Katherine Y. Lin

Bad Jobs, Bad Health? How Work and Working Conditions Contribute to Health Disparities:

In this review, we touch on a broad array of ways that work is linked to health and health disparities for individuals and societies. First focusing on the health of individuals, we discuss the health differences between those who do and do not work for pay, and review key positive and negative exposures that can generate health disparities among the employed. These include both psychosocial factors like the benefits of a high-status job or the burden of perceived job insecurity, as well as physical exposures to dangerous working conditions like asbestos or rotating shift work. We also provide a discussion of the ways differential exposure to these aspects of work contributes to social disparities in health within and across generations. Analytic complexities in assessing the link between work and health for individuals, such as health selection, are also discussed. We then touch on several contextual-level associations between work and the health of populations, discussing the importance of the occupational structure in a given society, the policy environment that prevails there, and the oscillations of the macroeconomy for generating societal disparities in health. We close with a discussion of four areas and associated recommendations that draw on this corpus of knowledge but would push the research on work, health, and inequality toward even greater scholarly and policy relevance.

Working, parenting and work-home spillover: Gender differences in the work-home interface across the life course

In this study, we bring a life course approach to work-family research and ask how work-home spillover changes as men and women move through different parenting stages. We use two waves of the Mid-Life in the United States Study (MIDUS I and II, 1996-2004, N=1,319) and estimate change-score models to document the association between five parenting transitions (becoming a parent, starting to parent a school-aged child, an adolescent, young adult, or adult child) and changes in both positive and negative work-to-home (WHS) and home-to-work (HWS) spillover, testing for gender differences in these associations. We find that moving through parenting stages is related to within-person changes in reports of work-home spillover, and that mothers and fathers encounter changes in spillover at different points in the life course. Our findings detail how transitions through parenthood produce a gendered life course, and speaks to the need for policies to support working parents throughout the life course.

Relatos diferenciados de experiencias con discriminación en Brasil y Estados Unidos

Ha poucos estudos comparativos entre paises sobre a experiencia com a discriminacao percebida, e poucos examinaram a maneira pela qual as identidades interseccionais configuram a percepcao do tratamento discriminatorio nas diferentes sociedades. Com base em dados do ELSA-Brasil (um estudo de funcionarios publicos brasileiros) e do Americans’ Changing Lives Study (em uma amostra nacional representativa de adultos americanos), os autores comparam os relatos de grupos diferentes em relacao a discriminacao sofrida ao longo da vida, de acordo com raca e genero, em cada sociedade. O estudo tambem investiga se o grau de escolaridade explica as diferencas entre grupos, ou se as diferencas dentro do mesmo grupo variam de acordo com a escolaridade. Os resultados mostram uma percepcao maior de discriminacao entre individuos negros em ambos os paises, principalmente homens negros, comparado com brancos, alem de menos relatos de discriminacao sofrida por mulheres brancas comparado com homens brancos. No Brasil, mulheres e homens pardos relataram maiores niveis de discriminacao em comparacao com homens brancos. Com excecao de homens brancos, para todos os grupos analisados por raca e genero, os relatos de discriminacao foram mais frequentes entre os mais escolarizados, embora o ajuste por diferencas de escolaridade dentro dos grupos nao explicasse as diferencas entre grupos. No Brasil, encontramos as maiores disparidades raciais entre individuos com nivel superior, enquanto nos Estados Unidos, os homens negros relatavam mais discriminacao do que os homens brancos, independentemente de grau de escolaridade. Os resultados revelam semelhancas gerais entre os dois paises, apesar de importantes diferencas historicas. A abordagem interseccional contribuiu para a identificacao dessas semelhancas e de algumas diferencas nas experiencias com a discriminacao. Os achados do estudo tem implicacoes importantes para a vigilância social e sanitaria, assim como, para intervencoes voltadas ao enfrentamento das consequencias danosas da discriminacao.

From pioneers to professionals.

Bioethics has made remarkable progress as a scholarly and applied field. A mere fledgling in the 1960s, it is now firmly established in hospitals, medical schools, and government agencies and boasts a number of professional associations and a handsome collection of journals. The rapid rise and success of bioethics presents an unrivaled opportunity to observe a ‘‘profession in process.’’ How did bioethics succeed in staking its claim in the fields of medicine and science? How has bioethics solved—or attempted to solve—the problem of separating the sheep (bona fide bioethicists) from the goats (pretenders to the title)? How is the next generation of bioethicists being recruited and educated? This last question is our focus. In the 1970s and 1980s there was no defined pathway to becoming a bioethicist. People entered the field from a variety of disciplines and professions and brought what they knew to the work of bioethics. But the field is now more organized, complete with undergraduate minors and majors—and even high school courses—in bioethics, master’s degrees and doctoral programs, and professional associations. Like other new occupations, bioethics is moving from a collection of ‘‘pioneers’’—those who created the field out of nothing—to a field populated by ‘‘professionals’’ who chose the field from among other possible opportunities for employment. The shift from a field populated by bioethics pioneers to a field made up of bioethics professionals is more than just a demographic or sociological curiosity. This change has significant implications for the definition of bioethics and the nature of its work. As bioethics professionalizes, recruits to the occupation come with a new set of motivations and new understandings of what bioethics contributes to medicine and science. The work of bioethics—invented on the fly by the pioneers—becomes, in the words of Max Weber, ‘‘routinized.’’ The path from pioneer to professional is inevitable; in order to survive in the larger division of labor, a new occupation must mark its boundaries and stake its claim to unique expertise. As it moves down this path, bioethics—once steadfastly an interdisciplinary enterprise—is now tilting toward becoming a discipline of its own. Not all members of the pioneer generation are happy with this turn of events. At professional meetings and on LISTSERVs, the founding mothers and fathers of bioethics discuss the promise and peril of plans for certification, the changing content of bioethics work, and what a bioethicist must know and do to be identified as a bioethicist. Notable in this regard is the widely circulated (unpublished) response of Arthur Caplan to Ezekiel Emanuel’s