We thank Paula England for participating in SJMR’s AMA series. Dr. England is a leading sociologist of family, work and gender. She is the outgoing president of the ASA and a Professor of sociology at NYU. You can learn more about her work by visiting her website. Below are her answers to our 10 questions. I have personally learned a lot from her views and experiences.
-beakman
Questions.
1. You spent the first 15 years of your career as faculty at a small regional university, The University of Texas at Dallas. Since then, you've contributed to some of the very best sociology programs in the nation, and you are now President of ASA. What advice can you give to job candidates and early Assistant Professors at small regional schools who aspire to have a similar type of impact throughout their careers? Do you think this sort of moving up is even possible anymore? Inquiring APs want to know.
Yes, I was upwardly mobile, as was, by the way, former ASA President Cecilia Ridgeway, who started at Milwaukee. It was statistically atypical in my generation and is now; downward mobility after an unfavorable tenure review is much more common. I don’t know that upward mobility it is less possible today than previously and, overall, —I think people move more since about the 1990s or 2000s than ever before. I’m sure my ascension was some combination of luck and merit and I’m not the most objective judge of their ratios.
Advice? Publish a lot on topics people care about in visible places. Be out and about presenting at conferences and colloquia. (It’s strategic, but I also think it is fun.) Give clear, succinct, memorable presentations. And enjoy where you are now; if you have any tenure track job, appreciate it. I learned an enormous amount from my colleagues at UTD (for example, it is where I learned at least half of t
...See full posthe economics I know) and I made a meaningful research-active academic life there and even achieved some modicum of a reputation in my subfield before I ever moved to my first top-20 school (Arizona).
By the way, Ruth Milkman from CUNY is now the President of ASA. I stepped down at the end of the 2015 annual meeting. I remain on ASA Council for one more year as “Immediate Past President.”
2. Can you give your assessment of "comparable worth" research in contemporary scholarship? It seems that comparable worth was an important focus in the 1990s but it is no longer discussed widely. On the other hand, there is still notable gender segregation and gender wage gaps. Do you think new gender scholars should still be pursuing comparable worth research and policies?
Sigh. I spent more than 20 years on this topic and there isn’t much progress in the real world on it. For those of you who don’t know what “comparable worth” refers to, let me give you the elevator version. Two types of sex discrimination are well known, even if we can’t always tell from the data whether they are the cause of a particular gap: 1) Women are paid less than men in their same job because they are women; this violates the Equal Pay Act of 1964 and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 2) Women are discriminated against when they attempt to enter higher-level or any male-dominated jobs; this hiring or placement discrimination violates Title VII. A third is less acknowledged and understood: Ignoring how segregation occurred (discrimination or supply-side choices), once some jobs are largely female, employers see them as less valuable or payworthy because they are filled by women. This is what was at issue in “comparable worth.” What I worked on was statistical analyses showing the net effect of the sex composition of the occupation an individual is in on their pay—net of human capital, and various measures of the skill demands of the occupations. It is about comparing the pay in distinct jobs with a higher or lower proportion of women that, given criteria that your analysis shows employers must be implicitly or explicitly using, you would predict to pay the same.
While the sex gap in pay has continued to erode, it is doing so at a much slower rate than in the 1980s. Indeed, all manner of indicators suggest a slowdown or stall in progress toward gender equality starting in about 1990, as I wrote about in my 2010 Gender & Society piece. Also, the progress that has been made on the pay gap is, I think, mostly from a) women’s more continuous employment, so they are now closer to men in years of experience, which has a return, and b) a lessening of hiring discrimination. That’s good news. But I’ve not seen any evidence that the type of bias at issue in comparable worth has diminished at all. Indeed, Asaf Levanon and I published a paper in Social Forces in 2009 showing that when fields feminize, their relative wages go down. This type of discrimination continues, and current U.S. law (as interpreted by the courts) generally doesn’t see it as illegal. The bill that would make it so has been stalled in Congressional committees for decades. Figuring out a practical way to regulate this form of discrimination is tough, but not impossible; there are “policy capturing” job evaluation techniques, although they can be gamed and the studies have costs. The issue needs addressing as much as ever. I quit working on it because I had contributed as much on theorizing it (in my 1992 book) and on empirical approaches (control variables, fixed effects in panel individual or occupational data) as I could. I just decided that, on the intellectual front, I needed to move on.
3. In recent years, several peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that journal article retractions as a percentage of published articles have increased dramatically (even while accounting for only a small number of instance) across scientific disciplines. Other studies emphasize that the results of much fewer studies can be replicated than would seem healthy for science. We have seen, across scientific disciplines, several high-profile cases of intellectual misconduct/malfeasance gain significant attention outside of academia. Meanwhile, several disciplines/journals are attempting to deal more seriously with "lower level" questionable practices such as p-hacking, image manipulation, guest authors, ghost authors, etc. So, here's my question. What do you see is the ASA's role in fostering greater rigor in the discipline and/or in promoting "best practices" in research performance and dissemination of results? Can/Should our professional association play a role or should this be left to journals, academic departments, and funding agencies?
I’ve read the media reports of these things with a combination of horror about bad science and fear that it will make the general public more negative about science, when, in the main, I think the peer review system we have is unsurpassed. (As Winston Churchill said about democracy, it is a really bad system but the alternatives are worse.) Our Executive Officer and the ASA Council watch and discuss these cases. I really don’t know what role ASA should take, to be honest, but I think it is an important question we should continue to chew on. I’d love to know your views.
4. In her SJMR AMA, Barbara Risman mentioned that ASA service work might be perceived as housework and that that could explain why male sociologists don't contribute much. Jeremy Freese has questioned this and has argued that male sociologists do provide service for the discipline, usually in the form of journal reviews. What side of this debate are you on? Why?
Barbara and Jeremy are both valued members of our tribe and I’m not going to take sides!
Of course, Jeremy is right that many men provide journal reviews (I saw this when I was an editor—although I didn’t notice that men review more than women). I can empathize with his not liking to read something that suggested the unwillingness of his gender to do service when he may have just finished sacrificing time from his own research or leisure to do a difficult journal review! And men serve in all sorts of other key elected and appointed roles. I know many men willing to run for offices in ASA.
Regarding Barbara’s comment: like her, I have the perception that, on average, women are more willing to do time consuming “academic housework” in departments; as with all gender differences, there are overlapping distributions. Barbara was speculating that more women than men are on the ballot for ASA offices recently because a higher ratio of men than women turn down the nominations. It could be; unfortunately, the data that would answer the question are confidential. We just see who runs, not who was nominated and turned ASA down. (The Nominations Committee is instructed to come up with numerous ranked names for every position, and either the Secretary or ASA staffers go down the list until the right number needed to run say yes.)
5. Sociology is approaching 2/3-female in PhDs, and a majority of faculty hired after 2000 are women. Meanwhile, within the discipline there is a lot of segregation across topic areas. Is there a risk that a) sociology will lose status as it feminized, and b) that male-dominated areas (e.g. math soc) will split off?
If you believe my past work on comparable worth, it does suggest that a consequence of feminization of our field is a loss of earnings (for men and women in the field) relative to what they would have been had the field not feminized as much.
I wish subfields were less segregated, but I don’t foresee a splitoff. (As an aside, I have sometimes humorously referred to myself as doing “boy analytics on girl topics.”) The neurological side of psychology has managed to extrude the other parts of psych out of some departments, with messy “divorces” and one department becoming two. And the PSA (which includes social and developmental psych) was formed because some folks thought the APA was mostly clinicians who weren’t researchers.
We have our occasional quant/qual splits over job candidates and best book prizes in Sociology, but I don’t see anything like either of the splits I just mentioned in Psych happening in Sociology. As for the idea that Math Soc would split off, where would they go? I revere many of our quant methods folks, and we aren’t reproducing enough of a next generation of them, but I don’t see them forming their own departments or associations. (Another complicating factor is that Theory, the ultimate nonquant field is also disproportionately male.)
6. As outgoing President of ASA, what are some of your takeaway points on how to improve sociology as a discipline? Also, do you think it is necessary for ASA to have a presence on K Street? Other associations, like AEA, are housed in places like Nashville.
I think most of what happens on the scholarly side isn’t determined by professional associations—except ASA contributes a lot by having a number of excellent ASA journals. The annual meeting is also a contribution—department trained and generated content, but ASA provides the vehicle for the exchange.
I used to worry 20 years ago that the number of sections in ASA was out of control. I still do think there is something weird about a population that has births but almost never has deaths. But Sections seem the lifeblood of the ASA in the sense that people need small more homophilous groups that they can identify with and feel they have some say in. And the rise in numbers of sections has turned out not to be a problem as far as I can see.
Re your question about K Street—I assume that your larger question is whether we should have an association with relatively high dues and high services or low dues and low services. We have explicitly or implicitly chosen higher dues and higher services than AEA, but a very similar strategy as a lot of other associations (APSA, MLA, etc.). At least this is the impression I have whenever we discuss dues on Council and look at comparative data. (Also there is, I believe, some path-dependent fluke such that AEA has the revenues from some indexing or citation type service that brings them a lot of money annually but isn’t something ASA could start now, and this helps keep their dues down.) I think the place on K Street is a wash—yes it was more expensive to buy, but it will also appreciate better than a place in Nashville probably would. Now they rent part of it out to another organization.
I sometimes hear grumbling about things like “ASA taking some of the dues you pay to your sections” that I think are really misinformed. Yes, the sections don’t keep all of it in their own coffers. But what do you think finances your section elections, or keeping section membership lists, keeping section by-laws and so forth stored in an accessible place in case one year’s section officers flake out, etc?
The broad question about what services we want most or what things we’d rather go without to lower our dues is a legitimate discussion we should have. Do we want things like nonsociologists at the annual meeting? We never pay speakers, but the program committee has some budget to fund travel for nonsociologists that would not otherwise come. (E.g. the “fun” panel with Aziz referenced in another question, or the law professor that I had on the panel on the politics of same-sex marriage.) It costs money to gather the Council and other groups to meet to govern the association. Our Executive Officer, among many other things, keeps tabs on things like attacks on Sociology funding at NSF, NIH, etc. and takes a lot of actions that you never hear about. One staffer at ASA works full time to make press releases on articles from ASA journals, so help us get more coverage in the press. I will say that after watching the ASA staff up close and personal for a year, I think they are quite frugal with our money, and work very hard.
7. The Modern Romance plenary was the most discussed plenary I've ever seen and generally regarded as a nice addition (even allowing for the heteronormativity critiques). What sorts of 'fun' sessions would you like to see future ASA presidents organize?
I am sans ideas. I am occasionally accused of being humorless, so I would never have devised such a fun session, had Eric Klinenberg not pitched the idea to me. I’m glad he did; it was fun and substantive.
8. I think many SJMRs might be surprised to learn that Ed Laumann was in your committee. At least before you started studying hookups, your topics, theoretical interests (e.g., feminism), and approach to sociology all seem quite different from his. Do you see a strong intellectual lineage here, even if it's not evident to outsiders? Based on your experience at Chicago or subsequently, do you have any advice to grad students about how to choose an advisor and what you should (and should not) expect to learn from him or her?
I started grad school thinking I was interested in inequality and stratification and took Laumann’s course on Stratification. He didn’t start studying sex till long after I got my Phd. I was becoming a feminist personally and politically and wanted to study gender inequality in labor markets. No one at Chicago had done anything on the topic. I viewed what I was doing as extending data sets and methods used to study class (SES) inequality to studying women’s experiences and gender inequality. I picked a committee that seemed most relevant—two people that did stratification (Laumann and David McFarland, now at UCLA), and Jim Davis, who had taught a very user-friendly data analysis class. Also, my first literature review on the sex gap in pay unearthed only about a dozen articles by social scientists. (I was working on the dissertation 1973-75. So it was a relatively new field—not to say I had a sense of being an innovator. I was really pretty out of it on strategy. I just picked something I was interested in that was doable, picked what seemed like the most relevant committee, they said yes, and I worked on it. I never really had a close mentor as an undergrad or grad student. Then I started my career at a University that started the year I came there and the faculty hired was mostly junior, so there were no mentors there either. Sometimes I look back and wish someone would have told me more about the game I was playing in. But I survived! The good side of little mentoring is that I had no Oedipal issues to work through, and tenure or hiring committees weren’t trying to figure out if these were my ideas. (I was, however, deeply influenced by a number of courses that I took, and I still find myself thinking in terms of ways I organized the literature in studying for my Inequality prelim exam).
Advice? Hmm. Pick a topic you really care about, and within that constraint, pick a mentor who is a really good scholar. (For one thing, to be crass, their letter will be weighted more heavily.) If they also have good mentoring skills and give good comments, so much the better, but that varies a lot. Once in a while it is worth while to change to someone who is a better mentor if the person who is really more relevant is actually impeding you. (But check that you aren’t just stubbornly resisting a message that there is a fatal flaw in what you are doing that everyone else it too warm and fuzzy to tell you. In that case, taking the pain may serve you better in the long run.) In the end, a lot of it is a very solitary enterprise, this reasoning and writing. If you can do that on a regular basis and make a life around it, then the fun, social part is getting to talk to smart people about your and their work—in classes you take and that you teach, in your mentoring, at conferences, when visiting other departments. That is the most fun part of this life, in my view.
9. Your office is on fire, and you only have time to grab three books on your way out the door. Which three books do you take, and why?
I grab my iPhone. If my coauthor who is partially blind is in his office down the hall, I suggest he take my hand. And off I go. Books? Are you serious? They’re all available on Amazon in one click, even many that are out of print.
10. What do you think about the current competitive job market situation in sociology? For example, people say things like: "to be a job market candidate, ABDs should have at least one publication in a top journal or several ones in second tier journals." I think the bar has gone very high for young folks who are entering the academic job market today. What do you think about this increased competition as former president of ASA and what would be your solution to this in the short and long terms? What do you advice your own graduate students on this matter as their mentor?
The bar is much higher than it used to be, and your quoted standard is indeed necessary at most R1 top-20 schools (and more at the top ones). Standards escalate mostly because departments can now be more selective, not because they have changed what they think is important, I think. (This is an empirical question; I could be wrong.) What has changed that is adverse for those on the market is how many new PhDs are chasing how many job openings, and how funding for state universities is politically contested. The advice at the individual level is obvious: Publish early and often and in as prominent of places as you can. Really, if you’re a grad student or an AP, don’t sit around reading SJMR more than a few minutes a day, work on a paper instead! It is hard and it is scary. (As I tell my students, “If you aren’t getting rejected by journals regularly, you’re not in the game.”) It takes a lot longer to complete each paper than you ever imagined, but if you work some on it every day, you’ll get some things done, and I’ve found it a very rewarding life. At the collective level, it isn’t clear what the “solution” is. If departments were somehow forced not to prefer people with more publications, it could change who got the jobs, but not how many people were left without TT jobs. It is hard to imagine how we would coordinate admitting less people into PhD programs so as not to create more supply than jobs, and that would have its down side too. This all sounds so harsh—if you’re facing this market, I do feel your pain. I have students on it and I know it is tough as lived experience.