Research Making the News

Report: Child-Care Barrier for OR Parents in College

| Eric Tegethoff | April 15, 2021

Oregon college students who also are parents often struggle to find affordable child care. New research details the accessibility issues facing about 42,000 student parents or guardians in the state. Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, managing director of the student-parent success initiative at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, said Oregon schools that provide campus-based care dropped from 16 a decade ago to 12 in 2019, and that was largely at community colleges where the most student parents are enrolled. She said child care is critical for some students. Reichlin Cruse said she thinks Oregon needs to increase the amount of child care available, especially in rural areas. The report noted that the state has a robust network of campus child-care centers and recommended expanding existing early-learning programs to serve student parents.

Citing: Child Care Access for Student Parents in Oregon: Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Educational and Economic Success by Susana Contreras-Mendez, Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, and Tessa Holtzman at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (April 8, 2021)

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Young Women Are Dropping Out of School and Work. Is Caregiving the Culprit?

| Alisha Haridasani Gupta | April 8, 2021

New research suggests that the number of “disconnected” young people — defined as those who are neither in school nor the work force — is growing. For young women, the caregiving crisis may be a major reason they have put on hold their education or careers. A recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, using the Current Population Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has smaller sample sizes but produces faster snapshots of data, found that the rates of disconnected young people jumped sharply from 2019 to 2020 among Black, Latina and Native American women. […] Young women are also much more likely than young men to be single parents, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research study noted, putting them in the stressful position during the pandemic of choosing between bringing in a paycheck or caring for their children.

Citing: Out of Work, Taking on Care: Young Women Face Mounting Challenges in the “She-Cession” by Shengwei Sun at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (April 6, 2021)

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Why ‘Zoom fatigue’ is worse for women, according to new study

| Nancy Clanton | April 15, 2021

“Zoom fatigue” — that feeling of being drained at the end of an online meeting — is not only real, a new study finds, but it affects women more than men. For their study, researchers at Stanford University used “Zoom” as a general catch-all for video conferencing. The Stanford team found that overall, one in seven women — 13.8% — compared with one in 20 men — 5.5% — reported feeling “very” to “extremely” fatigued after Zoom calls. What exhausted women most, the researchers found, was an increase in what social psychologists describe as “self-focused attention” triggered by the self-view in video conferencing. The Stanford study also found that although women and men have about the same number of daily meetings, the women’s meetings tend to run longer with shorter breaks between them — all factors that contributed to increased weariness.

Citing: Nonverbal Mechanisms Predict Zoom Fatigue and Explain Why Women Experience Higher Levels than Men by Geraldine Fauville, Mufan Luo, Anna Carolina Muller Queiroz, Jeremy N. Bailenson, and Jeff Hancock at Stanford University (April 5, 2021)

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Women’s mental, financial well-being have suffered more than men’s during pandemic, study finds

| Caitlin Mullen | April 12, 2021

From money concerns and caregiving duties, to Covid-19 worries and the strain of isolation, the pandemic has understandably stressed employee well-being, but a new study highlights just how disproportionate the impact has been on women. MetLife, which polled more than 2,600 full-time workers as part of its 19th annual U.S. Employee Benefits Trends Study, found women’s mental, physical, social and financial health have fallen significantly since April 2020, while men’s health in these aspects has remained mostly unchanged. About 62% of women workers report feeling mentally healthy now, down from 69% in April 2020. By comparison, 75% of men employees said they’re feeling mentally healthy — practically no change from 76% last April. Additionally, as the pandemic has dragged on, fewer women employees feel successful (62% vs. 71%), engaged (65% vs. 75%) and productive (74% vs. 82%) than they did last spring. Again, men’s feelings of success, engagement and productivity remain mostly unchanged since last April.

Citing: MetLife’s 19th Annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study 2021 by MetLife (April 2021)

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Research says Facebook’s ad algorithm perpetuates gender bias

| Sam Biddle | April 8, 2021

New research from a team at the University of Southern California provides further evidence that Facebook’s advertising system is discriminatory, showing that the algorithm used to target ads reproduced real-world gender disparities when showing job listings, even among equally qualified candidates. In fields from software engineering to sales to food delivery, the team ran sets of ads promoting real job openings at roughly equivalent companies requiring roughly the same skills, one for a company whose existing workforce was disproportionately male and one that was disproportionately female. Facebook showed more men the ads for the disproportionately male companies and more women the ads for the disproportionately female companies, even though the job qualifications were the same. The paper concludes that Facebook could very well be violating federal anti-discrimination laws.

Citing: Auditing for Discrimination in Algorithms Delivering Job Ads by Basileal Imana, Aleksandra Korolova, and John Heidemann at the University of Southern California (April 8, 2021)

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The pandemic may set women back by a whole generation

| Ishaan Tharoor | April 2, 2021

The social damage wrought by what’s been dubbed the “shadow pandemic” may be felt for decades to come. That’s the grim conclusion of an annual report on the global gender gap released this week by the World Economic Forum, which keeps an index on “gender parity” in 156 countries. Based on its graded evaluations in each country on four broad benchmarks — ranging from women’s participation in politics and the economy to access to health and education — the organization had previously forecast that gender parity was a century away. But the effect of the pandemic has now added roughly 36 years to its calculation, effectively the span of another generation.

Citing: Global Gender Gap Report 2021 by Robert Crotti, Kusum Kali Pal, Vesselina Ratcheva, and Saadia Zahidi at the World Economic Forum (March 2021)

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New Research Reports

The Student Parent Equity Imperative: Guidance for the Biden-Harris Administration

Institute for Women’s Policy Research | Chaunté White and Lindsey Reichlin Cruse | April 13, 2021

The memorandum serves as a call to the Biden-Harris administration to include parenting students and their families in its policymaking efforts tied to postsecondary education, early care and education access, and social welfare. It provides policy recommendations to prioritize student parents and their families’ wellbeing and contribute to the development of sustainable and equitable pathways to educational attainment. The recommendations span four areas: supporting student parents’ college access and success, building affordable pathways to college for student parents, expanding caregiving support and child care access for student parents, and increasing basic needs security for student parent families.

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A Lifetime’s Worth of Benefits: The Effects of Affordable, High Quality Child Care on Family Income, the Gender Earnings Gap, and Women’s Retirement Security

National Women’s Law Center | Robert Paul Hartley, Ajay Chaudry, Melissa Boteach, Estelle Mitchell, and Kathryn Menefee | April 12, 2021

Parents are paying more than they can afford. Providers are not being paid enough. In short, the lack of public investment in care infrastructure is one important reason that women—as both paid child care providers and mothers—bring home less pay, experience higher poverty rates than men at every stage of life, and are less secure in retirement. Parents are paying more than they can afford. Providers are not being paid enough. In short, the lack of public investment in care infrastructure is one important reason that women—as both paid child care providers and mothers—bring home less pay, experience higher poverty rates than men at every stage of life, and are less secure in retirement. In short, investing in high-quality, affordable child care not only supports families, the development of children, and the communities of families and providers in real-time, but has additional effects that increase economic security for women and families throughout their lives.

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The Enormous Impact of Eroded Collective Bargaining on Wages

Economic Policy Institute | Lawrence Mishel | April 8, 2021

A major factor depressing wage growth for middle earners and driving the growth of wage inequality over the last four decades has been the erosion of collective bargaining. Indeed, the only factor more responsible for weak wage growth for the typical worker is the excessive unemployment perpetrated by central bank policymakers’ high interest rate policies and fiscal austerity. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement fell from 27.0% in 1979 to just 11.6% in 2019. The erosion of collective bargaining has been especially harmful to men’s wages because men were far more likely than women to be unionized in 1979 (when 31.5% of men were covered by collective bargaining versus 18.8% of women). Thus men had more to lose from the subsequent attack on unions and collective bargaining.

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Perceptions of Discrimination and Unfair Judgment While Seeking Health Care

Urban Institute | Dulce Gonzalez, Laura Skopec, Marla McDaniel, and Genevieve M. Kenney | April 5, 2021

In this brief, we draw from the most recent wave of the Urban Institute’s Coronavirus Tracking Survey, a nationally representative survey of nonelderly adults conducted between September 11 and September 28, 2020. That survey wave asked respondents whether in the last 12 months they had ever felt a doctor, other health care provider, or their staff judged them unfairly or discriminated against them based on their race/ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, a disability, or a health condition and about the consequences of these experiences. Our questions were broad, allowing respondents to select multiple reasons for these perceptions of discrimination or unfair judgment. We focused on perceptions of discrimination by health care providers and their staff, so we do not capture interactions with other actors in the health care system, such as pharmacists or health insurance companies.

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The Economic Impact of Supporting Working Family Caregivers

AARP | April 2021

People age 50-plus in the U.S. spent an average of 164 hours per year caring for adults, equivalent to over $260 billion in the total value of caregiving. By better engaging and supporting these caregiving efforts, the U.S. could both maintain and support this invaluable contribution and enable greater workforce participation among family caregivers of all ages, especially those age 50-plus. While caregiving cuts across all generations, this AARP study explores the potential economic benefits that can be captured if employers and governments provide better support for working family caregivers age 50-plus, enabling them to remain more active participants in the labor force. The prolonged economic downturn makes it especially important for working family caregivers—particularly workers age 50-plus who are in their peak earning years—to stay in the workforce.

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The Impact of Paid Family Leave on Employers: Evidence from New York

National Bureau of Economic Research | Ann P. Bartel, Maya Rossin-Slater, Christopher J. Ruhm, Meredith Slopen, and Jane Waldfogel | April 2021

We study the introduction of New York’s PFL policy, which was the fourth state-level PFL policy implemented in the U.S. (following California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island), taking effect in January 2018. We designed and fielded a survey over the years 2016 to 2019, using a representative sample of firms with 10 to 99 employees in New York and Pennsylvania, a neighboring state without a PFL policy. Our survey asked employers to rate their employees’ performance, as well as the ease of coordinating work schedules and handling employee absences of various durations. We find that PFL leads to an improvement in employers' rating of their ease of handling long employee absences, concentrated in the first policy year and among firms with 50-99 employees. We also find an increase in employee leave-taking in the second policy year, driven by smaller firms.

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