Women in a changing economy: the misleading tale of participation rates in a historical perspective

In this article I focus on women's advancement in the Swedish labour market during more than a century. By applying a long-term perspective I give the historical background to what is commonly seen as a success story. By reassessing census and labour force survey data I show that participation rates may tell a misleading tale not only for the past but also for the present. In a long-term perspective, Sweden does not stand out as a country with high female labour force participation rates. It was not until the mid-1960s that market work came to play a larger part of women's life, since young women worked until they had children and older married women returned to the labour force after having raised a family. During the late 1960s and the 1970s, women with children under the age of seven became an integrated part of the labour force. It seemed as if welfare reforms supported women's market work in an unprecedented way; gender differences in labour force participation decreased and became very small. A reassessment of labour force participation rates together with alternative measures of market work such as at-work and market-hours rates show that similarly to how they underestimate women's market work and contributions to production during the early decades of the twentieth century, they overestimate women's market work at the end of the century, neglecting the extent to which reproductive responsibilities still interfere with women's paid work through absence and part-time work.     

“What He Did Was Lawful”: Divorce Litigation and Gender Inequality in China

Sociolegal research has shed considerable light on gender inequality in the civil justice system. Existing research, however, rarely looks beyond court proceedings to examine gender inequality stemming from the prior stages in civil litigation. This article fills the gap by addressing the question of whether and how the early moments in disputing produce inequality between women and men. Based on a mixed‐methods study of divorce litigation in China, I identify two critical moments in the early stages in disputing: the initiation stage and the suit‐filing stage. Findings from the two stages indicate that, early on in disputing, the legal profession routinely dismisses and violates women's rights in marriage and family. Moreover, due to the legal profession's failure to convert important rights on the books into formal claims, women's marital grievances and rights claims fall through cracks long before they can enter court proceedings. These findings suggest that gender inequality can result not only from judicial decision making, but also from dispute processing conducted prior to—and outside of—court proceedings.     

Identities,Boundaries, and Accounts of Women Methamphetamine Users

Drug users often define themselves as functional users and depict others as dysfunctional (i.e. junkies). Previous research on the social identities of drug users has focused on the symbolic boundaries they create to distance themselves from stigmatized others. Investigators have yet to focus on how users account for their own boundary violations. Here, we examine the narratives of 30 former women methamphetamine (meth) users to determine how they make distinctions between functional and dysfunctional meth users (i.e. “meth heads”). The distinctions they make are based on users’ abilities to maintain control of their lives and to hide their use from outsiders. Those who saw themselves as functional but who engaged in behaviors inconsistent with this image accounted for these behaviors to maintain desired identities. We show the complexity of drug users’ identities and illustrate how anti-drug campaigns that provide grotesque caricatures of drug users may prolong drug using careers.     

When women disappear from the labour market: occupational status of Dutch women at marriage in a modernizing society, 1865–1922

Between 1865 and 1922 the labour force participation of women at marriage dropped considerably in the Netherlands. At the same time, girls' educational participation increased and egalitarian gender values started to spread. We expect these developments to have affected the occupational status of those women who stayed in the labour market. Using a large dataset of Dutch marriages and municipal-level information on female labour force participation, educational participation, and an indicator of gender values, we show that women's status dropped until around 1885 and then started to rise. The retreat of women from the labour market coincided with a decline in the status of the women who remained, whereas, especially after 1900, the increasing educational participation of girls and the dissemination of egalitarian gender values counteracted this trend by causing women's status to rise.     

PRECOCIOUS ROLE ENTRY AS A MEDIATING FACTOR IN WOMEN'S METHAMPHETAMINE USE: IMPLICATIONS FOR LIFE‐COURSE AND PATHWAYS RESEARCH*

Precocious adoption of adult roles and responsibilities at an early age often has been linked to substance abuse and criminal behavior. Yet, much of the existing research suggests that early offending behaviors induce precocious movement into adulthood; less attention has focused on the way in which early adoption of adult roles and responsibilities might itself contribute to the onset of offending. In the following article, we examine the cumulative impact of early transitions into adult roles and responsibilities on the onset of methamphetamine (MA) use. Through inductive analyses of interviews with women methamphetamine users, we identified a range of adult roles and responsibilities that women described as facilitating their initiation into MA use, including family caretaking, motherhood, independent living, and peer and romantic associations with adults. Such findings have theoretical implications for both life‐course perspectives and feminist pathways research. They highlight the importance of attending to the timing and sequencing of experiences as well as highlight the gendered nature of these processes.     

PARTICIPATION IN CRIME PARTNERSHIPS BY FEMALE DRUG USERS: THE EFFECTS OF DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS,DRUG USE,AND CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT*

Research findings on the crime patterns of women suggest that social changes in gender roles are associated with increased female criminality. Some researchers note that the increasing participation of women in established criminal organizations increases female crime levels in general, Other researchers demonstrate that involvement with deviant boyfriends or husbands in particular not only introduces women to addictive drugs, but also contributes to greater crime participation. Measures of the domestic network, crime commitment, drug use, ethnicity, and participation in vice and predatory crimes are used to focus on women's formation and participation in crime partnerships. Findings reveal that ethnicity, living with boyfriends or husbands, high levels of crime commission, particularly while carrying weapons, and participating in vice and predatory crimes are factors that are shared by a number of crime partnerships. On the other hand, having children raised by others, a history of incarceration and arrest, and opiate use are factors that are important for specific crime partnerships; therefore, these factors are unique considerations that relate to the likelihood that criminal partnerships will develop.     

Uncharted Terrain

ABSTRACT

This paper examines previously unexplored contexts of women's experience in the illicit drug economy. Data drawn from 141 women interviewed in a qualitative exploratory study compared methamphetamine use among 450 respondents in San Francisco, San Diego and Honolulu. Findings reveal the significant scope and extent of economic roles involving women match multi faceted and diverse drug use careers. The paper examines varied lifestyle and drug use characteristics in the context of shifting patterns of involvement in the methamphetamine drug economy. It then explores the perceived positive and negative consequences resulting from both drug use and drug sales. Analyses of these findings uncover several interrelated rationales, motivations, resources and values that chart the terrain of women in the illicit drug economy.     

Women who kill in drug market situations

Recent studies of women and homicide have shown that lethal violence by women is a more complex phenomenon than merely self-defense against abusive partners. In this paper we examine cases of homicide by women who killed in drug market situations to explore the ways in which changing drug markets may have influenced women's involvement in lethal violence. From open-ended and semistructured interviews with 215 women sentenced to prison in New York State for homicide, we identified 19 women whose cases involved a drug market situation. Through qualitative analysis of the narratives offered by these women to explain their involvement in the killing, we found evidence that women will use violence, as will men, to protect or augment an economic interest in a drug market. From further analysis, however, we concluded that even in a clearly economic context in which women are able to acquire their own economic interest, some women will kill or participate in a killing in connection with their relationship with a male business or intimate partner. That is, women who kill in the economic context of a drug market may kill for economic reasons, but the specific circumstances of involvement in a drug market do not necessarily negate the significance of gender.     

UP IT UP: GENDER AND THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF STREET ROBBERY*

Attempts to understand women's participation in violence have been plagued by a tendency either to overemphasize gender differences or to downplay the significance of gender. The goal of this research is to reconcile these approaches through an examination of the experiences of female and male street robbers in an urban setting. Based on in-depth interviews with active offenders, the study compares women's and men's accounts of why they commit robbery, as well as how gender organizes the commission of the crime. The research suggests that while women and men articulate similar motives for robbery, their enactment of the crime is strikingly different—a reflection, in part, of practical choices women make in the context of a gender-stratified street setting.     

DOING HER OWN TIME? WOMEN'S RESPONSES TO PRISON IN THE CONTEXT OF THE OLD AND THE NEW PENOLOGY*

Assumptions about gender role socialization dominated explanations for gender differences in responses to incarceration. We suspend these gender comparisons, which produced the focus on homosexuality and kinship networks in women's prisons, to determine how women's pre‐prison experiences, in the context of two different institutions, influence the way they “do time.” We analyze in‐depth interviews with a diverse sample of 70 female inmates housed in the California Institution for Women (CIW)—the oldest prison for women in the state—and Valley State Prison (VSP)—the newest prison for women. These two institutions differ in structure, size, and management philosophy, and accordingly necessitate the consideration of moderating situational effects. We use qualitative analysis to examine how women do time and to determine whether individual variations in doing time are similar across very different institutions.     

WOMEN IN THE STREET-LEVEL DRUG ECONOMY: CONTINUITY OR CHANGE?*

Images of women in the contemporary drug economy are highly mixed. Most scholars emphasize change in women's roles, some emphasize continuity, and others suggest that both change and continuity are evident. At issue is whether an increased share of women were involved in selling and higher-level distribution roles in the crack cocaine markets of the late 1980s and early 1990s, compared to the heroin markets of the 1960s and 1970s. We present the results of an ethnographic study of women drug users conducted during 1989–92 in a New York City neighborhood. Contrary to those who suggest that crack cocaine markets have provided “new opportunities” for women, we find that such opportunities were realized by men. At the same time, the conditions of street-level sex work, which has traditionally provided women drug users with a relatively stable source of income, have deteriorated.     

WOMEN'S PARTICIPATION IN CHINESE TRANSNATIONAL HUMAN SMUGGLING: A GENDERED MARKET PERSPECTIVE*

Despite extensive sociological research on gender and organizations, criminologists have paid insufficient attention to how organizational context and market demands may shape the extent and nature of women's participation in illicit enterprises. This study uses an organizational framework to examine the case of Chinese human smuggling to the United States. Drawing from interviews with 129 human smugglers, we propose a gendered market perspective for understanding the place of women in the human smuggling enterprise. We argue that the limited place of violence and turf as organizing features of human smuggling, the importance of interpersonal networks in defining and facilitating smuggling operations, gender ideologies about work and caregiving, and the impact of safety as an overriding concern for clients combine to create a more meaningful niche for women in human smuggling operations than is found in other criminal endeavors. Our research suggests that organizational and market contexts are significant explanations for gender stratification in illicit enterprises.     

Women's Rights Issues Among Bombay Parsis: A Legal Anthropologist's Thoughts on Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia

I focus in this essay on legal issues related to women's rights in the British colonial period that are discussed in Mitra Sharafi's 2014 book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Parsi leadership actively lobbied for laws related to intestate inheritance, women's property rights, divorce, and child marriage that were consistent with their community's customary values and practices. During the same period, legal reform movements were also underway on behalf of Hindu and Muslim women and, to a lesser extent, Christian women. This essay highlights some of the common themes in those movements and discusses, in particular, the similarities and differences in what was achieved for Parsi women and their Hindu sisters, as they and their respective male leaders traversed the road toward greater gender equality under the law.     

Without Peers

Abstract

This writing will, in two parts, trace the development of Anglo-American law in regard to women and jury service from the early Anglo-Norman jury to the present American system. In this long history, women were largely excluded from the public world of the legal system. As criminal defendants, they did not face a jury of their peers. The first part, contained in this edition, examines the limited participation of women in the legal system in medieval and early modern England, colonial America, and the new American nation ending with their entry into the public world and the victory of women's suffrage in the United States. Within this setting, this first section traces the evolution of trial by jury. The second part, to follow, will examine the twentieth century legal, and political, struggle for women's full participation in the American jury system.     

A Comparison of Criminological and Public Health Models: Geographic and Social Diversity Associated with Methamphetamine Laboratory Seizures

In the 1990s methamphetamine (meth) emerged as a significant drug problem in the United States. Along with more widespread meth use was a growing pattern of localized production of the drug in small-scale clandestine laboratories, creating public health issues beyond the drug’s direct harms to the health of users. Early efforts in analyzing aggregate patterns of meth lab production across communities suggest this phenomenon is different from other types of crime and drug problems, showing distinctive geographic patterns and different causal/etiological dynamics. This paper assesses the viability of public health outcomes as predictors of methamphetamine laboratory problems and compares them with traditional criminological predictors as explanations for aggregate patterns in meth lab problems across U.S. counties. It documents how local variations in meth production are different from other types of crime patterns and identifies whether geographic variations in local meth labs might be more effectively predicted and explained in public health terms.     

WOMEN'S GENDER PERFORMANCES AND CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY IN THE ILLEGAL DRUG ECONOMY

Based on interviews with 32 female drug dealers in Norway, this study investigates different gender performances among women situated in the illegal hard drug economy—a context with strong gendered “rules of the game.” Using grounded theory methods, I have identified four predominant patterns in which women enact their gendered identities being part of the drug economy: performing emphasized femininity in the context of marginalization; performing street masculinity; employing a feminine business model; and last, flexible use of cultural repertoires. The findings suggest that different gender performances among dealers are rooted in variations in the cultural tool kits they have at their disposal. I find that the content of women's cultural tool kits varied with three sociodemographic factors: 1) age, 2) time of entrée to the drug economy, and 3) educational and employment history. Combined, these influenced the type of gender performances the dealers tended to use as well as their position in the drug market hierarchy. The research suggests that those dealers using cultural repertoires flexibly are the most successful as they skillfully employed the model best suited for the context they were in.     

Mad Men,Meth Moms,Moral Panic: Gendering Meth Crimes in the Midwest

This research examines the content of a sample of newspaper articles from the Midwestern states. The analyses find highly gendered accounts of methamphetamine related crimes. Media depictions suggest women use meth for reasons drawn from conventional notions of motherhood, sexuality, and subordination. Alternately, motives of men appear constructed around dominant notions of male criminal virility and the viability of the drug trade. The findings offer a contextual framework to consider how this sort of mediated dichotomy emerges from and reinforces popular notions of gendered crime and drug users in non-urban spaces.     

Leaving Careers in IT: Gender Differences in Retention

The low prevalence of women in the information technology (IT) workforce has received considerable attention in recent years. The focus of much of this discussion concerns how women can be recruited into careers in IT by making careers more attractive and accessible to women. The size of the IT workforce depends on retention as well as recruitment. The focus of this study is on retention, examining factors related to retention and how retention varies by gender. Data for the study come from the Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT) compiled by Science Resources Statistics (SRS), National Science Foundation (NSF). We find that retention varies by gender and that a sizeable proportion of IT-trained women who are not working in IT jobs leave the labor force rather than take positions in other occupations. We also find that marriage and family play different roles for women and men in affecting retention.JEL Classification: J1, J4, J6, J7, O39     

Gender and “Other People's Money”: An Analysis of White-Collar Offender Sentencing

Although the female share of white-collar crime arrests (e.g., fraud, forgery, and embezzlement) continues to increase, little is known about the nature of women's involvement in these offenses, or the extent to which the legal treatment of white-collar offenders differs by gender. Using national survey data on employee crime, the present research addresses these voids in the literature. Consistent with prior research, women's roles in fraud offending are restricted by their positions in the organizational hierarchy. In support of the focal concerns perspective, results show that the decision to incarcerate and length of sentence are primarily shaped by indicators of offender blameworthiness. Findings reported here contribute to the literature on gender and white-collar crime, and also extend the growing body of focal concerns research to a previously unexplored sentencing context.