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This paper investigates trends in adult child‐rearing values in the United States over a 30‐year period, from the mid‐1980s into the first decades of the 21st century. Using data from the General Social Surveys, we report trends in emphasis on five child traits: think for self, obey, work hard, popularity, and helping others. Independent of the time of the surveys, child‐rearing values are associated with several individual attributes: gender, schooling level, occupational class, birth year, race/ethnicity, region, party identification, religious affiliation, and religiosity. Socioeconomic factors continue to be among the most important, but contrary to many arguments, occupational class, as measured by Weeden–Grusky micro‐classes, has a relatively less important role in predicting child‐rearing values, once education is taken into account. Religious variables are also important, less so than socioeconomic factors, but there is support for the hypothesis of the growing strength over time in the impact of religious conservatism and participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses US Census data from 1970 to 1990 to focus on “integrated” occupations—those in which men and women are approximately equally represented. We focus on the extensive variability that exists across these nominally integrated occupations, specifically their social demography and the paths by which they reach compositional sex equity. We also examine the link between occupational integration and race/sex succession, and explore the earnings consequences of working in mixed occupations. Our findings suggest that integration means quite different things at different levels of the occupational hierarchy and for the women and men integrating sex-atypical occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between employer hiring for skill and cultural matching. Using 68 semi‐structured interviews with recruiters and human resources professionals, I argue that costly on‐the‐job skilling can push employers to try to stabilize their workforce by, among other things, hiring socially similar applicants. Recruiters for high turnover cost roles considered cultural matching essential to their work, while in other cases it played little to no role. I conclude by discussing the implications of hiring‐for‐fit and on‐the‐job skilling for scholarship on labor markets and social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study of the employment situation of African American managers within New York State government. We argue that affirmative action, while having created employment opportunities for minority professionals, has also created racial submarkets in government. We identify three categories of jobs, a mainstream category and two sorts of minority categories, based on the racial composition of incumbents and constituencies that they serve. African Americans in minority submarket positions appear to have equal pay relative to comparable African Americans in mainstream jobs. They are less likely to have civil service job protection. There is limited mobility between submarkets; more professionals move from the mainstream to minority positions than vice versa. In the current period of budget reductions in state government, black professionals experience considerable job insecurity and express dissatisfaction with the policies that created the minority submarket. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noting that sociology, like other disciplines, usually discusses itself as if its content-its body of knowledge-were created by a wholly intellectual process, I am adopting in this paper the approach of the sociology of knowledge by emphasizing the "existential factors" that influence knowledge. I employ the poorly developed concept of occupation, and argue that in the United States academic disciplines like sociology are best analyzed as professions, which are organized occupations. American professions sustain their present position by the functional differentiation of members into separate administrative, research or scholarship, and practice roles. Practice roles serving lay clients or patrons provide the basic economic support of the profession as a whole. The characteristic practice role of most academic arts and science disciplines is teaching. Using sociology and its special position in the under-graduate curriculum as an example, I suggest that the contingencies of teaching influence what knowledge is used, underlie at least part of the public image of the discipline, and determine some of what becomes part of the published corpus of the discipline's knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the wage work and family determinants of self‐employment entry using a panel study of Canadian workers (Canadian Work Stress and Health Study). Rather than treating the self‐employed as a homogenous group—a characterization that conflates entrepreneurial ventures with lower quality and more precarious self‐employment—we disaggregate self‐employment entrants by occupational class. Descriptive analyses show that the nonprofessional self‐employed—the most common form of self‐employment observed in the study—are considerably more likely to report low income (<$25,000) and insufficient work hours compared to wage workers and the professional self‐employed. Event history analyses based on a multinomial logistic model also reveal that poor wage‐work quality—including low income, job insecurity, and unchallenging work—increases the likelihood of a transition from wage work into nonprofessional self‐employment. In contrast, job autonomy and human capital predict an increased likelihood of a transition into professional self‐employment. Our results suggest that both classic entrepreneurial and forced motivations explain self‐employment entry when the self‐employed's occupational class is distinguished; however, findings are mixed regarding the salience of work‐family factors in predicting self‐employment entry. We discuss the value of using a "good jobs, bad jobs" perspective to disaggregate the pathways from wage work into lower versus higher quality self‐employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of growth, women's labor force participation stagnated in the 2000s, prompting widespread interest in work-family balance and opting out. However, much of the research and media attention is limited to small samples of women in managerial and professional occupations. Using data from the 2009 American Community Survey, this article examines mothers' labor force participation and work hours across 92 occupations to assess whether mothers in nonmanagerial and nonprofessional occupations exhibit similar work patterns. I find that mothers in managerial and professional occupations are the least likely to remain out of the labor force but most likely to work reduced hours. The results indicate that there is significant occupational variation in women's work-family strategies, and these comparisons provide insight into the differential structures of disadvantage that encourage different work-family outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How important is academic performance in obtaining a tenure-track position in academic science? I use data on Korean biochemists and analyze them from both institutionalist and gender perspectives. In so doing, I illustrate the ways academic performance and gender interact with one another to maintain a gender barrier for Ph.D.s entering an academic career. The main findings are as follows. First, academic productivity did influence the job market outcomes, but the male scientists benefited from publications in both SCI and non-SCI journals, whereas the female scientists benefited only from those in SCI journals. I also found a positive effect of overseas doctoral training only for the female scientists. Such analysis suggests that women as a minority in academic science are pressured to prove their legitimacy through more rigorous criteria of academic performance. Thus, ostensibly gender-neutral rules of academic performance can be applied in such a way as to maintain gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's numbers in high-paying, male-dominated occupations have risen in the past three decades, but they disproportionately hold lower-paying jobs within those occupations. A cohort sample of Wall Street securities professionals shows how sex segregation occurs over time, as men's and women's different experiences lead them to change functions, to change firms, or to leave the securities industry. While seemingly similar processes impinge on the careers of everyone in this exceptionally high-paid occupation, family constraints and gender discrimination produce differential results for similarly qualified men and women. Over time men disproportionately gain the very highest paying Wall Street jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research linking occupational gender segregation to the workplace authority gap assumes that the effect of gender composition is invariant across occupations, ignoring the important distinction of whether an occupation's relevant labor market is local or national. We offer a new method for defining occupational labor markets and hypothesize that the effect of occupation gender composition on the authority gap will be strongest in national labor market occupations. Both sexes' odds of possessing work authority decline with the representation of women; this effect is strongest in the more desirable, national labor market occupations. Assuming occupations are part of one labor market results in understating the gender composition penalty for national labor market occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested the claim that newspaper help-wanted sections list enough jobs for all who want work. We counted jobs listed in The Washington Post's help-wanted section, sorting them by skill, education, and experience to identify those available to the unemployed poor. Then we asked employers how many people had applied. Only 13% of all vacancies and only 8% of all full-time vacancies offered work for the unemployed poor. Although these menial jobs paid low wages and rarefy offered fringe benefits, they received an average of 21 applications and were quickly filled. The tight labor market for menial jobs portends great difficulty in securing paid employment for people now being evicted from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have challenged a long-prevailing notion that free women held unusually high economic status in colonial America. The present study tests a corresponding idea that the 19th century afforded American women fewer occupational opportunities, with a resulting loss in freedom and status. Drawing from a large and broad sample of newspapers, we examine the distribution of occupational pursuits and changes in this distribution over time, and then compare these findings with observations from an earlier study for the 18th century. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed in terms of the ideology of "separate spheres," increasing divorce patterns, and the growth of the midwestern frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the original 1962 Blau and Duncan data for white males, I compare relative amounts of inequality in the distributions of occupational prestige, earnings, autonomy, and job skills. Also assessed are the degree of `status rigidity" (or intercorrelations) among these four dimensions of occupational inequality and the simultaneous relations among these four dimensions in a father-to-son occupational mobility model. These findings are compared to those obtained with Duncan's socioeconomic index to determine whether additional information can be obtained when using independent measures representing the multiple dimensions of occupational inequality versus using the SEI alone. Only minor discrepancies are found, and these relate to autonomy and earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee benefits contribute to the stratification of the labor force into occupational markets. Employee benefits and earnings form "compensation packages" available in different combinations and at different levels to occupations located in different labor markets. In this study I have merged and aggregated data from the Current Population Survey Pension Supplement in 1979 at the detailed occupation level with data from the Fourth Edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to examine the relative importance of workforce characteristics, occupational content, and labor market context in the provision of selected employee benefits both separately and in combinations with earnings. The analyses reveal that fringe benefits are structurally-determined factors that represent a dimension of the reward structure of occupations different from earnings, but they combine with earnings to stratify the workplace into occupational markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupational sex segregation persists in part due to cultural beliefs in the existence of gender differences in skills. This article explores potential resistance to the gender-typical aspirations and outcomes that re-create occupational sex segregation: cognitive skills in gender-atypical areas (i.e., math skills for women and verbal skills for men) and beliefs about women's prioritization of family over paid work. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort, I find that individuals with skills in areas considered gender atypical have less traditional occupational aspirations and outcomes than their otherwise-similar counterparts. This process varies by gender, however. The results reflect the differential valuation of math and verbal skills. I conclude that programs designed to encourage women to pursue gender-atypical occupations that align with their gender-atypical skills are focusing on the least resistant group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]