.

Yet, if mothers receive lower wages because employers tend to see them as less devoted workers and discriminate against them, we can expect still a different association between occupational characteristics and the extent of the motherhood wage penalty. Specifically, because employers suspicious of mothers’ devotion and performance should be even more distrustful of mothers when their occupation offers them latitude to determine tasks and make decisions, mothers can be expected to be penalized more in more autonomous occupations. Similarly, the suspicion of mothers’ ability to put in extra effort to compete may lead employers to pay mothers especially less than childless women in more competitive occupations. From the viewpoint that employers discriminate against mothers because of the stereotype of mothers’ higher job turnover rates, we should also expect that the motherhood wage penalty to be greater in occupations require more training, as employers are especially likely to be concerned about job turnover for such occupations.

In our recently published paper, we combined 16 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) with the detailed occupational characteristics reported by the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) and show that the wage gap between mothers and childless women are greater in occupations that are less autonomous, require more teamwork, and impose more competitive pressure. These differences in mothers’ pay disadvantage exist even after taking account individual differences in human capital (e.g., education, work experience, employment interruptions), geographic location, marital status, and a range of job attributes, including their occupation’s general educational requirement and gender composition. Overall, our results are the most consistent with the account highlighting how work-family conflict and job strain contribute to mothers’ wage disadvantage.

To further illustrate our findings, women in autonomous occupations (e.g., animal trainers and computer and office machine repairers), face very small wage decreases with the arrival of each child. Mothers in occupations that allow little autonomy (e.g., library technicians and cashiers), experience wage reductions that are much greater than average. Similarly, women in highly competitive occupations (e.g.,  lawyers and securities sales agents), suffer from a net wage penalty per child that is more than 40% greater than the average, while their counterparts in occupations with low levels of competition (e.g., accounting clerks and general maintenance and repair workers) barely suffer at all.

Women in occupations that require little teamwork (e.g., dispensing opticians and recreation and fitness worker), encounter no significant wage penalty. Conversely, women who are required to work with a team, such as registered nurses, first-line supervisors of retail sales workers, are subject to drastic wage decreases with each additional child.

Our analysis also indicates that the motherhood wage penalty persists—and virtually unchanged in its magnitude—for young women in today’s labor markets. Most previous work on mothers’ wage disadvantage relies on women born in the 1960s or earlier. Our study shows that the gross wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is greater for women born in the early 1980s, who mostly entered motherhood in the 2000s or later, compared to women born twenty years earlier. After taking into account human capital, marital status, and geographic location, however, today’s mothers with young children face a nearly identical net wage penalty as did their mothers’ generation—around 4% per child.

The strong persistence of the motherhood wage penalty, along with our findings about how occupations imposing greater job strain penalize mothers more, suggests that mothers continue to face a high level of work-family conflict, despite many societal changes that have improved women’s educational and occupational opportunities over past decades. Although our research echoes a growing literature that highlights the importance of changing working conditions to alleviate work-family conflict, our findings at the same time indicate that some of the obstacles mothers face are embedded in the design of occupations (e.g., teamwork requirements). Unfortunately, such obstacles cannot be easily addressed with workplace policies. Reductions in mothers’ work-family conflict and wage disadvantage would also require fundamental changes in the division of labor within the home.

Wei-hsin Yu is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland-College Park and Faculty Associate at the Maryland Population Research Center. Janet Chen-Lan Kuo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University.

This article is based on their paper “The Motherhood Wage Penalty by Work Conditions: How Do Occupational Characteristics Hinder or Empower Mothers?” published in American Sociological Review.

Image: Jerry Bunkers via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Occupational licensure creates a right to practice, legislatively carving out tasks that can only be performed by authorized practitioners and reserving an occupational title for the sole use of those practitioners.  The authority to practice can be obtained only from the state, and unauthorized practice can result in criminal and civil penalties.

Over the past few decades, occupational closure – most often through occupational licensing – quietly became the norm for a broad swath of American occupations. Where only a small set of ‘traditional’ professions once determined entry through regulation, today the practice governs a much wider range of occupations, from doctors to engineers, carpet layers to massage therapists, agricultural inspectors to wilderness guides, and fortune tellers to legal document assistants.

The most substantial growth in occupational licensing has been in blue-collar occupations.

Many occupational licensing boards are made up of senior professionals in that field. Thus, architects draft guidelines for other architects; standards for hairdressers are styled by instructors in cosmetology schools; and frog farmers must leap over barriers imposed by fellow amphibious agriculturalists.

Because not every worker who wants a license can obtain one, licensure is thought to raise wages for licensed workers by artificially restricting supply. If true, this would mean that licensed workers benefit at the expense of consumers.

This article presents a new examination of licensure-wage effects, relying on two important innovations.

First, it is the largest study to date, examining more than 4.5 million workers over 30 years, and across 500 occupations. This allows for more complex statistical modeling. By tracking licensing legislation across all fifty states, through an exhaustive search of statutes and administrative codes, licensed hairdressers in one state are compared to unlicensed hairdressers in another state, within that same year, licensed occupational therapists are compared to unlicensed occupational therapists, and so on.

Second, for the first time, the effect of licensing can be studied over time.  Using a longitudinal approach, this study examines wages in the years following enactment and see exactly how they change when a law is passed.

Does licensing raise wages?

The short answer is: no. The typical weekly wage declines by between 0.19 percent and 1.23 percent due to licensure – in other words, for most people, not at all.  In the years following enactment, wages will fluctuate, but even twenty years after enactment there is no long-term change in wages.

So why don’t wages increase?

The modern view of occupational closure as monopolistic derives from the earliest views on the subject.  However, the occupational regulation that pervades today’s legislative and economic landscape only marginally resembles the structures envisioned by Adam Smith and other early critics.

Licensing restructures methods of entering an occupation.

The enactment of a licensing law promotes the development of other institutions in the state, such as vocational schools specifically designed to train applicants for the new license. Licensees have access to support systems specific to their occupations, such as exam-oriented coursework, licensure application assistance, career counseling, job fairs, and networking opportunities, all of which are designed to make licensure requirements and employment outcomes manageable and attainable.

Overall, the major flaw in past research has been the assumption that, in an unlicensed environment, all prospective entrants have an equal opportunity to enter any given occupation. In reality, informal barriers pervade the labor market.

In a licensed state, workers can use the license as a state-endorsed signal of quality, which shows prospective employers that they meet basic qualifications, and can help overcome problems of ‘fit’, such as a race, gender, or age mismatch. Workers can rely on support from subordinate institutions to help find and get a job.

Unlicensed workers, on the other hand, have a hard time obtaining their first job without a standardized way to prove credibility and competence, and will most likely be chosen (or not) based on social networks or employer tastes. Workers who lack social connections may be left out in the cold.

Licensed applicants also take advantage of a codified path of entry, following a publicized set of steps that, by state law, lead to licensure. The would-be practitioner can refer to the appropriate publication or contact the licensing authority for the ‘official’ requirements.

Results of the study show that, after licensing, the number of workers in the occupation increases by an average of more than seven percent over original levels.

Licensing may be advantageous for women and minority workers

Because licensing requirements necessitate the expenditure of resources (frequently money and time), traditional theory suggests that the effect of supply restrictions should be most easily detectable among populations that are traditionally excluded.

Results show that this is not true. After enactment, the composition of licensed occupations shifts as more women and minorities enter the population. The proportion of women working in the occupation increases by approximately two percent and the proportion of black workers increases by more than three percent.

The new institutions that develop around licensing might be particularly helpful for historically-excluded groups, allowing them to bypass informal barriers. Increased supply, particularly among traditionally disadvantaged groups, is thus an understandable outcome from licensure.

Licensing may have other consequences

In addition to changing how workers enter an occupation, licensing may also create broader changes that social scientists have yet to investigate.

For as long as it remains legitimate, the license will continue to function as an important signal and may insulate practitioners against shifts in the market. States codify the appropriate content and level of training necessary to be the ‘right’ type of practitioner, and thus free licensed workers to obtain only the specified level of education, while workers in unlicensed jurisdictions continue to compete along educational lines.

Through the lens of licensure, occupational elites can define the ‘proper’ way to practice, since license requirements are essentially comprehensive lists of ways to be excluded or removed. However, this may also limit innovation, reduce experimentation, and perhaps hinder growth in knowledge. While practitioners in unlicensed markets are free to compete on all aspects of their occupations, licensed workers must obey legal limitations on both what they do and how they do it.

On a broader scale, this formalization may rigidify the reward structure of an occupation, solidifying wage inequality. Ongoing research suggests this might be the case. Current research into wage gaps shows that, while more women enter licensed occupations, licensing also tends to increase the wage gap as it reduces mobility for women. As a result, women tend to be clustered at the low-end of the earnings spectrum in their occupation.

Beth Redbird is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

This article summarizes findings from “The New Closed Shop? The Economic and Structural Effects of Occupational Licensure” in American Sociological Review.  For a free, pre-publication version of the article, click here.

Image by author

Happy Friday! This is our final post of the year, and we’ve got a big 2018 planned for Work in Progress so stay tuned. In the meantime, here are the stories that we’ve been reading this week.

The Lede – Homelessness

“The Lede” is our occasional Friday Roundup section that provides a mix of a prominent news story and some recent social science on the same topic. This week we are featuring The Guardian Newspaper’s  visually stunning and heart wrenching look at the practice of one-way bus ticket purchases for individuals who are street homeless:

• Bussed out: How America moves its homeless (The Guardian)

Here are a few other recent stories about homelessness that caught our attention:

• Report: 80 homeless people died on Portland streets in 2016 (AP)
• Crime-fighting robot retired after launching alleged ‘war on the homeless’ (Washington Post)
• Homeless scoff at SF strategy of dumping boulders at camp site (San Francisco Chronicle)
• L.A.’s twin disasters — rising homelessness and spiraling rents — have the same DNA (Los Angeles Times)
• The Number of Homeless People in America Increased for the First Time in 7 Years (Mother Jones)
• A Hard Knock Life for London’s Rough Sleepers (New York Times)

Here is a selection of recent articles on homelessness in the United States:

• From ’Rabble Management’ to ’Recovery Management’: Policing Homelessness in Marginal Urban Space (Urban Studies)
• Our Lives Matter: The Racialized Violence of Poverty among Homeless Mothers of Color (Sociological Forum)
• Moving on, finding shelter: The spatiotemporal camp (International Sociology)

At Work

• Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads (ProPublica)
• How Tough Is It to Change a Culture of Harassment? Ask Women at Ford (New York)
• How to Get American Men Back Into the Workforce (Wall Street Journal)

Changing Policy on Taxes and Immigration

• As Trump Tightens Legal Immigration, Canada Woos Tech Firms (New York Times)
• How the Tax Plan Will Send Jobs Overseas (The Atlantic)
• Republicans Promised to Simplify the Tax Code. They’re Making It Way More Complicated. (Mother Jones)

Social Problems

• The latest data makes it official: 2016 was by far America’s worst year for drug overdose deaths (Vox)
• U.N. Investigator On Extreme Poverty Issues A Grim Report — On The U.S. (NPR)
• High Temperatures Are Already Sending Refugees to Europe (The Atlantic)

Policing in America

• The Criminalization of Gentrifying Neighborhoods (The Atlantic)
• This Nightmare Court Ruling Could Put Lots of Bad Police Officers Back on the Streets (Mother Jones)

by Arne Kalleberg and Steven Vallas

Profound changes in paid employment have unfolded in recent decades, with serious consequences for millions of workers whose jobs, careers, and family lives have are been exposed to rising levels of risk. Though much of the attention has focused on the advanced capitalist societies, precarious work has also grown through Asia and much of the global south.

Involved here is the spread of work that is uncertain or insecure, in which risks are shifted from employers and governments to workers, and in which workers lack the legal protections and benefits that the standard work arrangement once offered.

Familiar examples of precarious work include temporary and contract work, but growing rapidly now are jobs in the “gig” or on-demand economy, “bogus” self employment in which workers are independent in name only. Working under these conditions can over time have adversely affect individuals, shaping workers’ trajectories in ways that can inflict lasting harm.

Workers often suffer income insecurity. They cannot know when they will be working, if at all. They have little or no access to job training or sick days. And they often feel like outsiders while on the job. Societal effects can also accumulate, as when the weakening of economic attachments drives the social and political instability that has surfaced in recent years, at times seeming to threaten the foundations of liberal democracy itself.

What is known about these developments? One set of answers can be found in Precarious Work, our just-published collection of original papers on the topic.

In editing this collection, we have sought to strengthen the theoretical and methodological foundations of this field, doing so by identifying key sources of variation in the precarization trend, not only in the United States, but also in Europe, Asia, and the developing world.

We have also sought to grasp the socio-demographic complexity of precarization, doing so by exploring racial and gender differences in exposure to it. In addition, we have tried to highlight the consequences of precarization for personal and family life, along with the policy alternatives that might protect workers from undue risk.

The rise of precarious work results from a combination of factors that are by now all too familiar: Globalization, digitalization, deunionization, and other structural trends. But as we make clear in our introductory chapter, these trends all have a common underlying source: neoliberal doctrines and practices, which define the dominance of market logic as a necessary condition for the pursuit of human freedom.

Neoliberalism has become a predominant force, steering economic activity around much of the world. Yet its link to the precarization of work has yet to receive systematic discussion. Although there are theoretically invested accounts such as Karen Ho’s Liquidated, which relies on a sophisticated application of Bourdieusian theory, much of the literature has managed to capture only the surface manifestations of precarious work, rather than its underlying causes.

Definitional confusion has understandably followed, and the role of racial and gender privilege – and the consequences that flow from the erosion of status hierarchies – have been too seldom explored. And our comparative grasp of the precarization trend has yet to move beyond its rudimentary state.

Though many scholars assume that European nations have erected important protections against precarious work, the validity of this claim remains a matter of sharp debate, as our volume makes clear.

The paper by David Brady and Thomas Biegart shows that social and economic dualism has grown quite pronounced in Germany, for example, as a gulf has opened up between still-protected insiders on the one hand, and the growing proportion of German workers who have been left outside the protected domain and stand exposed to the precarization trend. In her contribution, Valeria Pulignano goes further, arguing that class-based shifts in power across the EU landscape have given rise to what she terms an overarching “regime of competition,” pressing market logic and practices into the sinews of European institutions.

In his multi-level analysis of 32 European nations, Quan Dang Hien Mai stresses the varied nature of the precarization trend. Exposure to precarious forms of employment varies sharply, he finds, depending on the labor market policies that given nations adopt. In her paper on the methodological challenges of studying precarious work, Anna Kiersztyn provides an excellent example of the kind of carefully calibrated study we need to test broad theoretical arguments of the sort that our volume hopes to advance.

The collection seeks to expand the boundaries of the debate beyond the global north, however, offering important forays into the developing world. Especially valuable here are the studies by Michael Rogan and his colleagues, on how liberalization has reshaped informal work in the Global South, and by Rahul Suresh Sapkal and K. R. Shyam Sundar, who use survey data to capture trends on the Indian continent. The latter authors find that the politics of liberalization have fostered an increase in precarious work within the formal sectors of the Indian economy, only adding to the wider hardships of informal work.

The Fordist employment relation of long-term and relatively high-wage work with a single company was, it is vital to recall, a highly selective arrangement that often excluded women and people of color. Building on this point, several contributors explore how the precarization trend has affected workers across gender and racial lines. Enobang Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley show how gender and race have historically combined to affect exposure to non-standard employment. Christine Williams shows how hostility toward women even in relatively good jobs (as among engineers in the energy sector) negatively affects the work situations of women, who stand especially vulnerable during economic downturns.

The papers in Precarious Work also show how exposure to labor market uncertainty over time reaches deep in intimate life and personal well-being. Sharon Zukin and Max Papadantonakis show how business corporations and trade associations in the high tech sector have essentially colonized many of the rituals that are often shared within the occupational community of computer programmers. Companies have increasingly appropriated “hackathons,” those creative marathons through which programmers perfect, share, and celebrate their craft. Now informed by the kind of entrepreneurial thinking that large corporations seek to harness, hackatons seem to idealize risk, to legitimate the performance of upaid work, and to frame capitalism as a vehicle for benevolent social change and personal fulfillment.

The Zukin and Papadantonakis study is important since it reveals the political functions that occupational identity has increasingly assumed in an era marked by change and uncertainty in the economic landscape. Aliyah Hamid Rao adopts a similar view, showing how elite early-career contract workers employed by the UN go to extraordinary lengths, rearranging their personal lives for years in the effort to position themselves for the permanent positions they so desperately desire.

Concern for mental and physical well-being also extends into personal and family life. Dirk Witteveen shows how labor market instability influences the career pathways of entrants to the labor market over time. When women, racial-ethnic minorities, and members of subordinate classes are exposed to precarious work early in their careers, the effects can persist for years, even leaving symbolic scars.

Precarious work also influences family formation. Sojung Lim shows that men who work in part-time jobs, or to the lack of benefits, are substantially more likely to delay a first marriage. As in Japan, working in bad jobs matters more for men, though women in part-time nonstandard jobs also experience marriage delays.

There is little reason to believe that the forces fostering precarious work will abate anytime soon. Globalization and dynamic technological change are inexorable forces characterizing the 21^st century. However, the political, economic and social responses to these forces are not inevitable. Just as the adoption of neoliberal policies reflected political shifts in the balance of power among workers and employers, so too will political contests shape the reactions of workers and their allies in various parts of the world.

We expect that the phenomena studied by Michael Gibson-Light, on how workers in ambiguous employment statuses struggled to gain formal rights and protections, will become increasingly central as awareness of precarization grows sharper over time. Struggles over the legal categories that define formal employment, and the regulatory and social insurance systems that accompany it, are all up for grabs. Indeed, we expect that the struggles documented by Gibson-Light, exploring the liminal situation of prison inmates and culture industry workers, will become increasingly central as battles are fought over employment law generally.

The centrality of work to human existence argues powerfully in favor of research on these struggles, the battle lines they imply, and the outcomes the combatants envision. At stake are the lives and identities not only of workers, but also of their families, communities, and all of us who dwell in the shadow of market forces today.

Arne Kalleberg is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Steven Vallas is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. Precarious Work (Emerald) is out now.

Image: Dave Pearce via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Happy Friday, sociologists! It is finals week here at WIP and so, like a student stumbling in with fifteen minutes left in the exam, our #FridayRoundup is a bit belated today. We hope you have a great weekend!

Sexual Harassment

• The Silence Breakers (Time Magazine)
• The Reckoning: Women and Power in the Workplace (New York Times)
• Will Women In Low-Wage Jobs Get Their #MeToo Moment? (FiveThirtyEight)
• At Columbia, Three Women, 30 Years and a Pattern of Harassment (New York Times)
• It’s Pretty Crazy to Be a Young Woman in Roy Moore’s Alabama (New York Times)

Net Neutrality

• Why Net Neutrality Was Repealed and How It Affects You (New York Times)
• Net Neutrality Was Never Enough (The Atlantic)

This Week in Washington

• Marco Rubio got a last-minute tax deal — but the poorest Americans got left out (Vox)
• Millions of Children Could Lose Health Coverage Starting Next Month (New York Times)
• Democrats say Trump to seek federal pay freeze and cuts to domestic security (Washington Post)

Race and Politics

• The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment (Vox)
• Stop asking black women to ‘save America.’ Start organizing your own people. (Washington Post)

In the Discipline

• Law Professor’s New Book Puts Ethnography on Trial (The Chronicle)

On Campus

• Stop the Generational Moralizing About Free Speech (The Chronicle)
• Intimidation Is the New Normal on Campus (The Chronicle)
• The Importance of Dumb Mistakes in College (New York Times)

In the recent news several instances of sexual harassment and sexual abuse have been brought to light. These cases of sexual abuse highlight how powerful men, such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Matt Lauer can use their positions to exploit, harass, and cause harm to others.

There has been less focus on how these individuals were made powerful and protected by institutions that both enabled them to harass and gave them the tools through which they could cause harm. In my research, I explore the intersection between bureaucracy and harassment in the context of the United States military.

Earlier this year “Marines United” was identified as a closed Facebook group where over 30,000 servicemen shared nude photos of servicewomen. Many of the comments following the identification of “Marines United” asked whether the military had policies and regulations as well as avenues to prosecute servicemembers for online activities. We often understand policies, rules, and regulations as ways to prevent, address, and punish those who might perpetrate sexual harassment and abuse.

However, my research shows that it is also important to recognize the discretionary power that individuals have in interpreting, carrying out, and implementing organizational rules, policies, and regulations. The interplay between organizational polices, workplace climate, and individuals in power can lead to sexual abuse in the workplace.

In a recently published article, I use the term “bureaucratic harassment” to explain workplace harassment where bureaucracy is both the tool that perpetrators use to harass, as well as their source of power over others in the organization.

Through in-depth interviews with U.S. Servicewomen, I explore the bureaucratic dimension to harassment in the workplace and outline how servicemen implemented policies and rules in ways that damaged the reputation and careers of their female counterparts. Importantly, these servicemen would not be able to manipulate administrative procedures if the military as an organization did not include features such as high levels of discretion, a strict hierarchy, and workplace expectations that encourage commanders to regulate the personal lives of those who work for them.

For example, a white enlisted Marine recounted her attempt to report an instance of sexual harassment she experienced. She was told by her commander that, if forced to investigate, they would cancel her Christmas leave. She said, “It was clear that this was a threat. I was asked, ‘Do [you] really want to ruin this man’s career? If we have to go forward, we will have to cancel your leave.’” The threat of not being able to go home for leave after experiencing sexual harassment intimidated her into dropping the report.

In another case, a Latina Captain in the Army recalled how a fellow Captain tried to establish a paper trail that demonstrated she was a lazy solider because she had recently given birth. He used the bureaucratic system to achieve this despite his lack of authority to do so (they were the same rank). She said

I need to have a pregnancy profile in place. So, a pregnancy profile involves having an Army doctor signing an Army piece of paper saying that I had a baby. What the hell is wrong with our regular doctor saying this? Well I guess the Army doctor is special (laughing) so they want me to take time out of my civilian day … not paying me … and have me go to an Army doctor … so that they don’t have to have me take a PT [physical training/test] for six months after I give birth. But since there’s no pregnancy profile in place I am now subject to these regulations. And I am like, ‘Well, are you going to send me to the doctor?’ And he said, ‘No.’ Well then, fucking fine! So, then he put an administrative flag on me to say that I am a fat soldier.

This same captain repeatedly issued administrative sanctions for small and non-existent “infractions” to try to portray her as poor service-member to their commander.

These two examples show how bureaucratic procedures are both the source of power enabling harassers (through their rank and status) as well as the tools through which they achieve harassment. In the first example, a commander threatens to take away an earned and approved leave to intimidate a Marine out of reporting sexual harassment. In the second example, a white male captain mobilizes social power derived from his race and gender to try to control a solider of his same rank through the bureaucratic system. She had to spend time and resources to get the administrative flag removed.

The military’s organizational hierarchy lends legitimacy to commanders’ treatment of those who work for them. Additionally, the military allows commanders high levels of discretion in assigning work activities, evaluating employees, approving leave, promotions, and transfers, and in disciplinary actions. This discretion is often unchecked as it is understood as an essential part of military operations and success.

Thus, when individuals cause harm through military bureaucracy, many victims perceive this treatment as legitimate since it occurs through official organizational channels. The women in my study did not often report their experiences with bureaucratic harassment. Instead they spent time and resources fighting infractions levied against them and many ended up leaving the military.

The women in my study experienced many consequences as a result of the initial administrative strike including: being forced to transfer units, being forced to stay in units with perpetrators of sexual abuse, having a negative record of service that delayed promotion, and almost losing qualifications they earned through education and training.

One servicewoman was sent to a mental institution after telling her therapist that after an attempted rape she was “very depressed and I want to hurt myself.”  Her institutionalization was used against her: “I reported it, what happened … I did undisclosed reporting so only my commander knew … Come to find out, I reported it, they investigated it, and it was his word against mine and of course because I was technically crazy, they didn’t believe me … Then when I went to get out of the Navy, I got this code that said I have a personality disorder.” The symptoms of her rape were used against her to question her credibility, dismiss her case, and ultimately to label her as having a personality disorder which served to sever her post-service medical benefits.

This tactic is not unique to this case, the Veteran Affairs Committee has accused the military of improper use of personality disorder diagnosis to medically separate servicemembers from the military so that they do not have to pay for post-service medical benefits. Thus, the consequences of bureaucratic harassment are felt on an interpersonal and organizational level and have severe effects on servicewomen’s military careers and their post-service lives.

My research aims to make visible the interplay between organizational features, such as hierarchy and discretion, gendered and raced workplace climates, and the manipulation of institutional policies, that facilitates harassment and protects perpetrators as well as to outline the unique consequences of harassment that is achieved through official organizational structures.

Stephanie Bonnes is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

This article summarizes findings from “The Bureaucratic Harassment of U.S. Servicewomen” in Gender & Society.

Image: Brigid Farrell

Today we’ve adding a new element to our Friday news roundups – “The Lede”. We’ll use this space to feature reporting along with social science research on a topic that has been in the news. We hope you find it interesting!

The Lede – Race, Childbirth, and Mortality

ProPublica and NPR have been reporting on maternal mortality all year. We’ve linked to some of their major stories below along with some related reporting from Vox.com, which published the video embedded above on race and childbirth. We’ve also linked to some articles on poor birth outcomes more generally in the U.S.

• The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth (ProPublica)
• Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth (ProPublica)
• Lost Mothers (ProPublica)
• Why Giving Birth Is Safer in Britain Than in the U.S. (ProPublica)
• California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth (Vox)

• Low birthweight among immigrants in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Social Science & Medicine)
• Contextualizing racial disparities in preterm delivery: A rhetorical analysis of U.S. epidemiological research at the turn of the 21st century (Social Science & Medicine)
• Very Low Birthweight in African American Infants: The Role of Maternal Exposure to Interpersonal Racial Discrimination (American Journal of Public Health)

Taxes in America

• What happened when North Carolina cut taxes like the GOP plans to for the country (Washington Post)
• ‘I don’t think it’s going to help’: In a pro-Trump area, many voters are skeptical of GOP tax plan (Washington Post)
• The GOP is trying to pass a super-unpopular agenda — and that’s a bad sign for democracy (Vox)

At Work

• Racism Is Stopping Black Men From Solving Our Nursing Shortage (Slate)
  • Editor’s Note: This is written by OOW Section member Adia Harvey Wingfield.
• Robots Will Transform Fast Food (The Atlantic)
• How Harvard’s Hypocrisy Could Hurt Your Union (New York Times)

Thinking About “Science”

• There’s No Such Thing As ‘Sound Science’ (FiveThirtyEight)
• The Republican War on Economics (New York Magazine)

On Campus

• The Case for Affirmative Action (U.S. News & World Report)
• The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone (The Atlantic)
• Elitists, crybabies and junky degrees (Washington Post)
• Chinese power ‘may lead to global academic censorship crisis’ (Times Higher Education)

by Alice Sullivan

How is socio-economic advantage and disadvantage passed down from parent to child? This is a central question for sociologists and policymakers alike. No one denies the vital role that education plays in this process. However, sociologists have long argued that there is a persistent ‘direct effect of social origins’ on occupational attainment which cannot be accounted for by education. This residual direct effect of social origins on occupational destinations has acquired the status of a stylized fact within sociology, sometimes simply referred to as ‘DESO’.

Our recent study challenges the consensus on this issue. We ask, could the direct effect of social origins be an artefact of using overly crude measures of education?

If you want to get a top social class position, it certainly helps to be a university graduate.  But simply having a degree may not be enough. It may also matter what subject your degree is in, and whether you attended a prestigious university. Yet most studies of social mobility have not accounted for these educational distinctions, which are likely to matter for access to top jobs nowadays.

We set out to provide a refined account of the educational pathways from origins to destinations, using data from a nationally representative sample of over 17,000 people born in Britain in 1970, using the 1970 British Cohort Study. The BCS70 is longitudinal, meaning that the same group of people have been followed up over time. The BCS70 study members have been followed from birth, when their parents were interviewed, to mid-life. The study is ongoing, and the cohort members are interviewed every few years.

We examined access to the ‘elite’ in mid-life, identified as respondents who were in social class 1 according to the UK Government’s National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) when they were aged 42 (in 2012). This includes people such as CEOs, senior police officers, lawyers and doctors. We measured the individuals’ social origins in terms of their parents’ occupational social class, income and educational level, reported by the parents when the study members were children, during the 1970s.

Rather than just looking at educational attainment as a single variable in terms of ‘highest qualification achieved’, we looked at the study members’ cognitive scores during childhood and the qualifications they achieved at school and beyond, as well as the educational institutions they attended. We asked whether there was a ‘critical period’ in the emergence of those educational inequalities which in turn explain occupational outcomes.

Many commentators have argued that the early (pre-school) years are the key period when inequalities in learning emerge. If this is right, then test scores at age five should account for most of the inequality that we observe later on.

Our analysis supported the view that cognitive test scores at age five are important, however, we also found that cognitive progress between the ages of five and ten was similarly important in accounting for the origins-destination link. And those who did well in cognitive tests at age ten were more likely than those who scored less highly in these tests to be in top jobs at age 42, even when we compared people who achieved the same level of academic attainment later on. The link between social origins and destinations was further chipped away by school-level qualifications at age 16 and 18, and finally by degree level qualifications.

In other words, there is no single decisive stage of the educational career that accounts for access to the top social class in mid-life.

Fee-paying private secondary schools in Britain serve a small proportion of the population (6% in our sample). They are very expensive, as well as being typically academically selective, and their alumni disproportionately dominate elite occupations. We have previously shown that the privately educated have a higher chance of gaining a degree from an elite university, even compared to state school students with the same level of school qualifications. Our analysis shows that the private school advantage in gaining access to top jobs extends over and above the educational advantage that private schools bestow.

Britain, like the US, has a hierarchy of universities. Our study found that people who had attended high status universities were more likely to get top jobs than those who attended less illustrious institutions, although much of the difference was accounted for by academic selectivity into these university degrees.

We also distinguished between fields of study at degree level, showing that graduates in both STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and law, economics and management, reaped higher occupational rewards than those with social science, arts and humanities degrees.

We find that the influence of childhood social advantage on access to top jobs in mid-life is entirely channelled by education: we do not find evidence for a direct link between social origins and top class destinations.

We suggest that the conventional approach to educational attainment is too simplistic, potentially leading to spurious or exaggerated findings for non-educational factors, including social origins. Other factors, such as non-cognitive skills and social networks, may well be important in their own right, but researchers should be cautious about invoking these factors as explanations for ‘DESO’ without first taking into account a refined picture of education, including consideration of elite institutions and fields of study.

We do not intend to suggest that inequalities that are mediated via education are just. We should not forget that the parental resources and access to high quality education, which provide huge educational advantages in developing cognitive skill and achieving educational credentials, are not equally distributed. In addition, the small minority of children who attended private schools gained a direct advantage over and above that attributable to their educational attainment. It is also striking that women had about half the chance of getting a top job compared to men, and this gender gap was in no way explained by educational pathways.

One limitation of our study is that it focuses only on reaching the top occupational social class. Individuals in the same occupational social class may have very different incomes and levels of wealth. This is important given the changing nature of inequalities, with younger generations increasingly disadvantaged in terms of wealth. Our future work will therefore examine differences in the nature of the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage according to social class, income and wealth.

Alice Sullivan is Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education, and Director of the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70).

This article summarises findings from: Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Green, F., Wiggins, R. D., & Ploubidis, G. (2017). The path from social origins to top jobs: social reproduction via education. The British Journal of Sociology. For a free pre-publication version of the article, click here.

Image: Claire MacNeill (CC BY-SA 2.0)