Barbara R. Bergmann

Justice, gender, and affirmative action

Demonstrates the fairness and necessity of affirmative action for women and minorities in the workplace

Long Leaves, Child Well-Being, and Gender Equality

Of the measures for resolving work—family conflict proposed by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers, government programs that provide or pay for nonparental child care would advance gender equality. However, paid parental leaves of six months for both parents, and the encouragement of part-time work, would retard it, and possibly reverse some of the advances toward gender equality that have been made in the home and the workplace. Female jobholders would increase their time at home to a much greater extent than would male jobholders, increasing the share women do of child care, cleaning, cooking, and laundry. In the workplace, employers would become more reluctant to place women in nonroutine jobs, where substitution of one worker for another is difficult. Finally, recent studies of the effect on young children of nonparental care are reviewed. They can be interpreted in more than one way, and the lessons drawn from them depend crucially on the opinions of those doing the analysis.

A Swedish-Style Welfare State or Basic Income: Which Should Have Priority?

State provision of “merit goods” and of narrowly targeted cash payments has higher priority than large universal cash grants. Analysis of the Swedish budget shows that advanced countries do not have the taxing capacity to do both at once. Other problems with cash payments schemes include the disincentive to work for pay, reducing taxpaying capacity, and retrograde effects on gender equality. After the achievement of a welfare state, rises over time in productivity may gradually open up room in the national budget for universal cash payments.

Sex Segregation in the Blue-collar Occupations: Women’s Choices or Unremedied Discrimination? Comment on England

or lack of ability to perform in those jobs. They do not put much emphasis on what those who might have been resisting womens entry?employers, male coworkers, unions?have been up to, and they feel no need to talk about remedies that might be brought to bear by government. Indeed, the implicit message is that no remedy is necessary because no harm has been done. The women got what they wanted, or rather, did not bother to get what they did not want. Paula England, judging by her recent diagnosis of the cause of continuing sex segregation in occupations that do not require college, seems to have signed up with that camp. Her explanation of the failure of women to enter blue-collar male-dominated occupations depends almost entirely on lack of motivation on the part of those women who might have entered. Her attention to any who might have opposed and prevented that entry is limited to a single sentence in a footnote (England 2010,163). Englands explana tion of the difference in outcomes in the professions and the blue-collar jobs is that women have wanted two things: (1) They wanted to do better than their mothers, and (2) they wanted to work in occupations that are historically female dominated because such occupations are thought to be particularly suited to womens essential nature and women feel they can express their femininity by working in them. The women who became physicians, lawyers, and business executives could not do both because, England tells us, their mothers already had the highest-class feminine-typed

The Effect of Wives' Labor Force Partcipation on Inequality in the Distribution of Family Income

We investigate the forces affecting the distribution of income by analyzing an unbalanced panel of information for 16 industrialized countries for the years 1966 through 1994. Income inequality is measured with the Gini coefficient of equivalent ...

The Current State of Economics: Needs Lots of Work

The study of the economy has not developed as have other sciences, in which direct observation and data collection by the scientists themselves play a large part. Rather than evidence, which is mostly scarce and indirect, it is political ideology that determines which side of any controversy any economist is likely to take. Two methodological habits of the economics profession have contributed to the poor state of development of economics as a science. One is theorizing based on simple made-up scenarios and assumptions about human cupidity and rationality. The other is the lack of a rigorous connection between the modeling of the macroeconomy and an empirically based description of the behavior of consumers, firms, banks, and individual markets. This article provides a brief discussion of the work of those economists doing systematic observation of economic actors and an assessment of whether their work will lead toward an economics that is empirically based.

Do Sports Really Make Money for the University

It s game time, and from the stands we hear the roar of tens of thousands of adoring fans of our colleges team, who have paid a handsome price for their tickets. Millions more at home are watching the game on TV, and the network sends our school huge sums for the privilege of beaming beer commercials to them. Perhaps the alumni, inspired by our teams valiant effort, will send large checks to our fund-raisers.

Subsidizing Child Care by Mothers at Home

Child care on a do-it-yourself basis by a parent would seem to be just as worthy of subsidization by government as nonparental care is. However, subsidies for care by a stay-at-home parent raise serious issues of equity between families with and without an adult at home full time. They also have the effect of reinforcing traditional gender roles, thus setting back the advances women have made in the workplace and society generally. Efficiency problems and administrative difficulties can also be cited. Long paid parental leaves have similar disadvantages associated with them.

Evaluating and Forecasting Progress in Racial Integration of Employment

Develops a model of the integration process and implemented it for broad occupational groups within manufacturing industries, using data from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the racial composition of employment. Simple mathematics of the integration process; Establishment of targets for racial integration; Projection of job vacancies. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)

Lone Mothers: What is to be done?

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum, ranging from those that seek to enable all lone mothers to take employment to those that aim to let mothers choose whether to take employment or care for their children themselves. Other policies discussed concern ways to value and support caregiving, improve the low-wage labor market for women, and provide a set of income supports that would both boost income and provide time to care for children.