"Controlling for what?" Folk economics, legal consciousness and the gender wage gap in the United States

Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of the gender wage gap in the United States, this article showcases how stylized facts travel into political debates, and how the choices made in characterizing an aspect of economic life (such as controlling for full-time work, but little else) interact with social movement activism, and folk understandings of economic life shaped by legal consciousness. The gender wage gap was first calculated in the 1950s, but did not take on special importance until the 1960s-1970s when feminists rallied around the statistic as a useful aggregate measure of women's economic disempowerment. Academics soon followed, and sociologists and economists began to publish studies documenting trends in the gap and trying to account for its sources. The comparable worth movement of the 1980s explicitly argued that the wage gap resulted from occupational segregation and the devaluation of women's work. As that movement faltered in the late 1980s, the gender wage gap became increasingly understood through the lens of women's choices and tradeoffs between work and family, and occupational segregation dropped out of the narrative, even as academics documented the persistent importance of segregation in explaining the remaining gap. Throughout this period, the gap was frequently misunderstood or misrepresented as reflecting the narrow sort of same-job, different-pay discrimination made illegal by the 1963 Equal Pay Act, adding confusion to the public debate over women's economic position. These dynamics showcase how technical choices made in the identification of stylized facts, such as statistical controls, are simultaneously deeply political choices.

Diagnostics of social policy challenges in the field of labor relations of Russian mothers having preschool children

The article considers the social policy of the state in the field of labor relations of Russian mothers with preschool children and the main challenges faced by mothers in this area. The author of the research paper analyses such problems as female unemployment, occupational segregation, discrimination; issues associated with the functioning of a socially fair system for designed to protect working mothers, problems associated with combining family obligations and raising children with labor activity. The article is based on the results of the author’s sociological study of representatives of this category conducted by the author in the spring of 2020. The suggestions of respondents for solving the problems under consideration are outlined.

A five-decade review of gender-based occupational segregation: A bibliometric study of influential authors, institutions, and research clusters

Despite the proliferation of occupational segregation research, only a limited amount has explored it from a gender perspective. The attention that has been given is widely scattered and requires an analysis to identify the major works undertaken and the changes over time. This study aimed to examine and assimilate articles published on gender-based occupational segregation through a bibliometric analysis. The study examined 512 articles published from the early 1970s to 2020 that were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The findings suggest that gender and occupational segregation remain an extensive field of research, although this research comes mainly from North American and European countries. The low representation from developing countries indicates that more research is needed based on these different socio-cultural settings. This study identified three dominant research clusters, namely gendered organisational structures and systems, measurement of occupational segregation, and wage differential. Studies also covered areas including conceptualization, LGBTQ issues, and the role of legislation and institutions in reducing workplace inequalities; thus, providing a direction for scholars and practitioners.