gender

With a fascinating new article in Gender & Society, the Sociologists for Women in Society issued a press release through EurekAlert, making its way onto the Crawler radar today. The study suggests that pressure to work overtime in the workplace is adversely affecting families – dads are overworked and tired while moms may be more likely to be demoted or fired.

EurekAlert reports,

If dad looks exhausted this Father’s Day it could be due to his job, suggests new research that found many male employees are now pressured to work up to 40 hours of overtime—often unpaid— per week to stay competitive.

Women face the same pressures, but family obligations may force them to work fewer hours on the job, putting them at risk for demotions or even firings.

The new findings, published in the journal Gender & Society, add to the growing body of evidence that heightened competition in the workplace, combined with modern business practices, are resulting in near-unprecedented levels of overtime that may not even be productive in the long run.

“This clearly does not ease the situation for women and men who want to combine career and family-life,” concluded lead author Patricia van Echtelt and colleagues. “Moreover, a growing body of literature shows that working long hours does not automatically lead to greater productivity and effectiveness, and thus not necessarily contributes to employers’ needs but potentially harms the well-being of employees.”

Their conclusions…

Van Echtelt, a Netherlands Institute for Social Research scientist, and her team found that, among the survey respondents, 69 percent of all men worked overtime versus 42 percent of women. Women who work overtime do so at a rate that is about one-third lower than that of their male colleagues.

It’s “usually explained by the continuing trend for women to be more involved in unpaid family work,” the researchers noted. And even when partners share family chores, “men often characterize their contribution as ‘helping’ their wives, without feeling to have the main responsibility.”

The researchers therefore predict families with more kids and at-home responsibilities will become “more constrained in their opportunities to indulge the ‘choice’ to work overtime.”

Choice is turning into expectation at most companies built upon the “team work” model, with pressures coming from project teams, responsibility for meeting profit or production targets, imposed deadlines and employees left to manage their own careers. A separate study at a software engineering firm, for example, determined that interdependent work patterns, “a crisis mentality,” and a reward system based on individual heroics led to “inefficient work processes and long working hours.”

Read more.

Yesterday The Examiner ran a story on an article published in the  American Journal of Sociology – and winner of the 2008 Kanter Award Winner for Excellence in Work-Family Research – about the ‘motherhood penalty’:  the pattern demonstrating that working mothers make less than women without children. The study, authored by Shelley J. Correll of Stanford University, Stephen J. Benard, and In Paik also suggests that, “the mommy gap is actually bigger than the gender gap for women under 35.”

About the methods:

188 men and women participated in the study. Researchers used two types of experiments in the study; a laboratory experiment and audit study. The laboratory experiment was used to determine “how evaluators rate applicants in terms of competence, workplace commitment, hireability, promotability and recommended salary.” The audit portion of the experiment measured “positive responses to applicants based on the number of callbacks from actual employers.”

Researchers created fictitious resumes and cover letters and found that the starting salaries were quite different for the women with children versus their counterparts, even though the qualifications in the resumes were equal. The researchers also created fake resumes for both working dads and men without children and found no difference in starting salary for the male gender.

And the findings…

The study found that “Mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary.” On the other hand, men were not. In fact, according to the study, some working dads actually benefited from being a father.

On average, working mothers were offered $11,000 less pay per year than equally qualified women without children.

According to the report, women without children received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers who were equally qualified.

Women without children were recommended for hire 1.8 times more than equally qualified moms, while fathers were recommended for hire and called back at a higher rate.

Read more.

Miller-McCune ran a story yesterday based on new research presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America this past weekend. Miller-McCune reports, “We’ve long known that high-pressure jobs can be hazardous to one’s health. New research suggests that, for working mothers [especially those who are less-educated], employment-related stress may also be detrimental to their children’s intellectual development.”

Sociologist Amy Hsin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and economist Christina Felfe at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, compared assessments of verbal skills of 5- to 12-year-olds with the jobs their mothers held. Those jobs were ranked in terms of stress, with both physical hazards and social pressures taken into account.

High-stress jobs for well-educated mothers included nursing and teaching. Those for less-well-educated mothers included factory work and housecleaning.

“For both less-educated and highly educated mothers, the degree of hazards or social stress experienced at work is negatively correlated with children’s language development,” Hsin reports. The researchers did not find that the stressed-out mothers spend fewer hours with their offspring.

“We find that total time (a mother spends with her child) and time spent on educational activities (i.e. playing, reading, arts and crafts, etc.) do not differ across work conditions,” Hsin said. “We speculate that the source of the problem is less about time per se than the type of interactions that are occurring during time spent together.

“When a woman comes home from a stressful day at work, she may be less patient, less responsive and talk less to her children. Or the type of conversation may be short or even dismissive rather than interactive and engaging.”

The researchers believe better access to intellectually enriching day care and preschool programs is a possible solution to this problem. “Providing affordable, high-quality day care is beneficial for mom, child and family,” Hsin said.

Read more.

Business Week ran a story over the weekend about how the economic meltdown is hitting male-dominated jobs, such as those in car manufacturing and finance, much harder than the service sector, where jobs are more often held by women. 

Good thing they call upon a sociologist to sort this out for their readers…

“In a society where services are becoming increasingly important, women quite simply have the better jobs,” says Hans Bertram, a sociologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Bertram is not at all surprised by the fact that it is men who are worst affected by the crisis. “That was historically always the case, for example when you look at the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the Ruhr industrial region,” he says. Unemployment has always been a part of life in an industrialized country, and belongs to the rhythm of industrial society. “As long as someone is young and strong, he can make good money as a construction worker. But once you are 35 and your body won’t cooperate any more, there are fewer prospects,” Bertram explains.

He thinks it unlikely that, for example, former Opel workers will simply retrain to work in the service sector. “You can’t turn a steel worker into a call center agent,” he says. The service industry usually requires higher qualifications and these are not easily acquired later on in life, he explains.

“The change will only come with the generations,” Bertram says. “Perhaps young men will now more often decide against becoming a mechanic or a construction worker and instead opt to train as a nurse.”

Read more. 

This week, Newsday ran a story about what might lead certain people to commit murder-suicide, drawing upon scholars’ expertise on identifying key traits of perpetrators. The article was specifically concerned with the practice of familicide, also referred to as ‘family annihilation,’ which is committed by men nearly 95% of the time according to the Violence Policy Center.

The psychological perspective…

Louis Schlesinger, forensic psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there were two different types of familicidal offenders.

One takes a proprietorial view of his wife, gets angry, and attacks her and everyone around her. The second type is “the despondent male,” who feels he must kill his family and himself to spare them the humiliation or pain of what life will bring, Schlesinger said.

“It’s not rational, it’s not reasonable,” he said. “If he tries to kill himself and survives, he views the [slain] family with sympathy. . . . He feels tremendous regret.”

The sociological perspective…

But Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is almost always a “catastrophic loss that precedes a family annihilation.”

Triggers can be a loss of a job, money, a relationship or a loved one. Often, he said, there is a feeling of isolation.

“Most family annihilators, and typically it’s the husband and father, have been frustrated and depressed over a long period of time,” he said. “But they, unlike other depressed individuals, blame everybody else for their miseries.”

Or, he said, in cases when the man may be described as a dedicated husband and devoted father, the motive may be “a perverted sense of altruism that they’d be better off dead than live in this miserable existence.”

In general, he said, most familicides are suicidal rampages, “but first the killer will take care of his loved ones.”

If the person is religious, “He may feel he can reunite with loved ones in the hereafter, or wants to spare his loved ones the humiliation of his suicide.”

Read more.

Early this week USA Today ran a story about last weekend’s Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago, during which experts discussed how topics such as sexual orientation, sexual labeling, and gender-bending were no longer “x-rated or adults-only topics, but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out how they fit in.” Psychologist Braden Berkey told conference attendees, “Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation.” 

USA Today reports:

Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.

However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”

More from Barbara Risman…

Among boys, “homophobia in middle school is used to police gender,” she says. In-depth interviews with 43 students at an urban middle school in the Southeast found vast differences between the sexes.

“Today, girls are free to do sports and be competitive. No one thought they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. The women’s movement has done great things for middle school girls,” she says.

“It’s another story with boys. I feel like we’re in a time warp. We have not dealt with men and masculinity in a serious enough way,” she says.”Boys police each other. There’s no room not to do anything not traditionally masculine.”

Risman says it’s important not to generalize the findings to most American children, but she says the fact that boys are labeled quickly suggests that this is a developmental stage. The study, she adds, was limited by many rules requiring parental permission for contact with minors.

Risman says it’s the stigma of homosexuality that looms among young boys. Being emotional or caring too much about clothes or liking to dance are reasons that boys give for describing someone as “girlish,” she says.

Read more.

This past weekend Pink News, a UK-based media outlet, ran a story on a new study out of the University of Derby suggesting that lesbian women in abusive relationships may resist seeking assistance for fear of being outed. Findings from the study were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annul meetings last weekend in Cardiff and indicate that abusive relationships between gay women “can can include physical assaults, sexual coercion and emotional cruelty but victims are put off seeking help because of fear of being outed to friends, colleagues and family.”

The scale of the problem:

Forty women between the ages of 21 and 70 were chosen for the study, believed to the most detailed research into abusive lesbian relationships to date. All of those who took part had experienced abuse in some capacity.

Around 88 per cent of those questioned had suffered physical abuse such as punching, kicking and slapping. Forty five per cent reported had been bullied into performing unwanted sexual activities and ten per cent admitted to having been forced into having sex.

Thirteen per cent had been threatened with being outed by their partner to friends, family and colleagues or outed altogether by the abusive partner, while 18 per cent had felt suicidal or had attempted suicide during the abusive relationship.

The author’s comments:

Dr Rebecca Barnes, who led the study, said: “Only women who had been abused by a previous female partner were invited to participate in the study, with the aim being to examine these relationships in detail rather than trying to establish what proportion of lesbian relationships as a whole is abusive.

“The findings show that women in abusive same-sex relationships experience very similar challenges to women in abusive heterosexual relationships.

“However, being in a same-sex relationship poses additional barriers to seeking and receiving effective support. My findings also showed that abuse in lesbian relationships can involve wide-ranging forms of emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse, as it can in heterosexual abusive relationships.”

“One of the key differences with same-sex abuse is the secrecy which surrounds many same-sex relationships – a few of my participants had had relationships lasting years which their family or colleagues knew nothing about or which only a few close friends were aware of. This particularly applied to women who were in their first same-sex relationship.”

Read more.

The Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) ran a story on Friday about sociologist Maria Kefalas’ work on how “poor women find redemption in having a baby.”

When Maria Kefalas started visiting low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia to interview the young, single and often welfare-dependent mothers who lived there, many of the grandmothers were her age. When one mother heard Kefalas, at 32, had just become pregnant with her first child, she said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the doctors were proved wrong and you were able to get pregnant?”

The woman, who had her own first child in her teens, assumed Kefalas had been trying without success to have a baby since 19 or 20. This wasn’t true, of course. In her early 20s, Kefalas had college to think about. Summer vacations spent traveling. Her future career. But this was still an assumption she encountered in these neighborhoods while conducting research with another sociologist. One 14-year-old told her, “I’ve been trying to have a baby ever since I could.”

As Kefalas puts it, childbirth has very little “competition” in these women’s lives.

“The stylish careers, fulfilling relationships and exceptional educations that will occupy middle- and upper class women’s twenties and thirties are unattainable dreams to the women driving the non-marital childbearing trend,” she writes on her blog on the Huffington Post. She sees children out of wedlock not as a decline in family values in poverty-stricken areas but as yet another symptom of the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

In a phone interview, Kefalas said she believes talking to these women allowed her to dig past survey and statistical data that provide information but few answers. When the question “Why do poor women have children outside of marriage?” comes up, society responds that individuals in low-income neighborhoods don’t believe in marriage.

The innovative and important contribution of this work…

Kefalas and Edin’s research doesn’t refute the notion that repairing family structures will help end welfare dependency by stabilizing homes. But it does challenge the assumption that the women living in Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods didn’t care about marriage. In fact, the young women they met cared deeply about it.

“Everyone’s notions of marriage have changed in society,” Kefalas said. The difference is, “upper-class young couples are able to achieve those raised” expectations, although “among low income couples you see the raised standards like everybody else, but actually more diminished opportunities to achieve those goals.”

For example, if the dream for marriage is a stable, dependable husband, these women had little hope of finding him. Many don’t go to college and remain in the neighborhood where they grew up. The men around them are engaged in high-risk behavior and are often involved in the drug economy. Many spend some time in prison. Seen in this light, marriage is far from a stabilizer. The relationships are very “volatile,” and the divorce rate for these low-income couples is significantly higher than the national rate.

Having a child, however, does seem to provide new sense of purpose for the women Kefalas interviewed. It can act as a stabilizer in a neighborhood, family or financial situation that is otherwise chaos.

“Having a child offers a source of redemption,” Kefalas said. “You go from being this teenager who is wild and out of control to being this young woman with a baby, and if your baby’s clean, people stop you on the street and say, ‘You’re such a wonderful mother.’

“These young women say, ‘Having a baby saved my life.’ ”

Read more.

Minnesota Public Radio ran a segment on ‘Midmorning’ yesterday about how men are increasingly feeling the conflicts that come out of trying to balance work and family. The segment was developed because of “a recent survey from the Families and Work Institute, which found that women in two-worker households are earning more money than their male partners, yet men are feeling more stress about the work-life balance.”

The show featured guests Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder of Families and Work Institute, and Scott Coltrane, Sociologist and Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.

Listen in…

USA Today ran a story yesterday about how we are starting to see a shift in conflict in the work-life balance associated with gender roles.

Sharon Jayson of USA Today reports on new data from a telephone interview survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, suggesting that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in attitudes toward gender roles and the balance of work responsibilities and family life.

Women in two-earner couples are contributing more to family income, but it’s the men who are feeling more conflicted over the work-life balance, according to a survey of 3,500 workers released today.

Asked how much jobs and family life interfere with each other, 59% of fathers in dual-income families reported conflict in 2008, while just 35% did in 1977. For mothers, reported conflict increased from 40% to 45%.

The sociological interpretation…

“It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Up until the past decade, “men weren’t doing enough to add stress to their lives,” he says.

Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.

“What we see here is that the conflict for women hasn’t increased as fast because it was already so high,” says sociologist Kathleen Gerson of New York University. Other findings show:

•Annual income contributed by women in dual-income couples rose to 44% in 2008; 26% of such women earned at least 10% more than their partners.

•Traditional gender roles have lost favor among both sexes. About 60% of men and women say they disagree with the idea that men should earn the money and women should take care of the children.

•Women under age 29 are just as likely as men to want greater work responsibility, regardless of whether they have children.

“When you get men and women feeling the same, maybe it is a sea change,” says Ellen Galinsky, the institute’s president.

Sociologist Brian Powell of Indiana University, however, says even though “there probably has been real change, I have the sense there’s been more of a change in terms of people’s view that there should be equal division. That’s probably farther ahead of the actual behavior.”

Read more.