RESEARCH MAKING THE NEWS
Automation Could Force Millions of Women to Find New Jobs
Eric Morath │
│June 4, 2019
The study, released Tuesday, shows technological advancements affect the genders nearly evenly. That finding upends the notion that automation hits predominantly male manufacturing workers the hardest. Emerging automation technologies will look different and displace a large number of women, said Mekala Krishnan, fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute and one of the report’s authors. Advancements could take the form of Alexa-like virtual assistants replacing clerical tasks, wider adoption of cashierless checkouts and artificial intelligence replacing customer-service workers at call centers. And that technology could change the jobs done by women in the way robotic arms in factories put downward pressure on mostly male manufacturing jobs in the U.S. in recent decades.
Citing: The Future of Women at Work by Mckinsey Global Institute, June, 2019
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Americans Want Diversity in the Workplace but are Skeptical About How to Get it
By Catherine Kim | 
| May 9, 2019
A majority of Americans think companies should encourage diversity in the workplace — but they’re much more skeptical about the methods businesses could use to ensure they’re hiring a diverse group of employees […] Yet only 24 percent said race and ethnicity should be taken into consideration in decisions about hiring and promotion. In contrast, 74 percent said only qualifications should be taken into account — even if it resulted in less diversity.
Citing: Americans See Advantages and Challenges in Country’s Growing Racial and Ethnic Diversity by Juliana Menasce Horowitz at Pew Research Center, May 8th, 2019
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Women Choose More Precise Words than Men when Applying for Grant Funding, but Guess Who’s More Successful?
Meera Jagannathan │
│ May 8, 2019
Women scientists are less likely to win funding for grants, even when they’re evaluated anonymously, according to a recent working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The apparent driving force: Women’s penchant for using “narrow” words in their grant proposals, versus men’s tendency toward “broad” words.
Citing: Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation by Julian Kolev, Yuly Fuentes-Medel, and Fiona Murray at The National Bureau of Economic Research
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New Fed Survey Finds Americans in Better Financial Shape as Expansion Continues
Steve Goldstein ││ May 23, 2019
A new survey of American household finances finds economic well-being is getting better, despite a flurry of headlines to the contrary. The Federal Reserve said Thursday that 61% of those surveyed for its annual report on the economic well-being of U.S. households said they could pay an unexpected expense of $400 with either cash, savings or a credit card paid off at the next statement. That’s up from just half in 2013.
Citing: Report on the Economics Well-Being of U.S Households in 2018 by Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 23, 2019
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Fighting the Gender Stereotypes That Warp Biomedical Research
JoAnna Klein│ 
│May 30, 2019
In 2016, the National Institutes of Health and its Canadian counterpart mandated all preclinical research they fund must include female subjects. Now, Dr. Shansky and other scientists wonder if that requirement will do enough to improve how research is conducted [..] In an essay published Thursday in Science, Dr. Shansky questions whether simply adding female organisms to experiments or looking for sex differences misses the point. She warns that this is a public health problem — with implications beyond neuroscience — and says scientists should design experiments better suited to both biological sexes.
Citing: Are Hormones a “Female Problem” for Animal Research? By Rebecca M. Shansky at Science, May 30, 2019
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How many Americans Live on $2 a Day? The Biggest Debate in Poverty Research, Explained
Daylan Matthews │ │June 5, 2019
For much of the last decade, Princeton sociologist Kathryn Edin and University of Michigan social policy researcher Luke Shaefer have been using survey data to argue that a significant and rising share of American children live in households earning less than $2 in cash income per person. […]. But since their research started circulating, some economists and sociologists have pushed back, arguing that the Edin and Shaefer’s research — which relied on surveys — underestimated the support very poor households get from welfare programs that provide benefits “in kind” rather than through cash. […] The most comprehensive response to date — by University of Chicago professor Bruce Meyer, his colleagues Derek Wu and Victoria Mooers, and the Census Bureau’s Carla Medalia — has just been publicly released, and concludes that true $2-a-day poverty, after adjusting the data properly, is extremely rare.
Citing: The Use and Misuse of Income Data and Extreme Poverty in the United States by Bruce D. Meyer, Derek Wu, Victoria R. Mooers, and Carla Medalia at The National Bureau of Economic Research, May, 2019
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NEW RESEARCH REPORTS
Bridging Systems for Family Economic Mobility: Postsecondary and Early Education Partnerships
Barbara Gault and Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, and Rachel Schumacher│ Institute for Women’s Research │May 30, 2019
Promoting family economic security and mobility requires collaboration across key systems that serve families. This report describes opportunities for the early childhood and higher education systems to support each other’s key goals for system advancements to increase economic mobility among America’s families. It provides examples of early education/higher education partnerships at multiple levels that use a variety of funding sources, and that often benefit from leaders and champions who understand the importance of addressing families’ postsecondary and early education needs in an integrated fashion. It also provides a set of principles and recommendations for establishing effective partnerships, informed by the guiding voices of parents.
Closing the Gender Pay Gap: What Role for Trade Unions?
Jill Rubery and Mathew Johnson │International Labour Organization│April 2019
This report considers the current and potential role for trade unions in closing the gender pay gap which has become one of the symbols of progress towards gender equality. Not only have governments, trade unions and employers publicly resolved to close the gender pay gap; the commitment has also been internationally endorsed by various international organizations, including the International Labour Organization (ILO). Notably there has been the recent formation of the Equal Pay International Coalition (EPIC), led by the ILO, UN Women and the OECD, to help progress the commitment towards equal pay for work of equal value within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Goal 8.5). These commitments are supported by ILO’s international labour standards (ILS), most directly Convention 100 on Equal Remuneration, and by the ILO 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work that focuses attention on the commitment to eliminate discrimination in the world of work
Paid Family and Breastfeeding: Evidence from California
Pac, Bartel, Ruhm & Waldfogel | The National Bureau of Economics Research | April 2019
This paper evaluates the effect of Paid Family Leave (PFL) on breastfeeding, which we identify using California’s enactment of a 2004 PFL policy that ensured mothers up to six weeks of leave at a 55 percent wage replacement rate. We employ synthetic control models for a large, representative sample of over 270,000 children born between 2000 and 2012 drawn from the restricted-use versions of the 2003 – 2014 National Immunization Surveys. Our estimates indicate that PFL increases the overall duration of breastfeeding by nearly 18 days, and the likelihood of breastfeeding for at least six months by 5 percentage points. We find substantially larger effects of PFL on breastfeeding duration for some disadvantaged mothers.
Status of Older Workers
The New School Retirement Equity Lab │ May 1, 2019
Older workers experienced almost no real wage growth since 2007, despite record low unemployment rates. In the first quarter of 2019, median real weekly earnings of full-time workers ages 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher than in the first quarter of 2007, the peak of the business cycle. In contrast, weekly earnings for prime-age workers ages 35 to 54 grew 4.7%. In prior business cycles, older workers’ earnings grew at similar or greater rates than wages of prime-age workers.
Gendered Accountability: When and Why do Women’s Policy Priorities Get Implemented?
Valeriya Mechkova and Euth Carlitz │ V-Dem Institute │May 2019
The past two decades have seen dramatic increases in women occupying positions of political power. Such developments have been welcomed as a means of achieving better outcomes for women in their everyday lives. We interrogate this proposition, developing a “gendered accountability” framework to the delineate conditions under which female representation should have its desired effects. Our empirical analysis applies this framework to sub-Saharan Africa, home to the largest increase in women’s political representation in recent years. We find that having more women in the legislature is robustly associated with reduced infant and child mortality as well as greater spending on health. The effect on infant mortality is magnified when women are more active in civil society, and constrained to countries that have gender quotas and a proportional electoral system. We do not, however, find consistent evidence that maternal mortality and access to clean water respond to female representation.
