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Full-Text Articles in Inequality and Stratification

Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel Jan 2023

Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel

Data and Datasets

The following support document includes demographic data from my dissertation research, disaggregated to preserve the anonymity of respondents. It also includes two separate interview schedules for semi-structured interviews I conducted with trans women who were either currently parents (the first guide) or who want to be parents in the future (the second guide). My dissertation examines how race, class, and gender shape trans women’s parenting journeys. Trans women, and particularly trans women of color, experience high levels of discrimination across the contexts of employment, healthcare, and the legal system, yet remain virtually absent from contemporary research on family and parenting …


“Trash Talk” - Rethinking The Notion Of Waste, Shivaangi Salhotra Jan 2023

“Trash Talk” - Rethinking The Notion Of Waste, Shivaangi Salhotra

Student Showcase

In the twenty-first century, waste has become a ubiquitous problem. Images of things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have ceased to become jarring, and pictures of overflowing landfills and statistics about plastic in the ocean have become so commonplace that they are “memed”. Yet despite increasing awareness and changes in policy, global waste production and its deleterious effects continue to rise. Dominant narratives surrounding waste tend to focus on how individuals can properly dispose of their waste, which, while certainly important, is not the full story. It doesn't question why we produce so much waste in the first place, …


A New Way To Get Groceries? Ride-Hail Services And Navigating Outside Of Food Deserts, Kathryn Reynolds Oct 2022

A New Way To Get Groceries? Ride-Hail Services And Navigating Outside Of Food Deserts, Kathryn Reynolds

Masters Theses

Segregation has many negative consequences for marginalized populations, including poor health, increased poverty, low-quality housing, and limited education and employment opportunities. Scholars have recently recognized access to food as another piece of this “advanced marginality.” This study illuminates how lagging food and transportation infrastructures exacerbates these interlocking inequalities and whether new ride-hail technologies' promise that ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft will help affected populations access food stores with lower prices and higher food quality. As a descriptive understanding of the intersection between food, transportation, and racial residential segregation in Chicago, Illinois, this study analyzes two questions: (1) how often …


Organizational Variation In Federal Agencies’ Gender Pay Gaps, Karen M. Brummond Jun 2022

Organizational Variation In Federal Agencies’ Gender Pay Gaps, Karen M. Brummond

Doctoral Dissertations

Although previous research has identified differences in the gender pay gap by employment sector, existing research on the causes of employer variation in the gender pay gap, particularly in the U.S. Federal Government, is limited (Smith-Doerr et al. 2019; U.S. Government Accountability Office 2020). This dissertation fills that gap by exploring organizational characteristics contributing to varying inequality regimes (Acker 2006) and subsequent pay equity variation. Using a linked employer-employee administrative dataset covering over 2 million federal employees, I measured governmentwide and agency-level gender pay gaps and explored organizational characteristics that explain agency-level differences. I found a governmentwide gross gender pay …


Why Does Equality Matter Anyway? How Indifference To Inequality Relates To U.S.-Born White, Latino, And Black Americans' Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy, Trisha A. Dehrone May 2022

Why Does Equality Matter Anyway? How Indifference To Inequality Relates To U.S.-Born White, Latino, And Black Americans' Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy, Trisha A. Dehrone

Masters Theses

Research on attitudes towards immigration policies typically considers the economic and cultural threats that compel many Americans to favor exclusionary policies that curb immigration. Less is understood about how indifference to inequality shapes Americans’ attitudes towards immigration policies—that is, how ‘not caring’ about the unequal conditions faced by immigrants likely has detrimental consequences for their safety and wellbeing. The present research examines indifference to inequality as a predictor for policies that impact opportunities for immigrants to come to the U.S., and who are otherwise undocumented and/or at great risk for exploitation. Using survey data from the American National Election Studies …


American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein Oct 2021

American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein

Doctoral Dissertations

Why has economic inequality in the U.S. continued to grow despite widespread and strong public opinion in favor of reducing it? In this dissertation, I argue that Americans are upset by current levels of economic inequality and support downward redistribution as a means to reduce it. At the same time, many have hesitations about or resistance to the mechanisms through which such redistribution might be carried out. This resistance, I found, varied across respondents’ class and race (and, to some extent, gender). Across groups, respondents’ desires for change were stymied by a social and political context of differential visibility that …


Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro Oct 2021

Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro

Doctoral Dissertations

Structural racism has taken many forms throughout American history and to this day continues to drive social, economic, and health inequalities. Mass incarceration is a modern tool of social marginalization with well documented and deep-rooted racial inequalities. Research has continually shown that mass incarceration negatively impacts the health of disadvantaged communities. Even police stops, the most common and mundane form of criminal justice contact has been linked with deleterious health outcomes at the individual and community level. In this dissertation, I identify specific social and biological mechanisms connecting encounters with the police and health outcomes. In the first chapter, I …


Homophily, Gender-Typed Behavior, And Cultural Contexts In Adolescent Friendship Segregation, Chen-Shuo Hong Jul 2021

Homophily, Gender-Typed Behavior, And Cultural Contexts In Adolescent Friendship Segregation, Chen-Shuo Hong

Masters Theses

It is well-documented that adolescents tend to befriend those who share demographic characteristics like gender. Less clear is how culture connects to these homogeneous relationships. This study examines the effects of gender-typed behavior on adolescent friendships at dyadic and school levels. The friendship network data are drawn from the well-known wave 1 ‘saturation school’ component of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. I show that adolescents tend to befriend those who share similar gender-typed behavior, above and beyond simple demographic affiliation. Also, when students in particular schools exhibit more heterogeneous gender-typed behavior, the expression of gender-typed behavior …


The Changing Nature Of Inequality In A Time Of Institutional Transformation: An Examination Of Between-Workplace And Between-Industry Income Inequality In A Set Of Thirteen High-Income Countries, Anthony Rainey Jun 2021

The Changing Nature Of Inequality In A Time Of Institutional Transformation: An Examination Of Between-Workplace And Between-Industry Income Inequality In A Set Of Thirteen High-Income Countries, Anthony Rainey

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a three paper dissertation examining between-workplace and between-industry income inequality and their relations with changing labor market institutions and economic structures since roughly the early the 1990s. All three papers use large scale administrative linked employer-employee panel data (LEEP) for multiple years (roughly, 1993-2013) for a set of countries that span North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In the first chapter, I examine country differences in levels of between-workplace income inequality. Countries strongly vary in levels of between-workplace inequality. On the high end for example, over 60% of Germany’s income inequality occurs between workplaces. On …


Job Mobility, Gender Composition, And Wage Growth, Youngjoon Bae Oct 2019

Job Mobility, Gender Composition, And Wage Growth, Youngjoon Bae

Masters Theses

To explain the gender wage growth gap, sociologists tend to focus on gender segregation among/within jobs whereas economists put emphasis on individual job mobility. This study adopted a concept combining both segregation and mobility. The concept helps to take the gender segregation before and after job mobility into account to strictly measure the mechanisms of wage growth. For analysis, this study used 6-year personnel data of a firm, which allows researchers to track employees’ job mobility, wages, and job information at the most accurate level. The concept of combining segregation and mobility was operated through the gender composition of jobs …


Dropping The Invisibility Cloak: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Sense Of Belonging And Place Identity Among Rural, First Generation, Low Income College Students From Appalachian Kentucky, Brenda Abbott Jul 2019

Dropping The Invisibility Cloak: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Sense Of Belonging And Place Identity Among Rural, First Generation, Low Income College Students From Appalachian Kentucky, Brenda Abbott

Doctoral Dissertations

In a country that once was 95% rural in the late 1700s, only 19.3% of the population of the United States now live in rural areas (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). The shift in population from rural to urban areas is not simply demographic; it imbues a shift in who and what matters. Only 13.6% of adults over 25 in Appalachian Kentucky have earned bachelor's degrees, 18.9% below the national average (Appalachian Regional Commission, 2016). This phenomenological study seeks to understand how rural, first generation, low income college students from Appalachian Kentucky experience a sense of belonging in their first year …


Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim Jul 2019

Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the connections between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. While previous research shows that motherhood lowers women’s earnings, few studies explore how wage penalties for motherhood change over women’s lives. Moreover, most research examines only the baby boomer cohort; consequentially, little is known about how millennials experience this wage penalty and how such burdens of motherhood have changed across cohorts. This study investigates whether and how the motherhood wage penalty changes both across women’s life course and cohorts with these questions: (1) Does the motherhood penalty change over women’s lives? (2) What are …


Stigma In Class: Mental Illness, Social Status, And Tokenism In Elite College Culture, Katie R. Billings Jul 2019

Stigma In Class: Mental Illness, Social Status, And Tokenism In Elite College Culture, Katie R. Billings

Masters Theses

The majority of mental illness on college campuses remains untreated, and mental illness stigma is the most cited explanation for not seeking mental health treatment. Working-class college students are not only at greater risk of mental illness, but also are less likely to seek mental health treatment and hold more stigmatized views toward people with mental illness compared to affluent college students. Research on college culture suggests that elite college contexts may be associated with greater stigmatization of mental illness. This study bridges the social status and college culture literatures by asking—does social status and college context together predict students’ …


Three Essays On Network Dynamics And Liminality, Diego F. Leal Nov 2018

Three Essays On Network Dynamics And Liminality, Diego F. Leal

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the emergence and evolution of social networks by paying particular attention to the spanning of cultural boundaries that segregate actors in the context of specific societies. In particular, I use systems science methods to study the bridging of cultural holes in small and relatively dense artificial societies, as well as in an American high school. I also study the significance of local triadic configurations in giving rise to the highly hierarchical system of aggregate-level migration flows in place in the Americas during the late 20th century. I use the concept of liminality as a way to …


The Military And Incarceration: Hidden Mechanisms Of Racial Inequality In The U.S. Labor Market, 1980-2010., Joohee Han Oct 2018

The Military And Incarceration: Hidden Mechanisms Of Racial Inequality In The U.S. Labor Market, 1980-2010., Joohee Han

Doctoral Dissertations

U.S. incarceration since the 1980s is increasingly concentrated among black men, reinforcing their racial inequality in the labor market. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the military, which provided employment, income and educational opportunities to black men disproportionately, has downsized at the same time during this same period. Mass incarceration has rarely been studied in relation to military downsizing. I seek to understand how prison and the military, two crucial but often-neglected labor market institutions, have jointly influenced racial inequality in the labor market over time along with other major institutions such as higher education and …


Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson Oct 2018

Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson

Doctoral Dissertations

Sociologists have always acknowledged the complexity of gender, but despite acknowledging this complexity, much sociological research does not put this knowledge into practice; indeed, a great deal of research focuses on distinctions between men and women with regard to some other variable, reinforcing a narrow and binary understanding of gender. This tendency has two limitations: (1) it does not recognize the variability in men's and women's expression of masculinity and femininity; and (2) it does not recognize gender identities other than those of cisgender man and cisgender woman (i.e., transgender people). This study mitigates this limitation through telling a story …


Unequally Adrift: How Social Class And Institutional Context Shape College Academic Experiences, Mary Scherer Jul 2018

Unequally Adrift: How Social Class And Institutional Context Shape College Academic Experiences, Mary Scherer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how class background and institutional context shape students’ experiences of faculty mentorship, academic success strategies, and the relationship of college values and academic decision-making. In this comparative study, I draw from 68 interviews with working- and upper-middle-class students at a regional and flagship university to identify how institutional variation matters across moderately-selective public universities, the kind where the majority of four-year college students matriculate. Mentorship, often informal, is a resource most easily accessed by students with preexisting cultural capital—specifically, the knowledge that mentoring relationships are available and advantageous, and the skills for cross-status interaction with professors. …


Rethinking The Creative Economy: The Diverse Economies Of Artists And Artisans In Rural Massachusetts, Abby Irene Templer Rodrigues Mar 2018

Rethinking The Creative Economy: The Diverse Economies Of Artists And Artisans In Rural Massachusetts, Abby Irene Templer Rodrigues

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the contours of artistic economic activity through participatory action research conducted with artists and artisans in the Greater Franklin County, Massachusetts. The creative economy has drawn significant attention over the past ten years as a principle economic sector that can stimulate the redevelopment of post-industrial cities. However, dominant creativity–based development strategies tend to cater to the tastes of an economically privileged, and implicitly white, “creative class,’ leading to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically …


Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington Nov 2017

Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington

Doctoral Dissertations

In Portugal, high levels of women’s labor force participation, rapidly aging populations, along with the retrenchment of welfare states, has led to the expansion of publicly subsidized private care work such as home care. Much of this caring work is carried out by low-paid citizen and migrant women from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an independent archipelago nation off the West African coast. At the same time, Portugal is a “post-colonial” setting, with comparatively progressive policies around family settlement for migrants, and where the language of “legal race” does not exist. Taking the lived experiences of Cape Verdean …


The Role Of Social Class And Construal Level In Social Justice And Fairness Beliefs, Prerana Bharadwaj Jul 2017

The Role Of Social Class And Construal Level In Social Justice And Fairness Beliefs, Prerana Bharadwaj

Doctoral Dissertations

What predicts support for the redistribution of resources to improve socioeconomic inequality? Social class, or the subjective perception of one’s resources and position in relation to others in a larger society, was examined as one relevant characteristic. Across four experiments, social class as subjective social status was manipulated (two) and measured (all four), and found to have a significant negative effect on support for the moral values of group-based equality (social justice) but not on individual deservingness (fairness) separate from political identity and other demographic characteristics. This effect was seen on stated principles but particularly relevant in approval ratings of …


Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott Mar 2017

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …


Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos Nov 2016

Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos

Doctoral Dissertations

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …


The Professionalization Of Male Circumcision In Turkey, Oyman Basaran Nov 2016

The Professionalization Of Male Circumcision In Turkey, Oyman Basaran

Doctoral Dissertations

Male circumcision is seen as a cultural and religious event and a rite of passage for boys in Turkey. It is surrounded by public rituals and as there is no equivalent rite of passage for girl children, circumcision signifies a crucial marker of not only religious but also gender differentiation between boys and girls. Circumcision is a men’s affair and performing circumcision bestows economic privilege and social status on circumcisers (sünnetçi). In this dissertation, I trace the practical and discursive changes in the experience of male circumcision from the perspectives of practitioners. I argue that while circumcision was always a …


The Radicalism Plateau: Working Class Transformation, Housing Foreclosure And The Hegemony Of The American Dream, Aaron C. Foote Nov 2016

The Radicalism Plateau: Working Class Transformation, Housing Foreclosure And The Hegemony Of The American Dream, Aaron C. Foote

Masters Theses

Much research has been done to explain how the late 2000s housing bubble burst, but little work has been done to see how working-class people responded and are responding to the issue of foreclosure in their communities. City Resistance, a grassroots community organization, transforms working class people from passive actors going through foreclosure to militant activists seeking to stay in their homes. My two-year ethnographic study chronicles the meetings, civil disobedience, and everyday lives of an organization of 300+ members in a medium sized, declining city, in the Northeast. It seeks to understand the multiple processes by which primarily Black …


Gender Inequality: Nonbinary Transgender People In The Workplace, Skylar Davidson Mar 2016

Gender Inequality: Nonbinary Transgender People In The Workplace, Skylar Davidson

Masters Theses

Most research on employment gender inequality focuses on differences between men and women, reinforcing a binary conception of gender. This study uses the National Transgender Discrimination Survey to evaluate the employment outcomes of nonbinary transgender people (those who identify as a gender other than man or woman). The results of this study suggest that being out as a nonbinary transgender person negatively affects nonbinary transgender people's employment outcomes. Though all transgender people have higher unemployment rates than the general population, outness has different effects on nonbinary transgender people based on sex assigned at birth, with those assigned male at birth …


Gender Inequality: Nonbinary Transgender People In The Workplace, Skylar Davidson Jan 2016

Gender Inequality: Nonbinary Transgender People In The Workplace, Skylar Davidson

Sociology Department Graduate Student Publication Series

This study uses the National Transgender Discrimination Survey to evaluate the employment outcomes of nonbinary transgender people (those who identify as a gender other than man or woman). Regression analyses indicate that being out as a nonbinary transgender person has different effects on nonbinary transgender people based on sex assigned at birth, with those assigned male at birth tending to be discriminated against in hiring but those assigned female at birth more likely to experience differential treatment once hired. Transgender women tend to have worse employment experiences than nonbinary transgender people and transgender men, the latter two tending to have …


Bringing The Household Back In: Family Wage Gaps And The Intersection Of Gender, Race, And Class In The Household Context., Melissa J. Hodges Aug 2015

Bringing The Household Back In: Family Wage Gaps And The Intersection Of Gender, Race, And Class In The Household Context., Melissa J. Hodges

Doctoral Dissertations

Using the 1980- 2008 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this dissertation examines how parenthood exacerbates gender wage inequality within married, heterosexual households and across families stratified by race and social class. The majority of research on motherhood penalties and fatherhood premiums investigates how individual men and women’s earnings change after the arrival of children, yet it is unclear how parental bonuses and penalties accrue within coupled households. Although studies investigating child effects on individuals’ wages draw on theoretical explanations that rely on the joint decision-making of couples, empirical analysis rarely situates the effects of children on …


Cohort And Gender Differences And The Marriage Wage Premium: Findings From The Nlsy79 And The Nlsy97, Misun Lim Mar 2015

Cohort And Gender Differences And The Marriage Wage Premium: Findings From The Nlsy79 And The Nlsy97, Misun Lim

Masters Theses

Past research has established a marital wage premium among men, and more recently, among women of the baby boom generation. It is unknown whether: 1) the marriage premium holds among more recent cohorts of men and women, 2) it differs by intensity of work hours among husbands and wives, and 3) cohabiters receive wage bonuses. Using fixed-effects models and data from the 1979-1989 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the 1997-2010 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), this paper compares cohort differences in the gendered marriage premium. While both women and men receive …


On Belonging, Difference And Whiteness: Italy's Problem With Immigration, Flavia Stanley Mar 2015

On Belonging, Difference And Whiteness: Italy's Problem With Immigration, Flavia Stanley

Doctoral Dissertations

In the past thirty years, Italy has transitioned from a nation defined in part by a history of emigration, to a nation where immigration and attendant issues surrounding increased cultural and ethno-racial diversity dominates as a national concern. The research presented in this dissertation illustrates the ways in which, within this context, immigration is promoted and perceived unequivocally as a “problem” and a “threat.” However, rather than discussing Italy’s immigration problem, the issue here is recast as Italy’s problem with immigration. Despite deep regional differences and identities that continue to exist, increased immigration and the permanent settlement of …


Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann Nov 2014

Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann

Doctoral Dissertations

Mothers have contributed disproportionately to women’s rising employment rates in the United States, and contemporary fathers spend more time caring for children compared to previous generations of men. Still, parenthood continues to shape women’s and men’s employment participation patterns in profoundly gendered ways. Changes and continuities in aggregate labor market participation patterns raise questions with regard to the variation in mothers’ and fathers’ employment participation, and in the ways in which different-sex couples organize engagement in paid work after they become parents. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this dissertation examine the variation in new parents’ long-term …