Mary Gatta

High-Touch and Here-to-Stay: Future Skills Demands in US Low Wage Service Occupations

Interactive service occupations, requiring face-to-face contact, are rapidly growing in the US as they are typically not susceptible to larger trends of off-shoring and computerization. Yet conventional paradigms of understanding the nature of that work, and in particular the skill demands, are often ill equipped to deal with the ‘interactive’ aspects of these gendered and racialized occupations. As a result, discussions of lower-end service occupations have typically grouped together a variety of jobs that require little or no higher education, without examining the actual skill content and job requirements of these occupations. In this article we delve more deeply into the rapidly growing non-professional service occupations in the US and the level of skills these jobs require, with the intention of creating a framework that will reorient future sociological research in this area.

Balancing without a net in academia: integrating family and work lives

This paper presents qualitative data from a gender equity study at a Carnegie I research institution. In this paper we draw on interview data to explore the ways that our sample of senior women and men dealt with family‐work conflicts at different points in their careers. We offer stories of women (and a few men), who struggled with family‐work conflicts, and we provide these in their own voices. After first presenting our findings we demonstrate how they can be used to develop strategies to address family‐work conflicts and evaluate current programs. We first explore how women and men defined the problem of family‐work integration. We then review some of the main coping strategies they used at different points in their careers, and then explore the consequences that women experienced as a result of the university’s lack of support. We conclude by pointing to areas where in stitutionally supported programs and policies may be effective in addressing the balance between family and work.

Introduction: The Need for Gender-Targeted Workforce Development Initiatives

The United States entered one of its deepest recessions in the late 2000s—workers faced jobs that were not coming back, long-term unemployment, and increased economic insecurity. These severe problems emphasize the need for government workforce initiatives. Yet investments in comprehensive employment and training policies have declined in real terms by nearly 70 percent since 1979. This article discusses this evolution, with a focus on the persistence of gender segmentation that workforce training initiatives seem to reinforce. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the four articles that complete this special issue.

The “new” policy partnership

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on “the ‘new’ policy partnership”.Design/methodology/approach – The paper highlights the significance of policy‐academic partnerships and outlines the papers included in this issue.Findings – It is important to form and maintain partnerships and collaborations with new nontraditional stakeholders. One place where this is evident is in academia.Originality/value – The special issue includes original articles that address innovative ways in which researchers and policy makers can collaborate to move policy agendas forward.