Women's and Men's Access to Employer-Provided Benefits: An Assessment of Women's Acceptance as Breadwinners

abstract This article asks whether the rising number of women in the paid labor force over the last half-century has been accompanied by a parallel trend of increased recognition of a breadwinning status for women, or if traditional role conceptions have persisted in spite of women's changed economic and social circumstances. I theorize that employer-provided benefits are a unique form of compensation that, by helping parents balance work and family, directly affect parents in their capacities as breadwinners. As such, assessing women's and men's access to these benefits over the period of women's rising labor force participation can be very revealing of the acceptance of women as breadwinners. To acquire a general picture of women's and men's access to employer-provided benefits, I compare access to benefits from 1940 to 1990 in a modal women's occupation ("professional nurses") to a modal men's occupation ("automobile mechanics and repairmen"). Through the studied time span, these occupations are the largest comparably sized women's and men's occupations that are also similar in pay level and extent of unionization. This allows me to control for pay level and unionization, important alternative explanations for women's restricted access to benefits. I hypothesize that nurses have had more restricted access to employer-provided benefits than have auto mechanics. I find a disadvantage for nurses relative to auto mechanics through most of the time period, which nonetheless diminishes and then reverses slightly at the end. Taking into consideration subtleties, as well as patterns masked in the data as presented, these findings suggest at best a rather slow rate of acceptance of a breadwinning status for women, and at worst, a continuation of traditional gender norms.     

A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT TESTING INMATE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS*

Research Summary: In California, incarceration in the state prison system is in part organized by security level. The higher the security level, the more restrictive the setting. Upon arrival at a reception center, new inmates are scored within a classification system that is used to determine the appropriate level of security. In this paper, we report on the development and testing of a new inmate classification scoring system. Over 20,000 inmates took part in a randomized experiment in which half were assigned to their housing using the existing scoring system and half were assigned to their housing using the new scoring system. There were two key outcomes: (1) potential mismatches between the number of inmates assigned to different security levels and the available beds and (2) reports of inmate misconduct. Policy Implications: We conclude there to be some potential crowding problems, but that the new scoring system is much better than the old scoring system in sorting inmates by the likelihood of misconduct. We also conclude that some predictors popular in the past are no longer effective (e.g., marital status), while some new predictors are extremely powerful (e.g., gang activity), and that one can build in a number of mandatory housing placements (e.g., for sex offenders) and not degrade the overall effectiveness of the new classification system. Finally, the new classification system is shown to be more user‐friendly than the existing classification system and well received by the staff responsible for implementing it.     

Gender, Policy, Politics, and Work: Feminist Comparative and Transnational Research

abstract This article reviews feminist comparative and transnational research on workplace policy, politics and the state. The first section examines a range of theoretical approaches to the topic. We then present a variety of methodologies for conducting comparative and transnational research on policy developments. Informed by a number of case studies included in the symposium, we explore the dynamics and determinants, both national and supranational, of policy formation and its impacts. Finally, we tease out the implicit and explicit notions of gender equity for future policy analysis.     

Jurisdiction size and local government effectiveness: Assessing the effects of municipal amalgamations on performance

The optimal jurisdiction size has been debated since Plato and Aristotle. A large literature has studied economic and democratic scale effects, but we have almost no knowledge of the effects of jurisdiction size on the effectiveness of local services. This is due to two methodological problems. First, selection bias and reverse causality often render change in jurisdiction size an endogenous variable. Second, there is a lack of empirical indicators of effectiveness, and most studies therefore focus on spending measures. Extant research thus studies economies of scale, leaving effectiveness of scale unexamined. We address both problems in a quasi-experimental study of public schools. Our findings from the school area indicate that jurisdiction size does not have systematic effects on effectiveness. Our analysis therefore supports recent studies of economic and democratic scale effects that indicate that the search for the optimal jurisdiction size is futile.     

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.     

CHANGES IN PUBLIC SERVICE BARGAINS: MINISTERS AND CIVIL SERVANTS IN DENMARK

The concept of public service bargain (PSB) has been reintroduced in recent times to the study of public administration to analyse the division of roles between ministers and the civil service in the context of public service reforms ( Hood 2000, 2001, 2002 ; Hood and Lodge 2006 ). The empirical investigation of the concept of PSB in general and changes in PSBs in particular is, however, limited. This article addresses this limitation by investigating what causes changes in public service bargains, particularly with respect to the provision of advice. As argued by Hood, we demonstrate how changes in PSBs can be explained by a combination of changes in the environments of ministries as well as the interests of the political actors. Furthermore, we point to the professional qualifications of civil servants as well as their interests as causes of change which, until now, have not received sufficient attention in the PSB literature. The article is based on a longitudinal case study of PSB between ministers and the permanent civil service in Denmark.