Barbara Stanek Kilbourne

The effect of the sex composition of jobs on starting wages in an organization: Findings from the NLSY

We show that individuals in a job with a higher percentage of females earn lower starting wages with an employing organization. This holds true with controls for individuals’ human capital, job demands for skill or difficult working conditions, and detailed industry. We use a measure of sex composition that applies to detailed jobs: cells in a three-digit census occupation by three-digit census industry matrix. We use pooled panel data from the 19791987 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The unit of analysis is the spell-the time in which a person worked for one organization. The dependent variable is the first wage in the spell. We use models with fixed-effects to control for unmeasured, unchanging individual characteristics; we also show results from OLS and weighted models for comparison. The negative effect on wages of the percentage female in one’s job is robust across procedures for black women, white women, and white men. For black men the sign is always negative but the coefficient is often nonsignificant.

Feminist Critiques of the Separative Model of Self Implications for Rational Choice Theory

The article applies the radical-cultural feminist critique of the separative model of self to rational choice theories. Four assumptions of neoclassical economics-the “ideal type” of rational choice theories-are identified: selfishness; that interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible; that tastes are exogenous and unchanging; and that individuals are rational. For the most part, sociological versions of rational choice theories rely on these same assumptions. The article shows that a separative rather than a connected model of the self underlies each of these assumptions.

A measurement model for subjective marital solidarity: Invariance across time, gender, and life cycle stage

We use LISREL to assess the measurement properties of a unidimensional indicator of subjective marital solidarity based on four questionnaire items. A rigorously assessed measure containing more than one, yet relatively few items, is solely needed for research on marriage; such a measure can combine high reliability with low cost. Using 1971 and 1978 waves of the Quality of American Life data, we evaluate a measure based on four items: how well the respondent thinks his or her spouse understands him or her, how well the respondent understands his or her spouse, the amount of time spouses spend together in companionate activities, and reported marital satisfaction. With one correlated error term, these items are found to be a unidimensional indicator and to show substantial invariance across gender, survey year, and life cycle stage. We rejected inclusion of an item on how much the couple agrees on finances because this item created invariance by gender and survey year. This item apparently changed its meaning during the 1970s when many women became wage earners.