Andrew M. Penner

Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States1

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.

How social status shapes race

We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or identified previously. This is consistent with the view that race is not a fixed individual attribute, but rather a changeable marker of status.

Gender differences in extreme mathematical achievement: an international perspective on biological and social factors.

Genetic and other biological explanations have reemerged in recent scholarship on the underrepresentation of women in mathematics and the sciences. This study engages this debate by using international data—including math achievement scores from the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study and country‐level data from the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the World Values Survey, and the International Social Survey Programme—to demonstrate the importance of social factors and to estimate an upper bound for the impact of genetic factors. The author argues that international variation provides a valuable opportunity to present simple and powerful arguments for the continued importance of social factors. In addition, where previous research has, by and large, focused on differences in population means, this work examines gender differences throughout the distribution. The article shows that there is considerable variation in gender differences internationally, a finding not easily explained by strictly biological theories. Modeling the cross‐national variation in gender differences with country‐level predictors reveals that differences among high achievers are related to gender inequality in the labor market and differences in the overall status of men and women.

International Gender × Item Difficulty interactions in mathematics and science achievement tests

The author used data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Survey to examine whether Gender × Item Difficulty interactions like those in American mathematics exist in mathematics and science in 10 countries. For both mathematics and science, the author detected male advantages that were minimal on easy questions and increased as questions grew more difficult. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Engendering Racial Perceptions: An Intersectional Analysis of How Social Status Shapes Race

Intersectionality emphasizes that race, class, and gender distinctions are inextricably intertwined, but fully interrogating the co-constitution of these axes of stratification has proven difficult to implement in large-scale quantitative analyses. We address this gap by exploring gender differences in how social status shapes race in the United States. Building on previous research showing that changes in the racial classifications of others are influenced by social status, we use longitudinal data to examine how differences in social class position might affect racial classification differently for women and men. In doing so, we provide further support for the claim that race, class, and gender are not independent axes of stratification; rather they intersect, creating dynamic feedback loops that maintain the complex structure of social inequality in the United States.

From Motherhood Penalties to Husband Premia: The New Challenge for Gender Equality and Family Policy, Lessons from Norway

Given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality, the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality. We examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Norway, 1979–96, a period with extensive expansion of family policies. The motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996. Among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant. In 1979, the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty, but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties.

The Male Marital Wage Premium: Sorting Vs. Differential Pay

The authors examine whether male marital and parenthood premia arise due to differential pay by employers or from differential sorting of employees on occupations and establishments. They investigate these premia using matched employee-employer data from the period 1979–96 in Norway, a country with increased pressures on men to be more active in the family sphere and in which public policy has aimed at remaking the family institution. We find that the effect of marriage, and to a lesser extent of children, occurs mostly through sorting on occupations and occupation-establishment units. The role of differential pay from employers is marginal in explaining the marital and parenthood premia. Results assessing within-individual changes in wages suggest that about 80% of the marital premium is due to selection. The men who eventually marry and/or have children sort into the higher-paying occupations and occupation-establishment units even prior to marriage and parenthood.

Aiming High and Falling Short: California's Eighth-Grade Algebra-for-All Effort

The United States is in the midst of an effort to intensify middle school mathematics curricula by enrolling more 8th graders in Algebra. California is at the forefront of this effort, and in 2008, the state moved to make Algebra the accountability benchmark test for 8th-grade mathematics. This article takes advantage of this unevenly implemented policy to understand the effects of curricular intensification in middle school mathematics. Using district-level panel data from all California K–12 public school districts, we estimate the effects of increasing 8th-grade Algebra enrollment rates on a 10th-grade mathematics achievement measure. We find that enrolling more students in advanced courses has negative average effects on students’ achievement, driven by negative effects in large districts.

Do Women Managers Ameliorate Gender Differences in Wages? Evidence from a Large Grocery Retailer

Womens disadvantages in labor market outcomes are often attributed to the preponderance of men at or near the top of organizational hierarchies. While theories of homophily predict that women in positions of power ameliorate gender differences in wages for employees under them, status characteristics theory suggests that women face comparable disadvantages when working under men and women. Despite the existence of competing theoretical perspectives, there is little empirical work investigating the effect of women in positions of organizational power on gender inequality among their subordinates. This study makes an important contribution to this literature by using employment records from 3,707 employees at a large U.S.-based grocery retailer over nine years to examine how the gender gap in wages varies in establishments with male and female managers. Consistent with status characteristics theory, the authors find no significant differences between male and female managers in terms of gender-based wage inequality among their employees.

Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Fluidity in Racial Self-identification and Interviewer Classification

Research has demonstrated the fluidity of racial self-identification and interviewer classification, but how they influence each other over time has not been systematically explored using national, longitudinal data. A typical theoretical prediction, consistent with theories of a “looking-glass self,” is that people calibrate their self-identification in accordance with how they are perceived by others. We examine the degree to which this and other symbolic-interactionist processes account for the dynamics of racial categorization among young adults in the United States. To do so, we deploy a conceptual framework focused on three key dimensions of variation—concordance, stability, and influence—that capture both inconsistency in racial categorization at a given point in time and fluidity in either measure of race over time. We find that while the standard looking-glass self-perspective accounts for the majority of racial fluidity, a substantial proportion of changes in both measures of race remain unexplained by existing theory.