The intergenerational sources of the U-turn in gender segregation
Organizer
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University
Event Title
Sociology Seminar Series 2022-2023
Document Type
Public Seminar
Date
9-29-2022
Time
11:00 a.m. -- 12:30 p.m.
Venue
Online Session via Zoom
Department
Sociology and Social Policy
Description
In the early 1970s, the balkanization of the US labor market into “men’s occupations” and “women’s occupations” began to unravel, as women entered the professions and other male typed sectors in record numbers. This decline in gender segregation continued on for several decades but then suddenly stalled at the turn of the century and shows no signs of resuming. Although the stall is itself undisputed, its sources remain unclear. Based on her most recent work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in coauthorship with Dr David Grusky, Dr Zhu showed that a resurgence in segregation inducing forms of intergenerational transmission stands behind the recent stall. Far from serving as impartial conduits, fathers are now disproportionately conveying male typed occupations to their sons, whereas mothers are effectively gender neutral in their transmission outcomes. This segregative turn among fathers accounts for 47 of the stall in the gender segregation trend (between 2000 and 2018), while the earlier integrative turn among fathers accounts for 34 of the initial downturn in segregation (between 1972 and 1999). It follows that a U turn in intergenerational processes lies behind the U turn in gender segregation.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Zhu, L. (2022, September 29). The intergenerational sources of the U-turn in gender segregation [Video podcast]. Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/videos/956/
Additional Information
Speaker Biography
Dr Zhu received an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. Before moving to Hong Kong, she was a post doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality. Her overarching research interests consist of two substantive topics and one methodological theme: (1) state governance in authoritarian regimes how the bureaucratic organizations are structured and the bureaucrats are incentivized to maintain a delicate balance between political control (which requires power centralization) and regional development (which requires power de centralization), (2) mechanisms of reproducing economic inequality, gender segregation, and family advantages/disadvantages in China and in the United States, and (3) understanding misuses of causal inference methodology