Documents Birkelund, Gunn Elisabeth 3 results

"We explore a range of issues concerning the gender gap in workplace authority in seven countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Norway, and Japan). There are six main empirical conclusions. First, there is considerable cross-national variation in the gender gap in authority: The gap is lowest in the four English-speaking countries (especially the United States and Australia) and highest in Japan. Second, the gender gap in authority within countries and the pattern of cross-national variation do not appear to be the result of gender differences in personal attributes or employment settings. Third, the self-selection hypothesis (that women choose not to seek authority because of family responsibilities) does not appear to account for much of the gender gap in authority, except perhaps in Canada. Fourth, we find little support for the "glass-ceiling" hypothesis that barriers to upward promotions for women in authority hierarchies are greater than the barriers they face in getting into hierarchies in the first place. Fifth, in the United States the barriers faced by women already in hierarchies are weaker than in other countries, and probably weaker than the barriers they faced to enter hierarchies in the first place. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that these variations across countries in the gender gap in authority are explained by the interaction between the availability of managerial positions and the capacity of politically organized women's movements to challenge barriers to women gaining authority in the workplace."

"Spatial assimilation theory claims that immigrants' acculturation and socioeconomic progress will lead to converging neighborhood attainment relative to non-migrant natives. Recently, it has been argued that equalization of local services and life chances across neighborhoods in egalitarian welfare states may delay spatial assimilation by reducing immigrants' incentives to move out of low-income areas with many (co-ethnic) immigrant neighbors. In this article, we extend this argument to study whether neighborhood equalization also contributes to intergenerational persistence in neighborhood contexts among descendants of immigrants in Norway. Using administrative data, we find that immigrant descendants as adults often remain in neighborhood contexts that resemble their childhood neighborhoods, characterized by relative economic disadvantage and comparatively few ethnic majority residents. Intergenerational persistence in neighborhood contexts is strongest among descendants of immigrants from Pakistan, the Middle East, and Africa. The remaining immigrant–native gaps in spatial economic inequality largely reflect differences in individuals' education and earnings, family background, and childhood neighborhood context, but these factors matter less for ethnic neighborhood segregation. For both economic and ethnic dimensions of neighborhood attainment, childhood neighborhood context is the factor that matters most in accounting for immigrant–native gaps, whereas individual socioeconomic attainment is the least important. Overall, our findings point to a pattern of “uneven assimilation” among immigrant descendants, where spatial assimilation is slow despite rapid socioeconomic progress across immigrant generations in the egalitarian Norwegian welfare state."