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Based on detailed occupation titles and making use of measures that do not require pair-wise comparisons, this paper shows that the occupational segregation of African American women declined dramatically in 1940–80, decreased slightly in 1980–2000, and remained stagnant in 2000–10. This paper quantifies the well-being losses that African American women derive from their occupational sorting. The reduction of segregation was indeed accompanied by well-being improvements, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Regarding the role that education has played, this study highlights that it was only from 1990 onward that African American women with either some college or university degrees had lower segregation (as compared with their peers) than those with lower education. Nevertheless, the well-being loss that African American women with university degrees derived in 2010 for being segregated from their peers in education was not too different from that of African American women with lower education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reform of the United States welfare system in 1996 drastically changed welfare receipt for low-income lone mothers. This paper explores the effects of these changes on lone mothers by summarizing empirical work on caseload reduction, labor force participation, income, poverty, material hardship, and family formation. While it appears that the economic status of many lone mothers improved during the economic expansion in the late 1990s, many lone mothers continued to experience poverty and material hardship. Building on the work of feminist scholars from both the US and other countries, this paper goes on to critique mainstream research on welfare reform. It identifies a particularly feminist approach to welfare reform research, stresses its advantages over mainstream research, and speculates about why there is comparatively less feminist research to date. The paper concludes by calling for more structural analyses of poverty and of lone motherhood itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores one angle of the race/gender/class intersection by examining the effect of residential segregation on black women and men's employment status in the US. Do the exclusionary mechanisms embedded in racially-based residential segregation affect black women and men's economic outcomes similarly, or are their employment outcomes differentiated by their different gender statuses? This paper lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the role residential segregation may play in shaping black men and women's labor market outcomes, outlining key mechanisms that link residential segregation to labor market inequality, highlighting the ways in which many of these mechanisms are gendered as well as racialized. This paper also offers an analytic design to test the hypotheses developed in this exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global AIDS policy has failed to stop the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa because prevention programs are limited by an unscientific theory of disease causation, which assumes that differences in HIV prevalence among populations are adequately explained by variation in rates of unsafe sexual behaviors. But differences in sexual behavior cannot explain 250-fold differences in HIV prevalence among countries and increasing divergence in incidence. Such disparities point to biological characteristics of the pathogen, the host, and the environment, all of which influence individual risk of infection and the spread of infectious diseases in populations. This paper explores the ways in which Western constructions of race and sexuality have drawn attention to sexual behavior alone and away from scientific evidence of biological risk factors that increase HIV transmission in poor populations. Much of the discussion addresses sub-Saharan Africa, but the biological implications could apply to poor people in other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the US, marital status is more important than work history in determining economic security for many older women. Two-thirds of older women in the US receive spouse or widow Social Security benefits. These benefits generally require recipients to be currently married or to have had a ten-year marriage. Declining marriage rates, coupled with shorter marriages, dramatically change the distributional impact of these benefits on each cohort as they become eligible for Social Security. This paper uses June 1985, 1990, and 1995 CPS supplemental data to trace the decline in marital rates for women from five birth cohorts. We find that the proportion of persons who will be eligible as spouses or widows is decreasing modestly for whites and Hispanics, but dramatically for African Americans. This growing race gap in marital rates suggests that older black women will be particularly unlikely to qualify for these benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]