RESEARCH MAKING THE NEWS
Reproductive Coercion ‘Much More Prevalent’ Than Once Thought
By: Auditi Guha | 
| 10.24.2018
Eighty-four percent of these survivors of reproductive coercion became pregnant. This is one of the findings from a survey of 164 survivors in domestic violence programs and shelters conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). The survey, which was administered to survivors in 11 states and D.C., explores how abuse affects their abilities to secure and keep jobs, choose when to start families, and maintain good credit. The report, released Wednesday, shows how abuse keeps survivors from achieving economic security. “I fantasize about having a well-furnished, cozy home for my children and me …the ability to always provide. I want a cozy, happy life so bad it hurts,” said one of the women in the report.
Citing: Dreams Deferred: A Survey on the Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Survivors’ Education, Careers, and Economic Security by Cynthia Hess, Ph.D., and Alona Del Rosario, M.A., Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Oct 2018
What #MeToo Has to Do With the Workplace Gender Gap
By: Vanessa Fuhrmans | 
| 10.23.2018
The #MeToo movement has thrown a glaring spotlight on the gender gap in the workplace. For the past year, a collective national reckoning about the sexual pressure many women encounter on the job has pervaded offices, factory floors and break rooms. Women have come forward with painful secrets, and powerful men have been toppled. What has been less apparent, though, is how harassment and the gender gap are inextricably linked. In fact, management experts and executives say, harassment can be a direct side effect of a workplace that slights women on everything from pay to promotions, especially when the perception is that men run the show and women can’t speak up.
Citing: Women in the Workplace 2018 by Mckinsey&Company at Lean In, 2018
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Blue-collar Men are Riding America’s Economic Wave. Women? Not so much.
By: Danielle Paquette | 
| 10.23.2018
Well-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree are multiplying at the fastest rate in three decades, offering more Americans a path to the middle class. But economists warn one group is missing out: women. A new report from Georgetown University found there are now about 13 million jobs nationwide that require only a high school diploma and pay at least $35,000 annually, a higher wage than most entry-level service roles. Three-quarters of them, however, belong to men.
“If you don’t have that degree, you better be a guy,” said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
Citing: Three Educational Pathways to Good Jobs by Anthony Carnevale, Jeff Stohl, Neil Ridley, and Artem Gulishat Georgetown University, 2018
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1495 Americans Describe the Financial Reality of Being Really Sick
By: Margot Sanger Katz | 
| 10.17.2018
The New York Times, the Commonwealth Fund and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health used the survey to examine the sliver of the American population who use the health care system the most. To be included in the results, a respondent had to have been hospitalized twice in the last two years, and to have seen at least three doctors. In some cases, when patients had died or were too ill to answer questions, relatives who had taken care of them participated in their place. Their experiences may serve as an early warning system for problems that all of us may face: Because the estimated 40 million people in this population visit doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and pharmacies the most, they are the likeliest to see the weak points in the health care system.
Citing: Health Care in America: The Experience of People with Serious Illness by Eric C. Schneider, Melinda Abrams, Arnav Shah, Corinne Lewis, and Tanya Shah at Common Wealth Fund and Harvard School of Public Health, October, 2018.
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How Raising the Minimum Wage Keeps Excons from Going Back to the Prison
By: Jacob Passy | 
| 10.03.2018
Married men far outpaced single men and single and married women in their wages and salary through their careers, according to the report. Unmarried men and women have very little difference in income, according to the analysis of all people employed in 2016 with at least a high school diploma. But for women, getting married does little to improve wages, the St. Louis Fed study found. The data doesn’t necessarily mean that being married increases a man’s wages, according to the analysis by Guillaume Vandenbroucke, a research officer at the Fed. It may mean men earning higher wages are more likely to marry and lower-income men remain single, the Fed found.
Citing: The Minimum Wage, EITC and Criminal Recidivism by Amanda y. Agan and Michael D. Makowsky at the National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2018
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NEW RESEARCH REPORTS
Strategies for Meeting the Demand for Advanced Manufacturing and Ship Building Workers: Women Only Pre-Apprenticeship Programs in Mississippi and West Virginia
By: Ariane Hegewisch, Institute for Women’s Policy Research for the National Center for Women’s Equity in Apprenticeship and Employment at Chicago Women in the Trades l Oct, 2018
Apprenticeships in advanced manufacturing and the trades offer pathways to good jobs with family-sustaining wages and benefits and are a proven and cost-effective model for employers seeking to ensure that they can meet their future need for skilled workers. […]This brief describes how two women-only pre-apprenticeship programs, West Virginia Women Work’s Step Up for Women and Moore Community House’ Women in Construction program in Mississippi, are preparing women for career pathways that meet the needs of families as well as the demands of the manufacturing and shipbuilding industry. This report is based on site visits and interviews with program leaders, participants, employers, and other program partners.
Women Only Pre-Apprenticeship Programs: Meeting Skills Needs and Creating Pathways to Good Jobs for Women
By: Ariane Hegewisch and Julie Andersen, Institute for Women’s Policy Research l National Center for Women’s Equity in Apprenticeship and Employment at Chicago Women in the Trades l Oct, 2018
This briefing paper profiles three women-only pre-apprenticeship programs7 – Chicago Women in the Trades (CWIT), New York’s Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), and Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. (OT) that are achieving impressive results in improving gender and racial diversity in apprenticeship programs.8 Where these programs operate, women’s share of registered apprenticeships is at least twice as high as the national average, and in the double digits in several key apprenticeship programs, showing that women-only pre-apprenticeship programs are an important component in creating greater diversity in the trades.
The Effects of Universal Preschool in Washington D.C
By: Rasheer Malik l Center for American Progress l Sept, 2018
This report focuses on maternal labor force participation—in this case, mothers with a child younger than 5 years old—because most frequently, the parent who is on the margin of participating in the labor force is female. For the purposes of this report, the term “young children” refers to those under 5 years old, and the term “maternal labor force participation rate” refers to the share of women whose children are under age 5 and who are either working or actively seeking employment.
Rethinking Gender Pay Inequality in a More Transparent World
By: Mita Goldar, Chrisopher Ryan, and Ahu Yildrimaz l ADP Research Institute l Sept, 2018
As employment practices in the United States have evolved, so has federal and state legislation. Starting with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Congress has passed at least nine major bills addressing discrimination to help ensure the legal protections for pay equity are enforced across various protected categories, such as race, religion, ethnicity, disability, age, and national origin. More recently, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which amends the 180-day statute for filing an equal-pay lawsuit to reset with each new paycheck impacted by the original act of discrimination. States have added their own guidelines. The California Fair Pay Act, for example, looks past job classification to examine the situation of employees who perform “substantially similar work,” and forbids retaliation against workers who share their personal compensation information with co-workers. Multiple states explicitly focus on total compensation rather than only base pay. Some states and local jurisdictions, such as Massachusetts and New York City, are advancing ordinances that forbid an employer to request the salary history of a prospective employee for purposes of negotiating salaries
Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality
By: Armin Falk and Johannes Herme l Science l Oct, 2018
Preferences concerning time, risk, and social interactions systematically shape human behavior and contribute to differential economic and social outcomes between women and men. We present a global investigation of gender differences in six fundamental preferences. Our data consist of measures of willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust for 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples. Gender differences in preferences were positively related to economic development and gender equality. This finding suggests that greater availability of and gender-equal access to material and social resources favor the manifestation of gender-differentiated preferences across countries
