Helen A. Moore

Maintaining Credibility and Authority as an Instructor of Color in Diversity-Education Classrooms: A Qualitative Inquiry.

Interviews with instructors of color teaching required diversity-education courses at a predominately white university are qualitatively assessed. Major themes emerge on credibility and authority, including resistance to instructors’ outsider status, challenges to instructor integrity and course content, and derogation tactics. Countermeasures by instructors involve anticipatory teaching, depoliticizing the course, and disarming students. We discuss potential reforms to increase instructor retention.

Job Satisfaction and Women's Spheres of Work

Job satisfaction for women workers is traditionally researched from the job-gender model in which sex roles generate the research framework. Women employed in the labor market are viewed as responding primarily to the confines of sex roles, as opposed to the structural rewards and constraints of the labor market itself. We reexamined earlier studies that found no effect of the labor market on job satisfaction for women. Reanalysis of the 1972–1973 Quality of Employment national survey revealed significantly different levels of job satisfaction, which are in part structured by the characteristics of the labor market sectors in which women and men work. Women working in labor market sectors that are predominantly male or have a balanced proportion of male and female workers jobs have high job satisfaction. This job satisfaction is predicted almost exclusively by their perceptions of fewer income problems, flexibility of hours, and use of job skills. Factors related to maternity benefits and leaves are related only marginally to job satisfaction for women workers in either labor market sector. Women in predominantly female sectors of the labor market have similarly high job satisfaction scores, but these are related to a wider cluster of factors, including fewer perceived income problems, skills, and challenge factors, as well as the socioemotional rewards of their work. This pattern is most similar to males who work in predominantly male sectors. In contrast, males who work in predominantly female or gender-proportionate jobs have significantly lower job satisfaction scores, even after controling for income issues and other benefits. Labor market sectors and the rewards available within them are important structural dimensions of job satisfaction for women and men employees.

Separate Roads to FeminismSeparate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave, by RothBenita. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 271 pp.

effects of skin color on feelings about the self for African American men and women. The authors distinguish between respondents’ self esteem (feeling good about oneself) and self efficacy (a sense of one’s own competence). They find that skin color affects black men and women differently. For black men, skin color predicts perceived self efficacy but not self esteem. For black women the opposite is true, skin color predicts self esteem but not self efficacy. For both black men and women, light skin color is “important in self domains that are central to masculinity . . . and femininity.” Reading these two essays together suggest that the while being light skinned may hurt African American women’s sense of ethnic authenticity, their self esteem does not suffer much for it. As is noted throughout the book, normative evaluations of skin color are inextricably linked to histories of racial domination. So what happens in a period in which historical relations between race and class are in flux? One essay examines the relationship between skin tone, class, and racial attitudes at a time when the black middle class is expanding yet the class distribution among African Americans is increasingly polarized. Their findings support previous research that shows that lighter skin is related to higher class position. Skin color, however, does not seem to affect African American racial attitudes. Nor does skin color seem to be related to marital patterns among African Americans. Edwards, Carter-Tellison, and Herring argue that dark skinned African American women are as likely to marry as other black women, yet they tend to do so at a later age than lighter women. This is a surprising finding given widely held perceptions of the light skin privilege enjoyed by women, particularly in the dating and marriage market. More important, the authors find little evidence to support the suspicion that African Americans do (or are able to) trade light skin for class privilege in mate selection. The collection contains a few speculative essays on the implications of recent changes in racial formations in the United States. One is quite critical of recent elaborations of multiracial identity and what the authors dub “neo-mulattoes,” a provocative reference to people of mixed descent who, the authors claim, are akin to middlemen minorities whose emergence indicates an “evolution in racism.” This is a bold claim, yet the authors provide virtually no evidence to illustrate multiracials’ putative position as middlemen, either in a particular division of labor or in informal social relations, nor do they elaborate on what buffering functions they (presumably) perform. Moreover, the essay contains numerous factual errors regarding the 2000 Census race results. Such errors detract from the quality of the volume. So does the low quality of the book’s production. There are numerous spelling errors and the graphs and charts look as if they were printed on an old dot matrix printer and photocopied. Finally, in many of the articles there is a frustrating lack of explanation as to how they or the works they cite measure such malleable concepts as skin color and attractiveness. The book is somewhat repetitive in that most of the essays cover the same theoretical and empirical ground. Despite these caveats, Skin Deep provides a good general introduction to the literature on color and stratification.

65.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-521-82260-2.

Using labor market theory, we assess how we have constructed the teaching of required courses on diversity, with the potential splitting of the academy into distinctive labor markets. In-depth interviews with instructors of color and nonminorities who teach required diversity-education courses at a predominately white university are qualitatively assessed and describe the differences in the emotional labor attached to this segmented academic market. We identify specific dimensions of diversity teaching that attach to the job conditions of secondary labor markets, including the distortion of work loads and evidence of differential barriers in the emotional labor attached. These labor market conditions may structurally limit opportunities for career survival and advancement of minority and female instructors.

22.99 paper. ISBN: 0-521-52972-7.: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

A tournament model emphasizes variation in graduate department resources and environments and is compared to human capital models of graduate student success. Success is defined as participation of sociology students in professional activities and commitment to various professional aspirations. Data from a random survey of 25 sociology graduate programs provided student achievement indicators and department resource factors that are regressed on student success rates. Both the department resource factors and student background variables show substantial effects on success, and human capital factors are moderated by the opportunity structure of the graduate program itself. Women students have lower academic aspirations and racial/ethnic minority students participate in professional activities at lower rates, when student achievement factors are controlled. Academic and private-sector career goals and department resource effects on graduate student involvement are discussed.

Splitting the Academy: The Emotions of Intersectionality at Work

Nonverbal behaviors of Hispanic elementary school students and their peers were examined in a small-group cooperative task with a total of 202 subjects. Thirty-five randomly selected groups were videotaped in ten desegregated schools; each group was gender-homogeneous, with three Hispanic and three Anglo students. Analysis of the videotapes revealed that Hispanic females used less vertical and horizontal space than Anglo females, and were also less likely to verbally interrupt or physically intrude on other group members. They had similar rates of handling the group resource cards and were given similar leadership scores by multi-ethnic trained observers. Among males, Hispanics are significantly more likely to use vertical or upward movements and physical intrusions, while Anglos use more verbal interruptions. School and social status factors such as high- and low-equity desegregated school programs, ethnic and gender status, and school status variables of academic grades and English word knowledge had varying effects on teacher and peer ratings of leadership. High-equity schools garnered higher leadership scores for Hispanic females from both peers and teachers when all other nonverbal behaviors were controlled. This positive effect of the school on leadership ratings was evident only for males in teacher ratings. Hispanic females and their peers do reflect adult models of nonverbal behavior and leadership, and that leadership is enhanced in the perceptions of teachers and peers when they participate in a high-equity desegregated elementary school.

Human Capital, Social Integration, and Tournaments: A Test of Graduate Student Success Models

This article explores the “gender model” of job research instruments that are based on the Holland Occupational Classification scheme. The six Holland “environments” constitute a ubiquitous base for tests and measures in career counseling and research. Analysis of the 1973 Quality of Employment Survey provides evidence that the Holland Classification scheme replicates the segmentation of women into certain occupations that generate low pay, even after controlling for worker education, job tenure, and age. Comparable data for male wage earners show a significant segregation away from low-income, predominantly female occupations. Thus the Holland occupational scheme and the instruments based upon it are likely to contribute to the replication of sex-segregated labor markets. The findings suggest that current models of “work” and job counseling tests and techniques may reinforce, rather than eliminate, the economic disadvantages for women.

Leadership and Nonverbal Behaviors of Hispanic Females Across School Equity Environments

This research explores the work perceptions, both physical and mental, of women. The research finds that womens perceptions of waged and nonwaged labor differ greatly depending on the work environment. Perceptions of physical demands of waged labor are almost solely dependent on the type of paid labor women engage in. For homeworkers, perceptions of physical labor are influenced primarily by the number of hours invested in housework. The mental demands of waged and nonwaged labor are also perceived differently. Women in the waged economy report significantly higher mental demands than do homeworkers. This too varies across labor segments. The closest parallel between physical and mental demand perceptions is between homeworkers and women in the service sector of the waged economy. Overall the assumption that women perceive their work roles in the waged market and the home market similarly is negated.

What Sex Is Your Parachute? Interest Inventory/ Counseling Models and the Perpetuation of the Sex/Wage Segregation of the Labor Market

Sociologist Helen Moore discusses how capitalization of academic faculty roles raises questions of whether or not we have adequate theories to assess such changes. She argues that labor market fragmentation, racialization, and gendered faculty roles provide new frameworks for these theories.

The contexts of housework and the paid labor force: Women's perceptions of the demand levels of their work

Purpose: to explore the experiences of employees in a local bank merger in the United States and examine the concept of job exit queues. We introduce the concept of a job exit queue, which describes how workers position themselves or are positioned by employers to leave jobs and enter new jobs following the announcement of a corporate merger. Design/methodology/approach: Qualitative interviews with mid‐ level managers, technical specialists and low status workers during the sale and merger process were conducted and coded thematically. We explore: (1) how workers and managers describe the job search as an “opportunity” or as a recurring cycle of low‐wage, high‐turnover work and (2) how severance packages structure the job exit queue to meet corporate needs. Findings: The role of severance pay is pivotal in understanding women’s and men’s job relations to job exit queues. We conclude that employers create job exit queues, placing low status workers and mid‐level women managers with less formal education at a disadvantage in reemployment. Value: This paper contributes a new concept “job exit queue” to the research and theory on work place diversity, gender inequality, and queuing theories.