Conference Agenda

Racial and ethnic minority youth have been historically and continue to be disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system across the United States. Studies on juvenile justice frequently highlight the propensity of Black and Brown youth to come into contact with the justice system, but these studies have not paid equal attention to the critical role that institutions of social reproduction/care, embedded in the places we live in, impact the biopsychosocial health and development of youth. These place-based institutions of care include not only schools and childcare, but also a wide range of support for families such as political representation, housing wealth, local businesses, social program density, environmental conditions, neighborhood ties, public safety, and transportation. This paper illustrates how youth risk behavior is not embedded in the individual, but rather embedded in the environments youth live in and the relations all community members maintain from the household to the community. By using a novel juvenile justice dataset from the most populous county in the state of Utah (Salt Lake County), this paper aims to illustrate through spatial analysis how concentrations of youth contact with the system is a by-product of where place-based institutions of care are not well supported (care deficits) by state policy. This paper introduces a meso-conceptualization of social reproduction as it is embedded in the neighborhood and how this spatial pathway deeply intersects with racial-ethnic disparities in the justice system. Lastly, this paper demonstrates how spatial methodologies can help policymakers identify ‘punishing places’ for youth as a result of place-based care deficits and direct targeted interventions in these very specific places.

Social safety nets, including cash transfers, asset transfers and social care services, are widely used policy instruments to promote household economic security, resiliency to shocks and investment in human capital. With increasing investment in gender-sensitive social safety nets as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate and humanitarian-related shocks, there is increasing need for evidence generation and aggregation on if and how safety nets respond to women’s needs and enhance gender equality. Previous reviews have shown promising impacts on women’s economic achievements and agency, however do not comprehensively review the literature (e.g. focus on only one type of safety net or a single region) or are outdated. We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies on social safety nets and women’s economic empowerment and agency measures in the global south. Endpoints for women’s economic empowerment include labor force participation, work intensity, time spent in unpaid care and childcare, savings, debts, assets and personal expenditures. Endpoints for women’s agency include decision-making, autonomy, self-efficacy, aspirations and goals, voice and leadership. Meta-analysis uses robust variance estimation and accounts for precision of estimates, multiple impacts per study and quality assessment. In addition to overall average impacts, we also unpack how impacts vary according to type of safety net, and according to enablers and barriers to intervention and evaluation designs, target groups and context. Finally, we summarize evidence on cost-effectiveness and return on investment of the interventions. The paper discusses key research gaps that will help strengthen understanding of how safety nets promote and increase women’s economic achievements and agency for women living in poverty and in vulnerable situations in the global south.

Despite positive associations with paid care leave (PCL) policies, the United States is a notable outlier as the only advanced nation without a federal paid leave program. Furthermore, the occupational segregation literature suggests that women, especially mothers, are selected into certain types of jobs that accommodate their responsibilities as caretakers, which influences their capability for maternal self-reproduction (per the Triple Day Thesis). Our study examines how mother-friendly jobs engage with available PCL programs in the US. We use a unique dataset gathered from a 2020 survey of 306 New York and Boston area managers. To examine, the relationships between mother-friendly jobs and PCL, we perform binary logistic regressions across four distinct PCL outcomes: available company sponsored PCL before 2020, expanded company sponsored PCL in 2020, usage of company sponsored PCL in 2020, and usage of government sponsored PCL programs in 2020. We find that companies that employ large numbers of independent contractors and those that offer flexible working arrangements in 2020 are statistically significant predictors of expanding and using PCL. Further, we find that Essential industries are less likely to have internal PCL before 2020 and Face-to-Face industries are more likely to use government PCL. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our results do not provide evidence that mother-friendly jobs provide PCL in a way that enables maternal self-reproduction. We confirm the literature that comparatively high-wage industries such as Finance and Insurance are more likely to offer more generous PCL options, placing the burden of acquiring PCL on the job selection process.

In this paper, we challenge the dominant perspective that views the “universalization” of the international agenda on women’s empowerment as the only way for states to both promote women’s rights and be seen as a legitimate modern state. Our study provides a comparative analysis of public policies and gender data from the six Arab Gulf nations (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) to examine the situation of women’s empowerment in the Arab Gulf region. We argue that the persistence of neoliberal capitalist frameworks and Western-defined human rights strategies has perpetuated orientalist discourses that contrast Arab cultures with Western ones. Through detailing the flawed application of key data points (e.g., women’s labor force participation rate and time spent in care work) in the Arab Gulf and questioning the value of these indicators in terms of women’s lived experiences, we illustrate the continual ‘othering’ and invisibilization of Gulf women in normative feminist frameworks. Our analysis asserts that the international women’s agenda, through its emphasis on neoliberal ideals, overlooks and devalues contexts where progress is not measured in individual terms, but rather requires prioritizing the family and household in women’s economic pursuits. Through this lens, we present Arab Gulf policy frameworks as important and effective strategies that prioritize the provision of care, support for work-life reconciliation, and the freedom to pursue progress for women who have different life goals beyond the neoliberal framework. In revisioning the dominant women’s agenda, we engage local priorities for progress as a key component of attaining an equitable and sustainable world.