FY 1994 Annual Report to the Regents

Highlights from Social Science Research, 1994

UM social scientists reported the rates at which people escape from poverty in the United States and eight other Western, industrialized nations. The study shatters the myth that the United States offers the brightest hope to those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Low income families in Europe and Canada are just as likely as their U.S. counterparts to escape from poverty and much less likely to be poverty stricken in the first place, according to the study by Greg Duncan, professor of economics, and researchers in the Institute for Social Research. The study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the United States.

"We've known for almost twenty years now that a substantial proportion of the American poor escape from poverty," says Duncan. "What is surprising is that there's so much mobility in tradition-bound, class-conscious, welfare-state European countries." The results of the comparative study make it clear that the most important difference between poverty in the United States and in the eight other Western nations studied is that poverty in the U.S. is more prevalent and more severe. The research was funded by the Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and European Science foundations.

--Taylor Cox, Jr.

Do Black women in management suffer a double whammy or enjoy a double advantage in their careers? A study of 375 members of the National Black MBA Association suggests neither phrase accurately depicts the experience of Black women managers in corporate America. Black men and women moved up their organizations at nearly identical rates, according to Taylor Cox, Jr., associate professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at the UM School of Business Administration. But Black men reported much less satisfaction with their rate of advancement than Black women. Different predictors of upward mobility for men and women emerged from the study, with Black women advancing better in large organizations where they had mentors.

The gender wage gap is steep at the top of the career ladder, according to a study of nearly 900 graduates of the UM Law School. Female attorneys earned about 40 percent less than their male counterparts 15 years after graduating from law school. Only part of this wage gap can be attributed to family obligations and the part-time work or time off taken to care for children. Nor can it be explained totally by women being more likely than men to work in relatively low-paying areas of government or legal services. The study, "Pay Differences Among the Highly Paid: The Male-Female Earning Gap in Lawyers' Salaries," was prepared by UM economists Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant of the Institute of Public Policy Studies and Robert Wood of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation.

--Sheryl Olson

"Children who can wait for rewards not only exhibit greater patience, but they also show an understanding of implicit adult expectations. They have greater social sensitivity and a clearer understanding of social rules," says Olson.

Children who hit others are just as likely to use moral reasoning as other kids, but they hold different views of when using violence is acceptable, according to Ron Astor, assistant professor of social work and education. His study examined the judgments and reasoning patterns of 108 violent and non-violent inner city youth ages 8, 10, and 12. Intervention programs based on the assumption that violence results from an absence of morality may start from an inaccurate premise, Astor points out.

Drug use among American young people has been making a clear comeback in the last two years, according to UM research scientists Lloyd Johnston, Patrick O'Malley, and Jerald Bachman of the Institute for Social Research. Based on the 1993 results of the 19th annual ISR survey of drug use among the nation's high school students, the Monitoring the Future Study, marijuana use shows a sharp rise and the use of stimulants, LSD, inhalants, and cigarettes is also up. These increases are not just concentrated in large cities or particular regions of the country, but occur across most sectors of society. Most alarming to the researchers is the "softening" of attitudes and beliefs about drug use, with the perceived dangers of nearly all of the illicit drugs declining in 1993.

Law professor William Miller's book, Humiliation (Cornell University Press), explores the unwritten codes that govern social interactions such as dinner invitations and gift giving. He dissects the elaborate social rule of debt and repayment, as well as the intricate self-monitoring people do to avoid shame and humiliation. The link to the law, he says, is that these interactions are governed by big rule systems and how we punish people who violate the rules.

--Ruth Behar

Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story, written by Ruth Behar, associate professor of anthropology, was published by Beacon Press. It interweaves the life history of Esperanza, a peddler that Behar met in Mexico while researching women of the Spanish colonial period, with her own journey to become an academic anthropologist. Esperanza's narrative deals with her difficulties at the hands of her father, husband, and sons and her feelings about her story as a book, as well as Behar's own relationship to books and book learning. This book is part of a growing interest in academia in acknowledging personal, emotional accounts in scholarship.

In the department of Germanic languages and literatures, the scholarship of associate professor Rosina Lippi-Green is being described as "path breaking." In a time when multiculturalism and diversity are held up as ideals, she has found evidence of institutionalized discrimination in the educational system, news media, entertainment industry, corporate sector, and judicial system aimed at people who speak English with an accent. Her preliminary analysis finds that the listener's goodwill is an important element in this type of discrimination. Prejudiced listeners cannot hear what a person has to say because accent, as a mirror of social identity and a litmus test for exclusion, is so important. Her findings will be published in English with an Accent: Language and Discrimination in the United States (Routledge).