Blog 12

Occupational segregation can refer to race, religion, sexual orientation, age, and gender among many things. Gender occupational segregation occurs regardless of laws set in place by EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although men and women should be getting paid the same amount and have the same opportunities for advancement they do not. Women receive about 70% of men’s wages in the same occupation despite education, experience, and other background factors. Men and women have been unequal since the founding of country- women had to work for land owning privileges, voting rights, and had to make a place for themselves in the women place while men were away at war. It is a slow process of men and women becoming completely equal and as a country we are working towards it. A social factor that contributes to occupational segregation is the idea of women staying at home to raise children while the men are the breadwinners in the family. This idea is slowly becoming a thing of the past while more women are graduating from college than men and les women are getting married and having children at a young age. Women have some advantage by breaking into male occupations such as making more money. If women break into industries which men are usually in them can make more money than in traditional women jobs. An IT worker, construction manager, or car repairer will make more than a receptionist, house cleaner, or another job that women usually hold. Another advantage is many male dominated careers are just that-careers, not jobs. With a career they will have a long term job with possible advancements versus just a dead end job. Men lose in the workplace when women enter because it is a surprise if women excel in male dominated jobs. Upper management will be more impressed with women who are completing the same tasks as a male because women do not usually do it. It is interesting that women are slowly beginning to step into a normally male dominated career as social norms are changing. More women are getting careers versus staying at home to raise a family and are relying less on men to support them. As women become more independent and gender laws are more enforced then women can eventually be equal to men in the workplace.

Blog #11

I read an article from the AFLCIO website, which is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the article was titled “Helping Women Workers Helps Us All” by James Parks. According to the article, working women make up 40% of the work force. This article talks about other factors women face on the job- sexual harassment, unequal wages, and maternity leave benefits. A problem women face, which men do not, is harassment from coworkers. Most sexual harassment charges are male to female, not females acting on males. This brings up a story I read one time about a woman who was afraid to tell on her male counterpart for harassing her because she thought she may lose her job over it. If she did go to human resources and the male was fired she was afraid that her fellow coworkers would look down upon her, this one problem men do have in work force. Women’s wages are still only 77 cents to every dollar that a man makes, which is not equal by any means. It does not seem fair that a woman and a man in the same position could optionally get paid different amounts. Although education, experience, and years on the jobs should be taken into a consideration men are usually paid more than women. Finally, not all jobs offer maternity leave for mothers. It is hard for a mother have a child and then immediately go back to work. Our text book mentions that the time from when a child is born till when they are entered into childcare by someone other than the parents is getting younger and younger. The fact many work places do not offere any sort of paternity leave to males shows that is it a social stigma that women take care of child therefore only maternity leave is offered. This article was written September 16, 2009 and covered many topics covered at the AFL-CIO Convention, its interestingly enough brings up points not made by readings or videos in this section.

Blog #9

In the Official Story of “Who are America’s Poor Children” the authors explain many statistics related to the families that are considered poor. The article starts off with a good point- that the number of children living gin poverty has increased by over 11 percent between 2000 and 2005, despite the positive changes in the economy (Fass and Cauthen). It raises an important question, why are more children living in poverty if the economy improved between 2002 and 2005? One can look at the conditions of poor working women and how the federal poverty level does not accurately represent how much a family needs to live off of. Poor working women have a hard time getting off food stamps because of conditions in the work place. Most of the time these women are working minimum wage jobs and do not have any other options. They do not move vertically at the their job because of they can only work limited hours due to their children. Also, if a child gets sick or childcare falls through they will have to miss work. The term ‘glass ceiling” is usually applied to work in the corporate realm; when we women cannot go past a certain level of management because the upper management jobs are only for men. Its seems like there is also a glass floor, women cannot get out of their minimum wage jobs and obtain a good paying, full time position. It seems like the poor women are stuck in the basement of jobs and the glass floor is keeping them in the low paying job. The article also mentions how many of low income families are minorities. The major races mentioned were Asian, Mexican, and Black- this also applies to the children. Overall, the conditions that are keeping women in low income jobs are part of the reason children are in poverty.

Blog #8

The term “urban poverty” was coined by William Julius Wilson in New Work Disappears; The World of New Urban Poor where he analyzed demographic data from inner city neighbors in the Chicago area. He states that decline of labor in urban areas and migration of well workers to other areas leaves a concentration of unskilled, unemployed people. He then mentions that since so many poor people are concentrated in one area the schools, churches, and other social programs are weakened (Chaudry 128). What happens in these situations is that single women are stuck in these areas because they have no means of moving away. They are too poor to move to another neighborhood or to leave their current job, if they even have one. An important point about these concentrated areas of poverty is they become extremely unsafe and dangerous. Wilson mentions that drug dealing and other activity is prominent in these areas; which makes it unsafe to raise children in these areas. In one of the videos, the mother was aware that she could not let her children play outside because it was too dangerous. The middle class people who once lived in the area move away because the neighbor is getting bad, which means their vacancies invite more people to move in. Businesses are going to close down and new ones are not going to open in areas of little to no money which means no jobs for poor women. If these women lived in an area of mixed classes they could let their children play outside, rely on neighbors for childcare, and possibly have job opportunities. The neighborhood would be more inviting for new businesses and middle class people to move in. In urban poverty centers the concentration of poor gets higher and higher where as in mixed class areas, it stays the same.

This idea of “urban poverty” reminds me of a similar concept I learned about in Criminal Justice 350: Law and Social Control. This theory was called the “broken window” theory; it is said that if a window in an abandoned building was broken and left unfixed then the other windows in the building would be broken too. The other windows would be vandalized because one broken window means that no one cares about the building. Once all the windows are broken, maybe other vandalism starts to occur, groups of juveniles gather on corners, more people are drinking on the streets, and maybe more homeless come to the neighborhood. More homeless and increased crime on the streets make the neighborhood unsafe and affluent families move out so only the poor are left. In essence “urban poverty” and the “broken window” theory from James Wilson have the same agenda, small steps until the entire neighborhood is a concentration of poor, unskilled, and unemployed people. Overall, there seems to be a general consensus that living in urban areas that are going downhill is a dangerous place to raise a family.

Blog #7

In chapter three of Chaudry’s Putting Families First, they explain the plethora of child care sources that Julia had to put her daughter, Jacqueline, in before she was four years old. Over the first four years of Jacqueline’s life, she had six different child care “spells”. There were many factors that contributed to Julia’s situation- absence of a father, pursuing education, unreliable welfare programs, low paying internships, loss of grants if working, and miscommunication between different programs. Many women are at the low-income poverty level because they are single parents; they are raising multiple children on their own because the father is not around or imprisoned. In attempt to get a fulltime job and further their educational accomplishments, many mothers return to school. Although a higher academic status is ideal when looking for a job, a mother must consider childcare while she is at school and how she will pay tuition. The Work Experience Program that provided welfare for Julia was often late in childcare payments or did not write the checks for the correct amount. If there is not a reliable source of payment for childcare then the childcare is not stable; the WEP lost of all her paper work therefore completely stopped making payments. Although internships and even jobs can help pay for household costs, many times grants or other funding can be cut if there is another source of income. Also, when women are working a minimum wage job it is hard to make advances in pay because the only other jobs they are offered are also minimum wage. Most minimum wage jobs do not offer benefits or health insurance, but if someone is working they are not eligible for grants or government help. In the video, one man sometimes had to skip on his prescription drugs because he did not have enough money. It almost seems that minimum wage jobs are not even worth having because it disqualifies an individual from government aid and it is not enough to support a household. In the end Chaudry concluded that “when Jacqueline was in her most stable care arrangements that Julia was able to move from progressively better internship experiences into a full-time job and off of welfare” (Page 94). Since minimum wage jobs do not yield stable childcare, it is hard to single mothers to obtain fulltime jobs.