Vered Kraus

2. Gender, Ethnicity and Income Inequality * The Israeli Experience

1 For example see Moore, 1966, p. 476 and Fournier, 1972, p. 630. 2 On this point see, for example, Lamy, 1976. See also the Brief of the Canadian Federation of Social Sciences in Social Sciences in Canada, vol. 6, no. 4 (December, 1978), p. 6. 3 See Koulack and Keselman, 1975, pp. 1050-1051; Glenn, 1971, pp. 300-301; and Giles and Wright, 1975, pp. 255-256. 4 The study by Lodahl and Gordon (1972, pp. 57-60) placed the three natural sciences tested first in terms of consensus on theories and methodology and the four social sciences last. The study by Knorr (1978, pp. 113-145) exposed the low levels of consensus which exist in seven social sciences.

Strategies of economic endurance: Israeli Palestinians in the ethnic economy and the public sector

Abstract This chapter reports the results of comparative analysis of the socioeconomic achievements (income, occupational prestige, standard of living, job power characteristics) of four groups of Palestinian citizens of Israel: employees in the Palestinian-owned businesses, employees in the dominant (Jewish-owned) economy, employees in the public sector, and self-employed workers. The findings indicate that Israeli Palestinians have two paths to overcome barriers for advancement in the main economy. The first option, economic entrepreneurship, is realized mostly by joining a family business, while the second option, public employment, is more meritocratic and depends upon formal education. Private-sector employees are almost equally disadvantaged in both segments of the economy. The Palestinian economy, however, is important for offering the possibility of self-employment, and given the unfeasibility of assimilation, the ethnic economy is certainly vital for the well-being of Palestinians. We argue that this situation is typical to ethnic minorities in post-colonial societies, in which ethnic separation is deeply engraved into the social structure.

Patterns of Cultural Transition: Soviet and American Children in a New Environment

A comparative study of the adjustment of immigrant students from the Soviet Union and from North America to the Israeli educational system reveals distinct differences between the two groups. The differences between the social environments in the countries of origin affect the pattern of adjustment both in school and society at large. Students from North America are age group-oriented whereas students from the Soviet Union are adult-oriented and place strong emphasis on the teacher-student relationship. As the orientation of the Israeli students resembles that of the American immigrant students rather than that of the Soviet immigrant students, the latter are confronted with a situation of dissonance resulting from the inconsistency between their adult-oriented values and the peer group-oriented values of the new environment.

Components of Occupational Prestige Evaluations.

This article addresses perceptual aspects of occupational prestige evaluations. The data presented are based on the evaluation of a set of occupational categories on six dimensions: power and influence, value to society, standard of living, initiative and autonomy, skills and knowledge, and social standing. Based on individual-level data, we present correlations among these dimensions. These correlations are appreciably lower than those previously published, based on aggregate data. Regression equations were estimated for each individual in the sample, predicting social standing from the other five dimensions. The mean R2 in these equations is .760. The highest weight in these equations is assigned to the dimension of skills and knowledge. Value to society is assigned a zero weight. The mean regression coefficients display invariance across various subsamples.

Violence at School Situational Factors or Societal Input

This empirical Israeli study compared the explanatory capabilities of three interpretations for school violence: (a) violence as an input of the wider society to the school system; (b) violence at school as a response to frustration and alienation; and (c) school violence as a consequence of already existing violence at school. It appears that violence in Israels schools is mainly a result of exposure to violent behaviour either at school, or in the general society. Frustration and alienation and expression of youth subculture seem to have very little effect.

The transmission of socioeconomic status and prestige in Great Britain and the United States

We analyze male occupational attainment using separate models in which occupational level is measured by indigenous socioeconomic index (SEI) scales, indigenous prestige scales, and a common prestige scale. Other than some consistent societal differences, the SEI scales produce highly similar results in both societies. In sharp contrast, both indigenous and common prestige scales indicate a stronger relative effect of origin (compared with education) on occupation in Great Britain. The dimensions of prestige and socioeconomic status thus seem to tap different aspects of the social mobility process, and the societies differ in the transmission of prestige but not socioeconomic status.

Group differences: the issue of decomposition

This study proposes a new method for decomposing inter-group mean differences. Based on theoretical arguments regarding the availability and distribution of resources influencing achievement in a society. This method utilizes the grand mean values of resources in the system to compare group differences in achievement. The proposed method allows for the specification of majority/minority population distribution in the decomposition of inequality.

Ethnicity, Gender, and Exclusion: Which Occupations Are Open to Israeli Palestinian Women?

When we started our research into Palestinian women’s employment in Israel several years ago, very few people, either in academia or outside, were interested. In sociology, Israeli researchers were concerned with comparing either Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, or Palestinian and Jewish men. But Palestinian women were not very present in the labor market, and it was therefore easy to ignore them. Following a very slow and long upward trend that started in the 1960s, labor force participation rate of Palestinian women in the beginning of the twenty-first century was about 20 percent, a very low figure compared with the much higher labor force participation of Jewish women (Yonay and Kraus 2009).

A Multidimensional Approach to the Problem of Crime Seriousness

The interest of the discipline in explaining the attribution of severity to offenses has been enduring but the methods of the past have contributed little to our understanding of the concept of severity and its components. This study introduces a new method designed to address the methodological and theoretical concerns of working criminologists. Randomly selected respondents sorted index cards containing descriptions of specific crimes. First, they grouped the cards by perceived similarity of offenses, then they ranked the offenses within each group according to perceived severity. The authors, after applying smallest space analysis to the results of the card sort, conclude that two discrete variables account jointly for the perception of crime severity by the citizen: Presence of criminal intent and degree of injury. The implications of replacing unidimensional methods with this new approach are discussed.

Ethnic and gender earning gaps in a liberalized economy: The case of Israel

During the 1990s and the 2000s Israel, a country ethnically divided into a dominant Jewish majority and a disadvantaged mostly Muslim Palestinian minority, underwent a transition from a heavily regulated to a neo-liberal economy. This paper makes use of the Israeli case to shed light on the effect of liberalization on earning gaps in the public and private sectors across dominant and disadvantaged population groups. The data, drawn from the 1995 and 2008 censuses-years that encompass the transition period, enable a dynamic investigation of the liberalization process by comparing labor market outcomes for Israeli Jews and Muslims of both genders working in the public or private sector. Liberalization reduced the protective role of the public sector, especially hurting women of both ethnic groups. In the private sector this process improved the position of the strongest group of Jewish men and of the weakest group of Muslim women. Discrimination against Jewish women and Muslim men in the private sector increased.