Progress toward gender equality in the United States has slowed or stalled.

We examine change in multiple indicators of gender inequality for the period of 1970 to 2018. The percentage of women (age 25 to 54) who are employed rose continuously until ∼2000 when it reached its highest point to date of 75%; it was slightly lower at 73% in 2018. Women have surpassed men in receipt of baccalaureate and doctoral degrees. The degree of segregation of fields of study declined dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, but little since then. The desegregation of occupations continues but has slowed its pace. Examining the hourly pay of those aged 25 to 54 who are employed full-time, we found that the ratio of women's to men's pay increased from 0.61 to 0.83 between 1970 and 2018, rising especially fast in the 1980s, but much slower since 1990. In sum, there has been dramatic progress in movement toward gender equality, but, in recent decades, change has slowed and on some indicators stalled entirely.

Migrant mortality differences in the 2000s in Belgium: interaction with gender and the role of socioeconomic position.

BACKGROUND: Belgium has a long history of migration. As the migrant population is ageing, it is crucial thoroughly to document their health. Many studies that have assessed this, observed a migrant mortality advantage. This study will extend the knowledge by probing into the interaction between migrant mortality and gender, and to assess the role of socioeconomic position indicators in this paradox. METHODS: Individually linked data of the 2001 Belgian Census, the National Register and death certificates for 2001-2011 were used. Migrant origin was based on both own and parents' origin roots. We included native Belgians and migrants from the largest migrant groups aged 25 to 65 years. Absolute and relative mortality differences by migrant origin were calculated for the most common causes of death. Moreover, the Poisson models were adjusted for educational attainment, home ownership and employment status. RESULTS: We observed a migrant mortality advantage for most causes of death and migrant groups, which was strongest among men. Adjusting for socioeconomic position generally increased the migrant mortality advantage, however with large differences by gender, migrant origin, socioeconomic position indicator and causes of death. CONCLUSIONS: Adjusting for socioeconomic position even accentuated the migrant mortality advantage although the impact varied by causes of death, migrant origin and gender. This highlights the importance of including multiple socioeconomic position indicators when studying mortality inequalities. Future studies should unravel morbidity patterns too since lower mortality not necessarily implies better health. The observed migrant mortality advantage suggests there is room for improvement. However, it is essential to organize preventative and curative healthcare that is equally accessible across social and cultural strata.

Rethinking industrial citizenship: the role and meaning of work in an age of austerity.

T. H. Marshall in his famous tract Citizenship and Social Class wrote briefly about what he called 'industrial citizenship', a type of belonging rooted in the workplace. Here Marshall's ideas are developed alongside a consideration of Durkheim's Professional Ethics and Civic Morals together with research material from the Guinness Company. It shows the way the Company actively sought to create 'Guinness citizenship' within its London brewery. The article draws out the ways in which the significance and potential of work based citizenship for ameliorating the ills of industrial society are clearly articulated in mid-twentieth century Britain and echo earlier neglected Durkheimian sociological ideas on work. These ideas have real potential to inform contemporary academic and policy debates about the nature of capitalism and the form and content of work now and in the future.

Tenancy and African American Marriage in the Postbellum South.

The pervasiveness of tenancy in the postbellum South had countervailing effects on marriage between African Americans. Tenancy placed severe constraints on African American women's ability to find independent agricultural work. Freedwomen confronted not only planters' reluctance to contract directly with women but also whites' refusal to sell land to African Americans. Marriage consequently became one of African American women's few viable routes into the agricultural labor market. We find that the more counties relied on tenant farming, the more common was marriage among their youngest and oldest African American residents. However, many freedwomen resented their subordinate status within tenant marriages. Thus, we find that tenancy contributed to union dissolution as well as union formation among freedpeople. Microdata tracing individuals' marital transitions are consistent with these county-level results.

Science as an early driver of policy: child labor reform in the early Progressive Era, 1870-1900.

Scientific evidence is an increasingly important driver of social and environmental policy concerning child health. This trend began earlier than generally recognized. The child labor reform movement of the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era reflected not only moral and economic forces but also the dramatic advances during the later decades of the 19th century in scientific knowledge concerning children's biological and psychological vulnerability to environmental and psychosocial stressors. The growing importance of scientific information in shaping policy concerning children's health between 1870 and 1900 is illustrated by the events leading up to and following the New York State Child Labor Law of 1886. Child labor reform during this period was a critical step in the development of a science-based as well as a value-driven movement to protect children's environmental health and well-being that continues today.

The impact of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic on economic performance in Sweden: an investigation into the consequences of an extraordinary mortality shock.

We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on short- and medium-term economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only scant attention in the economic literature--despite representing an unparalleled labour supply shock. In this paper, we exploit seemingly exogenous variation in incidence rates between Swedish regions to estimate the impact of the pandemic. The pandemic led to a significant increase in poorhouse rates. There is also evidence that capital returns were negatively affected by the pandemic. However, contrary to predictions, we find no discernible effect on earnings.

Sources of sibling (dis)similarity: total family impact on status variation in The Netherlands in the nineteenth century.

The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in The Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal resemblance through the value and inequality of family resources based on a job competition model in combination with modernization theory, status maintenance theory, and dualism theory. The authors use the high-quality, large-scale database GENLIAS, yielding digitized information for approximately 450,000 linked Dutch marriage certificates from 250,000 families, complemented with historical indicators of six modernization processes for over 2,500 communities. Using multilevel meta-regression models, they find that brother correlations in status decreased slowly from about 1860 onward. Although this exactly parallels the period of modernization, the authors find that modernization processes were not responsible (except possibly urbanization and mass transportation). In fact, in line with dualism theory, fraternal resemblance increased with most processes (i.e., industrialization, educational expansion, in-migration, and mass communication) because they amplified in-equality.

Precarious employment, ill health, and lessons from history: the case of casual (temporary) dockworkers 1880-1945.

An international body of scientific research indicates that growth of job insecurity and precarious forms of employment over the past 35 years have had significant negative consequences for health and safety. Commonly overlooked in debates over the changing world of work is that widespread use of insecure and short-term work is not new, but represents a return to something resembling labor market arrangements found in rich countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, the adverse health effects of precarious employment were extensively documented in government inquiries and in health and medical journals. This article examines the case of a large group of casual dockworkers in Britain. It identifies the mechanisms by which precarious employment was seen to undermine workers and families' health and safety. The article also shows the British dockworker experience was not unique and there are important lessons to be drawn from history. First, historical evidence reinforces just how health-damaging precarious employment is and how these effects extend to the community, strengthening the case for social and economic policies that minimize precarious employment. Second, there are striking parallels between historical evidence and contemporary research that can inform future research on the health effects of precarious employment.

Collateral damage: the German food crisis, educational attainment and labor market outcomes of German post-war cohorts.

Using the German 1970 census to study educational and labor market outcomes of cohorts born during the German food crisis after World War II, I document that those born between November 1945 and May 1946 have significantly lower educational attainment and occupational status than cohorts born shortly before or after. Several alternative explanations for this finding are tested. Most likely, a short spell of severe undernutrition around the end of the war has impaired intrauterine conditions in early pregnancies and resulted in long-term detriments among the affected cohorts. This conjecture is corroborated by evidence from Austria.

The impact of childhood sickness on adult socioeconomic outcomes: evidence from late 19th century America.

We use family fixed-effects models to estimate the impact of childhood health on adult literacy, labor force outcomes, and marital status among pairs of white brothers observed as children in the 1880 U.S. Census and then as adults in the 1900-1930 Censuses. Given our focus on the 19th century, we observed a wider array of infectious, chronic, and traumatic health problems than is observed using data that are more recent; our results thus provide some insights into circumstances in modern developing countries where similar health problems are more frequently observed. Compared to their healthy siblings, sick brothers were less likely to be located (and thus more likely to be dead) 20-50 years after their 1880 enumeration. Sick brothers were also less likely to be literate, to have ever been married, and to have reported an occupation. However, among those with occupations, sick and healthy brothers tended to do similar kinds of work. We discuss the implications of our results for research on the impact of childhood health on socioeconomic outcomes in developed and developing countries.

Care workers, care drain, and care chains: reflections on care, migration, and citizenship.

In this article, we discuss a case study that deals with the care chain phenomenon and focuses on the question of how Poland and the Ukraine as sending countries and Poland as a receiving country are affected and deal with female migrant domestic workers. We look at the ways in which these women organize care replacement for their families left behind and at those families' care strategies. As public discourse in both countries is reacting to the feminization of migration in a form that specifically questions the social citizenship obligations of these women, we also look at the media portrayal of the situation of nonmigrating children. Finally, we explore how different aspects of citizenship matter in transnational care work migration movements.

Transnational spaces of care: migrant nurses in Norway.

This article argues that international nurse recruitment from Latvia to Norway is not a win­win situation. The gains and losses of nurse migration are unevenly distributed between sender and receiver countries. On the basis of empirical research and interviews with Latvian nurses and families they left behind, this article argues that nurse migration transforms families and communities and that national health services now become global workplaces. Some decades ago feminist research pointed to the fact that the welfare state was based on a male breadwinner family and women's unpaid production of care work at home. Today this production of unpaid care is "outsourced" from richer to poorer countries and is related to an emergence of transnational spaces of care. International nurse recruitment and global nurse care chains in Norway increasingly provide the labor that prevents the new adult worker model and gender equality politics from being disrupted in times where families are overloaded with elder care loads.

Gender, space, and the location changes of jobs and people: a spatial simultaneous equations analysis.

This article summarizes a spatial econometric analysis of local population and employment growth in the Netherlands, with specific reference to impacts of gender and space. The simultaneous equations model used distinguishes between population- and gender-specific employment groups, and includes autoregressive and cross-regressive spatial lags to detect relations both within and among these groups. Spatial weights matrices reflecting different bands of travel times are used to calculate the spatial lags and to gauge the spatial nature of these relations. The empirical results show that although population­employment interaction is more localized for women's employment, no gender difference exists in the direction of interaction. Employment growth for both men and women is more influenced by population growth than vice versa. The interaction within employment groups is even more important than population growth. Women's, and especially men's, local employment growth mostly benefits from the same employment growth in neighboring locations. Finally, interaction between these groups is practically absent, although men's employment growth may have a negative impact on women's employment growth within small geographic areas. In summary, the results confirm the crucial roles of gender and space, and offer important insights into possible relations within and among subgroups of jobs and people.

Salesclerks, sexual danger, and national identity in Egypt, 1920s-1950s.

This article investigates change and continuity in anxieties about shopping during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt to argue that department stores and their salesclerks became critical sites for enacting and challenging new notions of sexuality and citizenship. Retail innovations, such as commission pay, display, free entry, and large commercial staffs, became understood as sexual and moral problems because department stores blurred the boundaries between classes and were public spaces where unrelated men and women could mix. These concerns about sexuality in the 1920s were recycled and amplified in the late 1940s and early 1950s when salesclerks again came under scrutiny during debates over citizenship and ethnicity. I argue that the particular way this latter debate was barnacled by the concerns of the 1920s helped to delineate the broader society's reaction to the challenges of defining Egyptian nationality.