Sarah Damaske

The Relationships between Mothers' Work Pathways and Physical and Mental Health.

We contribute to research on the relationships between gender, work, and health by using longitudinal, theoretically driven models of mothers’ diverse work pathways and adjusting for unequal selection into these pathways. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth-1979 (N = 2,540), we find full-time, continuous employment following a first birth is associated with significantly better health at age 40 than part-time work, paid work interrupted by unemployment, and unpaid work in the home. Part-time workers with little unemployment report significantly better health at age 40 than mothers experiencing persistent unemployment. These relationships remain after accounting for the unequal selection of more advantaged mothers into full-time, continuous employment, suggesting full-time workers benefit from cumulating advantages across the life course and reiterating the need to disentangle health benefits associated with work from those associated with pre-pregnancy characteristics.

A “Major Career Woman”? How Women Develop Early Expectations about Work

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women randomly sampled from New York City, I ask: how do women develop expectations about their future workforce participation? Using an intersectional approach, I find that women’s expectations about workforce participation stem from gendered, classed, and raced ideas of who works full-time. Socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexuality influenced early expectations about work and the process through which these expectations developed. Women from white and Latino working-class families were evenly divided in their expectations about their future workforce participation, while the vast majority of white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class women expected to work continually as adults. Unlike their working-class white and Hispanic peers, all of the working-class Black respondents developed expectations that they would work continuously as adults. The intersections of race, class, and gender play a central role in shaping women’s expectations about their participation in paid work.

Families as They Really Are

Prior studies have documented how deindustrialization poses a bleak outlook for both individuals and their communities: longterm unemployment, elevated poverty, and the erosion of once vital areas. What can people do to mitigate the effects of declining industries that once employed several generations of workers? More importantly, how can collective action help transform society into realizing diverse interests, rather than just a few, narrowly defined interests? Jeremy Brecher’s Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley shares a much-needed account of how such efforts unfold in Western Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, a community known for its brass manufacturing since the 1800s. An historian by training, documentarymaker, and resident of Naugatuck Valley for three decades, Brecher conducted over 100 interviews with leaders, staff, and locals for this book. He also conducted archival research and attended over 100 meetings as a participant-observer. The interviews provide the bulk of the data for his case studies of collective action regarding job preservation, job creation, and the construction of affordable housing via more democratic forms of organization. The challenges confronting Naugatuck Valley are depressingly familiar even to the most vibrant of communities and cities: multinational companies take over locallyowned factories and treat these as commodities, rather than as sources of livelihoods and identities, job prospects shift to the poorly-compensated service sector, and longtime renters face rising housing costs as developers deplete the affordable housing stock by converting rental units into condominiums. On the other hand, an influx of new residents poses another challenge that could potentially reinvigorate the community: how to integrate newcomers and incorporate their interests. Rather than relying upon the state or the market to address these issues, Naugatuck Valley residents organized to pursue mutual interests via collectivities run by the community, employees, or residents. Brecher posits that three conditions are necessary for such ‘‘local action’’ and ‘‘democratic economic vision’’—‘‘grassroots organization, democratically controlled enterprises, and supportive public policies’’ (p. xxi). Brecher first recounts how existing organizations, with the help of Ken Gladstone, a community organizer trained in Alinskyite organizing, formed the Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP) in the 1980s. Rather than focusing on one particular project, this ‘‘community alliance’’ has promoted grassroots organizing to revitalize their area. The NVP both formed new ties and built upon existing network ties in the workplace and small businesses, unions, churches and other organizations; this collective identified existing problems and possible solutions. Brecher describes how Gladstone deploys Alinskyite techniques for the unfamiliar ends of economic development—in this community, creating jobs or housing through corporations owned and run by residents. The Alinskyite techniques involve listening to locals to identify issues, selecting possible leaders, and then organizing collectivities to address these issues. These techniques use the power of organized groups—in these cases, residents, and workers—who otherwise have difficulties as individuals eliciting accountability to their interests from the state or their workplaces. The resulting redefined relations help democratize a political process that previously only catered to elite interests. To support his claims, Brecher delves into several case studies to illuminate the challenges, setbacks, and rewards of selforganizing. The first case illustrates how employees need support in honing their selfmanaging skills, but also shares individuals’

Male Scientists' Competing Devotions to Work and Family: Changing Norms in a Male-Dominated Profession

Using in-depth interviews with 74 men across different ranks in biology and physics at prestigious U.S. universities, the authors ask to what extent changing norms of fatherhood and a flexible workplace affect men working in a highly male-dominated profession and what variation exists in family forms. The authors conceptualize four typologies of men: those forgoing children, egalitarian partners, neotraditional dual earners, and traditional breadwinners. Findings suggest male scientists hold strong work devotions, yet a growing number seek egalitarian relationships, which they frame as reducing their devotion to work. The majority of men find the all-consuming nature of academic science conflicts with changing fatherhood norms.

Women’s Work Pathways Across the Life Course

Despite numerous changes in women’s employment in the latter half of the twentieth century, women’s employment continues to be uneven and stalled. Drawing from data on women’s weekly work hours in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we identify significant inequality in women’s labor force experiences across adulthood. We find two pathways of stable full-time work for women, three pathways of part-time employment, and a pathway of unpaid labor. A majority of women follow one of the two full-time work pathways, while fewer than 10 % follow a pathway of unpaid labor. Our findings provide evidence of the lasting influence of work–family conflict and early socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages on women’s work pathways. Indeed, race, poverty, educational attainment, and early family characteristics significantly shaped women’s work careers. Work–family opportunities and constraints also were related to women’s work hours, as were a woman’s gendered beliefs and expectations. We conclude that women’s employment pathways are a product of both their resources and changing social environment as well as individual agency. Significantly, we point to social stratification, gender ideologies, and work–family constraints, all working in concert, as key explanations for how women are “tracked” onto work pathways from an early age.

Has work replaced home as a haven? Re-examining Arlie Hochschild's Time Bind proposition with objective stress data

Using innovative data with objective and subjective measures of stress collected from 122 employed men and women, this paper tests the thesis of the Time Bind by asking whether people report lower stress levels at work than at home. The study finds consistent support for the Time Bind hypothesis when examining objective stress data: when participants were at work they had lower values of the stress hormone cortisol than when they were at home. Two variables moderated this association - income and children at home - such that the work as haven effect was stronger for those with lower incomes and no children living at home. Participants also, however, consistently reported higher subjective stress levels on work days than on non-work days, which is in direct contrast to the Time Bind hypothesis. Although our overall findings support Hochschilds hypothesis that stress levels are lower at work, it appears that combining work and home increases peoples subjective experience of daily stress.

Stress at work: Differential experiences of high versus low SES workers.

This paper asks whether workers with higher socioeconomic status (SES) experience different levels of stress at work than workers with lower SES and, if so, what might explain these differences. We collected innovative assessments of immediate objective and subjective measures of stress at multiple time points across consecutive days from 122 employed men and women. We find that in comparison to higher SES individuals, those with lower SES reported greater happiness at work, less self-reported stress, and less perceived stress; cortisol, a biological marker of stress, was unrelated to SES. Workers momentary perceptions of the workplace were predicted by SES, with higher SES individuals more commonly reporting feeling unable to meet work demands, fewer work resources, and less positive work appraisals. In turn, perceptions of the workplace had a generally consistent and robust effect on positive mood, subjective stress, and cortisol.

Single mother families and employment, race, and poverty in changing economic times ☆

Using American Community Survey data from 2001, 2005, and 2010, this paper assesses the relationships between employment, race, and poverty for households headed by single women across different economic periods. While poverty rates rose dramatically among single-mother families between 2001 and 2010, surprisingly many racial disparities in poverty narrowed by the end of the decade. This was due to a greater increase in poverty among whites, although gaps between whites and Blacks, whites and Hispanics, and whites and American Indians remained quite large in 2010. All employment statuses were at higher risk of poverty in 2010 than 2001 and the risk increased most sharply for those employed part-time, the unemployed, and those not in the labor force. Given the concurrent increase in part-time employment and unemployment between 2000 and 2010, findings paint a bleak picture of the toll the last decade has had on the well being of single-mother families.

Viewing 21st Century Motherhood Through a Work-Family Lens

Publisher Summary A demographic and social revolution has propelled most mothers and would-be mothers to join the paid labor force and establish committed work ties over the course of their lives. This irrefutable social shift has transformed the experience of motherhood and undermined mid-20th century assumptions that home and work are inherently separate, gendered spheres. Despite these vast social changes—or perhaps because of them the idea of a “working mother” remains highly contested. Work and family remain the two most prominent axes on which womens lives are structured, and equally clearly, they continue to be viewed as “oppositional” domains. Through a review of the burgeoning scholarship on motherhood, it considers how a work–family framework can expand our understanding of contemporary mothering and help explain and potentially resolve the contradictions in womens lives. This chapter examines contemporary variations in motherhood, with an eye to disentangling prevailing myths about past patterns from genuinely new developments. It considers some of the persisting theoretical debates about the nature, causes, and consequences of mothering practices and beliefs, asking how these debates frame our current understanding of contemporary motherhood. The gendered and cultural role of mothers and what it means to engage in “mothering,” and caring are still often seen to be in direct conflict with earning. That women are penalized on the work and earning front for engaging in care work, and they are criticized for their care work when devoting too much time to work.

Gender and the MBA: Differences in Career Trajectories, Institutional Support, and Outcomes:

This study asks how men’s and women’s careers diverge following MBA graduation from an elite university, using qualitative interview data from 74 respondents. We discover men and women follow three career pathways post-graduation: lockstep (stable employment), transitory (3 or more employers), and exit (left workforce). While similar proportions of men and women followed the lockstep pathways and launched accelerated careers, sizable gender differences emerged on the transitory pathway; men’s careers soared as women’s faltered on this path—the modal category for both. On the transitory path, men fared much better than women when moving to new organizations, suggesting that gender may become more salient when people have a shorter work history with a company. Our findings suggest that clear building blocks to promotions reduce gender bias and ambiguity in the promotion process, but multiple external moves hamper women, putting them at a clear disadvantage to men whose forward progress is less likely to be stalled by such moves.