research

From my dear friends over at the National Council for Research on Women comes this (cool graphic, ladies over there!):

Join Kimberle Crenshaw, Kim Gandy, Chandra Mohanty, Ellie Smeal and other leading scholars, researchers, advocates, and policy makers from across various disciplines and fields June 5-7, 2008 at the Kimmel Center at NYU for our Annual Conference. Share information and resources; learn about cutting edge and emerging research on women, gender, and girls; and strategize about ways to work across communities and fields of study.

This year’s conference themes will center around where women can have the most impact in the 2008 Presidential election and beyond, including research and policy issues that will need to be addressed with a new administration; challenges women in the academy confront—backlash, shrinking budgets, corporatization, conservative social pressures—and what can be done to counter them; and the implications of the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, generation and other markers of difference for feminist scholarship, leadership, and activism, nationally and globally.

Early registration starts now. For more info, contact ncrw@ncrw.org

On the heels my post below on work/life, gender, and families, this just in: Council on Contemporary Families co-chair Steve Mintz sent me abstracts from the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Families. Check out the following three tidbits. Now, why can’t we get more of this in the popular media convo about what’s really going on?

Title: College Women’s Plans for Different Types of Egalitarian Marriages (Francine M. Deutsch, Amy P. Kokot, and Katherine S. Binder)

This study examined college women’s plans for egalitarian marriages. One hundred and forty-four heterosexual undergraduate women completed surveys about their preferences for different life scenarios and their attitudes about work and family life. The pattern of their preferences showed a distinction between home-centered, balanced, and job-centered egalitarian families. Regressions showed that gender ideology, ideas about parenting and motherhood, career orientation, and family dynamics were associated differentially with the three types of egalitarian families, which reflected the different values that underlay the pursuit of each. The results also cast doubt on whether outsourcing is truly an egalitarian path. Outsourcing domestic labor may simply be a means for women to pursue careers without achieving real equality in families.

Title: Marriage and the Motherhood Wage Penalty Among African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites (Rebecca Glauber)

This study draws on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 5,929) to analyze the moderating effects of race and marriage on the motherhood wage penalty. Fixed-effects models reveal that for Hispanic women, motherhood is not associated with a wage penalty. For African Americans, only married mothers with more than two children pay a wage penalty. For Whites, all married mothers pay a wage penalty, as do all never-married mothers and divorced mothers with one or two children. These findings imply that racial differences in the motherhood wage penalty persist even for women with similar marital statuses, and they suggest that patterns of racial stratification shape women’s family experiences and labor market outcomes.

Title: Parental Childrearing Attitudes as Correlates of Father Involvement During Infancy (Bridget M. Gaertner, Tracy L. Spinrad, Nancy Eisenberg, and Karissa A. Greving)

Using daily diary data to document involvement with infants at 6 – 8 months of age (n = 142) and 6 months later (n = 95), we examined relations between reported childrearing attitudes and resident fathers’ relative (as compared to mothers’) involvement with children. Fathers’ authoritarian views related negatively to their relative involvement on weekdays, and this relation held over time for caregiving and playing activities. Mothers’ protective attitudes had concurrent negative associations with fathers’ relative weekend involvement. Findings suggest that fathers’ authoritarian and mothers’ protective attitudes relate to how parenting responsibilities are shared within families and may be detrimental to how much fathers become, or choose to become, directly involved in the care of their infants in comparison to mothers.

As Ann over at feministing says, it’s like the work/life all-stars over at the New School tomorrow. Just a reminder to come hear the preeminent thinkers on women, work, motherhood, and the so-called “opt-out revolution”:

WORKING MOTHERS: WHO’S OPTING OUT?
Tuesday, October 16, 7 p.m., $8 admission
The New School, New York City
Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

You’ve read the articles–and gotten angry at the debate. Are vast numbers of working mothers bolting the career track–or dreaming of doing so? Are elite women betraying feminism by staying home with their children? Or do the Opt-Out stories rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence–while shoving aside actual labor statistics and working families’ needs?

JOIN US as some of the KEY THINKERS and CRITICS of the “opt-out” storyline DISCUSS & DEBATE the real state of working motherhood in America today.

Moderated by E.J. Graff, senior researcher, Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University, collaborator on Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It. The panel includes Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It; Linda Hirshman, lawyer, professor emeritus Brandeis University and author of Get to Work; Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research, and co-author of Hardships in America and The Real Story of Working Families; and Ellen Bravo, author of Taking On the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families and Business and the Nation.

More info here. I’m totally planning to go…

I’d like to add to New York Times columnist David Brooks’ short list of “country’s best sociologists” in his op-ed today, “The Odyssey Years.” UPenn sociologist (and fellow Council on Contemporary Families member) Frank Furstenberg is the bomb on this one. And for a wider look at the latest thinking about the expanded transition to adulthood, check out what the good folks over at the Network on Transitions to Adulthood have to say about it all. I imagine you’ll find a more rounded view of the phenomenon–and not just Brooksian calls of “hook ups!” and “no more church!”

Are women less happy than men? New research says “yeah.” There’s an interesting, researchy thread on it all over at Language Log. And do check out Marci Alboher’s smart post over at her new New York Times blog, Shifting Careers. She quotes one of my favorite sociologists, Virginia Rutter. (Go Virginia!)

To kick off the week, here are two nuggets on one of my latest favorite subjects: men.

By way of the Christian Science Monitor last week comes news of a push to bring dads into kids’ school lives. Around the country, many African-American men are embracing a national movement called the Million Father March that encourages people of all races, but particularly black men, to be active in children’s educational lives. Created four years ago, the Million Father March is sponsored by The Black Star Project, a Chicago group working to build strong students, encourage parental involvement, and improve life in African-American and Latino communities.

Meanwhile, back at home, married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends, finds an international survey. But married women do more housework than their live-in counterparts. “Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples-even couples who see men and women as equal,” said co-researcher Shannon Davis, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia. For more on this, click here.

(Thanks to via the Council on Contemporary Families for the heads up.)

NEW OPPORTUNITY ON GIRL WITH PEN!: If you are a scholar who shares our mission of bridging feminist research and popular reality, is interested in blogging, and would like to try your hand at it, Girl with Pen is your place. Please contact me at deborahsiege@gmail.com for guidelines and parameters.

An amazing Stanford researcher who focuses on various issues around poverty, motherhood, and youth is going to be our first Guest Scholar/Blogger. She’ll be guest posting in this space very soon. She’s got the goods. Stay tuned!

I think a lot about the line between research, me-and-my-friends-search, and journalism. I read with interest the review of Wendy Shalit’s GGM in Sunday’s Washington Post. Reviewer Jennifer Howard seems to feel, as I did, dubious of Shalit’s method, yet somewhat sympathetic to the portrait she details. Writes Howard,

[Shalit] asks, “Why, in the year 2007, should women’s focus be completely on pleasing young men?” (Is it?) And she wants us to take heart (and I do, I do) from the growing number of young women whom she describes as “rebellious good girls.” These new avatars of girl power give abstinence talks to high-schoolers; they stage “Pure Fashion” shows in which fashion doesn’t just mean flesh; they become “girlcotters” who lobby retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch to pull tee-shirts emblazoned with sexist slogans. They don’t sleep with the first, or second, or third boy who comes along. They don’t become “people-pleasing bad girls” who will do anything, anything, to get a boy’s attention.

More power to them. Behind Shalit’s celebration of such girls, however, is some very dubious sociology.

Dubious indeed. And passing off anecdotal journalism as researched reality is particularly frustrating to the academically inclined in light of the fact that Shalit is onto something important. As the American Psychological Association noted in a May 2007 report, there’s a paucity of research on the sexualization of girls.

Jim Naughton over at Episcopal Cafe has an interesting take on it all:

Wendy Shalit has made a career as the sort of journalist whose trend stories fall apart on closer examination. But no matter, because by the time closer examination occurs, the stories have frequently started quite useful conversations. Her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, is a case in point. Unless one believes that the plural of anecdote is data, there is simply no evidence for a resurgence in modesty. But by the time a reader figures that out, he or she has skipped past the need for data, and leapt to the discussion of whether such a resurgence would be desireable. It is possible to regard Ms. Shalit simultaneously as a mediocre journalist and a useful contributor to contemporary conversation about morals.

And so I ask you, when does mediocre journalism constitute a useful contribution, and how do we draw that line?

Economist Heather Boushey weighs in at WIMN’s Voices Group Blog on that New York Times article from Friday titled “For Young Earners in Big City, a Gap in Women’s Favor.” She writes,

I haven’t seen the full study, but I’d guess that NYC must have fewer of the highly paid (white?) men and more of the poorly paid men (Black and Hispanic?), relative to highly paid women of any race. Is this progress? If it’s because there are more young, low-wage men of color, I’m not so sure that this is a sign of college women’s progress….So, is this a story about women with college degrees moving to the big city and makin’ it or is it about a change in the demographics of cities, with more, very low wage men of color? It may be a bit of both, but while the article implies that this data show that women with college degrees are outperforming their male colleagues, there is nothing in the statistics presented that indicates this is the case.

I’m guessing this counterview never makes it mainstream. Instead, how long do we think it will be before the backlashy chorus–women outpacing men!–chimes in? If that chorus shines the light on raising wages for urban low-wage men of color, terrific. But I’m not holding my breath.

Around the same time that GGM arrived in my mailbox the other week, I also received notice about these cool new resources:

1. The Barnard Center for Research on Women has assembled ephemera dating from 1970-1999 related to women’s sexual health–resource guides, newsletters, and pamphlets written for (and by) diverse groups of women. Addressing issues like safe sex, teenage pregnancy, lesbians, and AIDS, advancements in reproductive technologies, contraceptives, reproductive health, and forced sterilization, these are documents that have empowered women to make well-informed decisions about their own bodies since the dawning of feminism’s second-wave. The collection is online, here.

2. In May 2007, the American Psychological Association released the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, linking the phenomenon to some of the most common mental health problems in girls and women. You can read the executive summary here. (To request a copy, contact Leslie Cameron at lcameron@apa.org)

Pass it on 🙂