Joya Misra
Biographic Data
| ID | 174161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joya Misra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joya |
| FAMILY NAME | Misra |
| SIGNATURE | MISRA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9427-3952 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Going to Hell
Joya Misra on Katabasis
The Maya Effect: Theorizing Beyond Matthew and Matilda Effects to an Intersectional Understanding of Collaboration
Unequal credit in academic collaboration has long been understood through the Matthew effect—more credit is given to already famous coauthors. The Matilda effect posits that women receive less credit than men, assumed to be riding collaborators’ coattails. Analyzing 62 interviews that center women faculty of color contrasted with three same-rank colleagues (white women, men of color, and white men), we theorize the Maya effect: how unequal credit…
Sociological Solutions: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy
In her ASA presidential address, Misra calls for making solution-oriented, community-engaged, and participatory research more central in the discipline. She argues that solution-oriented work can strengthen the discipline, clarifying the promise and importance of sociology. She first discusses how sociologists engage in solution-oriented work that they communicate publicly. She then uses her collaborative work to suggest how to design research ge…
I don't believe that I have been wanted: Processes of Overinclusion and Exclusion in Racialized and Gendered Organizations
Many studies document that faculty of color, and particularly women of color, find the academy unwelcoming. Yet research that centers intersectional understanding of the mechanisms leading to these inequalities is underdeveloped. We identify three context-dependent mechanisms of racial and gender disadvantage among faculty: active exclusion, overinclusion, and passive exclusion. Taking an explicitly intersectional approach that builds on relation…
The Challenges and Joys of Publicly Engaged Sociology
In this essay, I lay out my motivations for doing publicly engaged sociology, emphasizing both the joys and the challenges of this work, and some of the key lessons that I have learned. I explore my attempts to impact policy at the federal level and the local level of my university, as well as efforts to shape changes across academia during the COVID‐19 crisis. I have found it meaningful to be working toward all of these changes. Moreover, making…
Stop Discounting Retail Workers
Retail workers are strong in numbers, but union density is weak. Transformation of the retail sector is possible. Returning stability to these jobs would change the lives of millions of workers and their families. The retail labor process provides multiple points for resistance and mobilization to occur. Leveraging relationships between workers and with consumers are crucial tactics to help curb employers' power
Revolution or Incursion? Academic Sociologists and Gender in the 21st Century
Transnational feminist sociology
This review essay explores a number of key books published in transnational feminist sociology over the last 20 years, including Kamala Kempadoo’s (2004) Sexing the Caribbean, Pei-Chia Lan’s (2006) Global Cinderellas, Smitha Radhakrishnan’s (2011) Appropriately Indian, Héctor Carrillo’s (2018) Pathways of Desire, Oluwakemi Balogun’s (2020) Beauty Diplomacy, and Rhacel Parreñas’ (2021) Unfree. The review analyzes three key themes found in transnat…
Creating inclusive department climates in STEM fields: Multiple faculty perspectives on the same departments
Climate studies that measure equity and inclusion among faculty reveal widespread gender and race disparities in higher education. The chilly departmental climate that women and faculty of color experience is typically measured through university-wide surveys. Although inclusion plays out at the department level, research rarely focuses on departments. Drawing from 57 interviews with faculty in 14 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) …
Growing the roots of equity: The TREE model of institutional response to Covid-19
Feminist scholars have long documented the complex, multiple ways in which academic institutions reproduce gender inequalities (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, & Institute of Medicine, 2007). In times of crisis, institutional commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion may be sidelined (Tulshyan, 2020). Academia must enact responses to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that retain and promote diverse women faculty …
The persistence of neoliberal logics in faculty evaluations amidst Covid‐19: Recalibrating toward equity
In this paper, we theorize the intersectional gendered impacts of COVID-19 on faculty labor, with a particular focus on how institutions of higher education in the United States evaluate faculty labor amidst the COVID-19 transition and beyond. The pandemic has disrupted faculty research, teaching, and service in differential ways, having larger impacts on women faculty, faculty of color, and caregiving faculty in ways that further reflect the int…
The Intersectionality of Precarity
Gendered and Racialized Perceptions of Faculty Workloads
Faculty workload inequities have important consequences for faculty diversity and inclusion. On average, women faculty spend more time engaging in service, teaching, and mentoring, while men, on average, spend more time on research, with women of color facing particularly high workload burdens. We explore how faculty members perceive workload in their departments, identifying mechanisms that can help shape their perceptions of greater equity and …
Methods of intersectional research
Intersectionality is a powerful concept within sociology, urging scholars to consider how an array of socially constructed dimensions of difference intersect to shape each person’s experiences and actions. This paper provides a number of different blueprints for designing intersectional research, which can be adapted for different purposes. The key methodological tenets of intersectional research are oppression, relationality, complexity, context…
New Handbook of Political Sociology
Book summary page views Book summary page views help Close Book summary page views help Book summary views reflect the number of visits to the book and chapter landing pages. Total views: 0 * Loading metrics
Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century
In 2004, Michael Burawoy, speaking as president of the American Sociological Association, generated far-reaching controversy when he issued an ambitious and impassioned call for a "public sociology." Burawoy argued that sociology should speak beyond the university, engaging with social movements and deepening an understanding of the historical and social context in which they exist. In this volume, renowned sociologists come together to debate th…
Department Conditions and Practices Associated with Faculty Workload Satisfaction and Perceptions of Equity
For decades, national surveys have shown faculty report high levels of dissatisfaction with the distribution of labor in their departments, especially women and underrepresented minority faculty. Research suggests this dissatisfaction is warranted, as these groups are often engaged in more service, mentoring, and institutional housekeeping than their peers. Despite the ample work revealing workload inequities and their consequences, few studies h…
Motherhood Penalties in the U.S., 1986–2014
Objective This article aims to determine whether the wage penalty for motherhood changed in the United States between 1986 and 2014 and to assess the relative impact of education and experience on the penalty over time. Background Mothers earn less than childless women. Although mothers' educational levels and labor market experience have increased over time, most studies do not analyze the motherhood penalty over time. Method This article uses o…
Visualizing Feminized International Migration Flows in the 1990s
The authors estimate migration flows of women in the 1990s at a global scale and provide a description of these migratory movements. The authors produce these data combining the 2011 World Bank Global Migrant Stock Database and state-of-the-art techniques to estimate migratory flows from stock data. The authors examine these flows in light of the global demand for care workers in the 1990s, showing that migration flows of women in that decade map…
Gender Inequality at Work
Carework
Carework refers, simply, to the work of caring for others, including unpaid care for family members and friends, as well as paid care. Carework entails taking care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, as well as doing domestic work such as cleaning and cooking. As reproductive labor, carework is necessary for human well‐being and the continuation of every society. Yet, because of its presumed “natural” quality, this work remains …
Earner–Carer Model
The earner–carer model is a fundamentally gender‐egalitarian welfare state approach, which assumes that men and women engage in both caregiving and paid employment. Welfare states rest on gendered assumptions about men's and women's roles in the family and in the workplace. The dominant vision of the western welfare state during the twentieth century was the male breadwinner–female caregiver or family wage model. According to this model, families…
Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists
Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments…
Gender and Reproductive Labor Migration in Asia, 1960–2000
Studies on gender and migration have focused on how and why men and women migrate. While women often migrate for family reunification, they increasingly do so for their own work and economic opportunities. Studies on women’s migration flows are rare; those that exist neglect increasingly prominent migration dynamics within Global South. Addressing this gap, we map understudied women’s migration flows within Asian sub-regions from 1960–2000. Build…
Policy Interventions and Relative Incomes of Families with Children by Family Structure and Parental Education
Cross-nationally, scholars conceptualize welfare states as both systems of stratification, reinforcing status distinctions between groups, and systems granting social rights to citizens. With growing inequality in the postindustrial era, it is particularly important to understand the role of the state in reinforcing or ameliorating inequality. The authors focus in this article on households with children, because there has been substantial polari…
The Intersection of Gender and Race in the Labor Market
This review investigates scholarship on the intersection of race and gender, with a particular focus on the U.S. labor market. We ask the following questions: What assumptions underlie intersectional perspectives in sociology? Is there any evidence to demonstrate that race and gender intersect in the labor market? We begin by discussing the core assumptions within Black and multiracial feminist theories, which represent the most fully articulated…
The Motherhood Penalty in Cross-National Perspective: The Importance of Work-Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes
Journal Article The Motherhood Penalty in Cross-National Perspective: The Importance of Work–Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes Get access Michelle J. Budig, Michelle J. Budig [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joya Misra, Joya Misra Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Irene Boeckmann Irene Boeckmann Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
Work-family policies and the effects of children on women's employment hours and wages
Welfare state generosity around work-family policies appears to have somewhat contradictory effects, at least for some measures of gender equality. Work-family policies, in encouraging higher levels of women's labor market participation, may have also contributed to lower wage-levels for women relative to men, for instance. We consider the relationship between particular work-family policies and mothers' employment outcomes. Analyses use data on …
Work–Family Policy Trade-Offs for Mothers? Unpacking the Cross-National Variation in Motherhood Earnings Penalties
Recent scholarship suggests welfare state interventions, as measured by policy indices, create gendered trade-offs wherein reduced work–family conflict corresponds to greater gender wage inequality. The authors reconsider these trade-offs by unpacking these indices and examining specific policy relationships with motherhood-based wage inequality to consider how different policies have different effects. Using original policy data and Luxembourg I…
Gender, Work Time, and Care Responsibilities Among Faculty 1
This study explores how faculty at one research‐intensive university spend their time on research, teaching, mentoring, and service, as well as housework, childcare, care for elders, and other long‐term care. Drawing on surveys and focus group interviews with faculty, the article examines how gender is related to time spent on the different components of faculty work, as well as on housework and care. Findings show that many faculty report workin…
The Programmatic Emergence of the Social Security State
Les AA. examinent les programmes politiques en matiere de securite sociale lors de la formation des Etats-providence au tournant du siecle. Ils envisagent la strategie bismarkienne significative des etats de type «patriarcal» et qui repond aux mobilisations de masse de la classe ouvriere, puis une strategie d'incorporation des partis ou des syndicats ouvriers dans des coalitions liberales, enfin une strategie de reforme menee par les partis catho…
Reconciliation policies and the effects of motherhood on employment, earnings and poverty
We examine the consequences of welfare state strategies on women's economic outcomes in ten countries. These strategies are 1) the primary caregiver strategy, focused on valuing women's care work; 2) the primary earner strategy, focused on encouraging women's employment; 3) the choice strategy, which provides support for women's employment or caregiving for young children; and 4) the earner-carer strategy, focused on helping men and women balance…
Political Resources and the Growth of Welfare in Affluent Capitalist Democracies, 1960-1982
Explanations of welfare effort in affluent postwar democracies are partially integrated within a "political resource" framework. Political resource models of welfare effort fare well when tested with pooled time-series data for 1960-82. Use of governmental authority by the left, use of disruption by the working class and the petty burgeois, and use of lobbying, voting, and/or entitlement rights by the elderly and the unemployed constitute means o…
Envisioning Dependency: Changing Media Depictions of Welfare in the 20th Century
Welfare dependency, or the idea that welfare makes the poor "dependent" on the government and incapable of providing for themselves, has dominated discussions about welfare for decades. Our research documents how media depictions of dependency have changed over time. We examine representations of welfare in popular culture by analyzing randomly sampled magazine articles over eight periods from 1929 through 1996. Despite the dominance of dependenc…
Family policies, employment and poverty among partnered and single mothers
Work—Family Policies and Poverty for Partnered and Single Women in Europe and North America
Work—family policy strategies reflect gendered assumptions about the roles of men and women within families and therefore may lead to significantly different outcomes, particularly for families headed by single mothers. The authors argue that welfare states have adopted strategies based on different assumptions about women's and men's roles in society, which then affect women's chances of living in poverty cross-nationally. The authors examine ho…
Methods of intersectional research
Intersectionality is a powerful concept within sociology, urging scholars to consider how an array of socially constructed dimensions of difference intersect to shape each person’s experiences and actions. This paper provides a number of different blueprints for designing intersectional research, which can be adapted for different purposes. The key methodological tenets of intersectional research are oppression, relationality, complexity, context…
The globalization of care work: Neoliberal economic restructuring and migration policy
Significant scholarly research has focused on the ‘globalization of care work’, or how care has been distributed and redistributed in an international system where immigrant workers provide care in wealthier countries. We argue that nation-states, through a range of contradictory policies and bilateral agreements, explicitly create and reinforce the redistribution and internationalization of care work. We show how economic restructuring has helpe…
Gendered and Racialized Perceptions of Faculty Workloads
Faculty workload inequities have important consequences for faculty diversity and inclusion. On average, women faculty spend more time engaging in service, teaching, and mentoring, while men, on average, spend more time on research, with women of color facing particularly high workload burdens. We explore how faculty members perceive workload in their departments, identifying mechanisms that can help shape their perceptions of greater equity and …
Integrating "The Real World" into Introduction to Sociology: Making Sociological Concepts Real
Teaching Introduction to sociology successfully requires making sociological concepts real to students. using examples from the mass media to depict and clarify important sociological concepts is one particularly successful method that has been well documented. This paper describes an approach using clips from a telecision show that explore sociological concepts in an introduction to Sociology course. This method encourages students to think of s…
The Gender Wage Gap in the United States and Cross Nationally
Scholarship in sociology and economics has long explored the gender wage gap. Recent research suggests that these inequalities are indicative of important differences not only between men and women, but among women and men, reflecting rising levels of income inequality among workers in the post‐industrial era. We argue that the most interesting debates in the gender wage gap – those exploring differences among subgroups by class, race, and/or par…
Representing the Discipline: Social ProblemsCompared toASRandAJS
Marina Karides, Joya Misra, Ivy Kennelly, Stephanie Moller; Representing the Discipline: Social Problems Compared to ASR and AJS, Social Problems, Volume 4
Department Conditions and Practices Associated with Faculty Workload Satisfaction and Perceptions of Equity
For decades, national surveys have shown faculty report high levels of dissatisfaction with the distribution of labor in their departments, especially women and underrepresented minority faculty. Research suggests this dissatisfaction is warranted, as these groups are often engaged in more service, mentoring, and institutional housekeeping than their peers. Despite the ample work revealing workload inequities and their consequences, few studies h…
Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists
Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments…
Motherhood Penalties in the U.S., 1986–2014
Objective This article aims to determine whether the wage penalty for motherhood changed in the United States between 1986 and 2014 and to assess the relative impact of education and experience on the penalty over time. Background Mothers earn less than childless women. Although mothers' educational levels and labor market experience have increased over time, most studies do not analyze the motherhood penalty over time. Method This article uses o…
Women as agents in welfare state development: A Cross-National Analysis of Family Allowance Adoption
While comparative case studies have examined the importance of women as agents in creating and transforming the welfare state, and cross-national research has confirmed that women's labour force participation appears to both shape and be shaped by welfare policies and spending, little cross-national research has explored the roles of women activists in policy adoption. This research explores the case of the adoption of family allowance policies d…
Mothers or Workers: The Value of Women's Labor: Women and the Emergence of Family Allowance Policy
Recent scholarship on gender and the state suggests that women's agency has been critical to the formation of welfare policy. Yet, nations with strong, mobilized feminist movements do not necessarily develop the most supportive welfare policies. By historically analyzing the emergence of British and French family allowance policy, the author suggests that the key to this conundrum lies in the interaction between women's movements and the value gi…
Teaching Stratification: Stimulating Interest and Critical Thinking through Research Projects
One goal in teaching stratification is to illustrate how powerfully stratification shapes society. This paper discusses an effort to stimulate critical thinking through student research projects that utilize active learning in a course on social stratification. Students investigate stratification through research projects focused on their university. These projects accomplish three goals : (1) they involve students in the process of sociological …
All Fun and Cool Clothes? Youth Workers' Consumer Identity in Clothing Retail
Retail offers notoriously bad jobs that exist at the nexus of work and consumption. Previous brand-based retail studies assert that youth workers see the stores' coolness and the employee discount as compensating for the low pay and variable schedules. The authors use interviews with 55 former and current young clothing retail workers to examine how they experience retail work in relation to their consumer identities. The authors find that while …
The Welfare State and Women: Structure, Agency, and Diversity
Feminist scholarship has provided interpretations of power and politics suggesting that welfare policies reflect the social inequalities between groups. We review the literature in this field, discussing the discriminatory and structural critiques of welfare, efforts to highlight the importance of women's agency in the origins of the welfare state, and the recent scholarship that analyzes differences betwen women in terms of class, race, and ethn…
Political Resources and the Growth of Welfare in Affluent Capitalist Democracies, 1960-1982
Explanations of welfare effort in affluent postwar democracies are partially integrated within a "political resource" framework. Political resource models of welfare effort fare well when tested with pooled time-series data for 1960-82. Use of governmental authority by the left, use of disruption by the working class and the petty burgeois, and use of lobbying, voting, and/or entitlement rights by the elderly and the unemployed constitute means o…
The Development of the Dutch Welfare State: From Workers' Insurance to Universal Entitlement. Robert H. Cox
Catholicism and Unionization in Affluent Postwar Democracies: Catholicism, Culture, Party, and Unionization
We build on a structural model of union density to construct a model of unionization in industrialized democracies that specifies a causal role for Roman Catholic culture. We consider the population size and political orientation of the Catholic laity, and the influences of political institutions, in particular Christian Democratic parties. We use generalized least squares regression analyses to evaluate pooled time series for 18 affluent democra…
The Nordic Countries — A Paradise for Women
The Programmatic Emergence of the Social Security State
Les AA. examinent les programmes politiques en matiere de securite sociale lors de la formation des Etats-providence au tournant du siecle. Ils envisagent la strategie bismarkienne significative des etats de type «patriarcal» et qui repond aux mobilisations de masse de la classe ouvriere, puis une strategie d'incorporation des partis ou des syndicats ouvriers dans des coalitions liberales, enfin une strategie de reforme menee par les partis catho…
In Search of National Economic Success: Balancing Competition and Cooperation
Teaching Stratification: Stimulating Interest and Critical Thinking through Research Projects
One goal in teaching stratification is to illustrate how powerfully stratification shapes society. This paper discusses an effort to stimulate critical thinking through student research projects that utilize active learning in a course on social stratification. Students investigate stratification through research projects focused on their university. These projects accomplish three goals : (1) they involve students in the process of sociological …
Women, Children and Welfare Policy in the US: Past and Present
Examining the concept of gender role ideology: Women in traditional jewish worship
The Welfare State and Women: Structure, Agency, and Diversity
Feminist scholarship has provided interpretations of power and politics suggesting that welfare policies reflect the social inequalities between groups. We review the literature in this field, discussing the discriminatory and structural critiques of welfare, efforts to highlight the importance of women's agency in the origins of the welfare state, and the recent scholarship that analyzes differences betwen women in terms of class, race, and ethn…
Mothers or Workers: The Value of Women's Labor: Women and the Emergence of Family Allowance Policy
Recent scholarship on gender and the state suggests that women's agency has been critical to the formation of welfare policy. Yet, nations with strong, mobilized feminist movements do not necessarily develop the most supportive welfare policies. By historically analyzing the emergence of British and French family allowance policy, the author suggests that the key to this conundrum lies in the interaction between women's movements and the value gi…
Research in Political Sociology, Volume 8
The mass class and teaching assistants: A case for discussion exercises
Employment Chances in the Academic Job Market in Sociology: Do Race and Gender Matter
Do employment chances for academics differ based on the gender or race/ethnicity of the job seeker? We use data from a sample of positions in sociology filled during the 1991-92 school year to determine whether European-American women, minority women, and minority men are advantaged, disadvantaged, or similarly placed in relation to European-American men. We find no evidence suggesting that European-American men are significantly disadvantaged, o…
Theorizing Revolutions
Integrating "The Real World" into Introduction to Sociology: Making Sociological Concepts Real
Teaching Introduction to sociology successfully requires making sociological concepts real to students. using examples from the mass media to depict and clarify important sociological concepts is one particularly successful method that has been well documented. This paper describes an approach using clips from a telecision show that explore sociological concepts in an introduction to Sociology course. This method encourages students to think of s…
Representing the Discipline: Social ProblemsCompared toASRandAJS
Marina Karides, Joya Misra, Ivy Kennelly, Stephanie Moller; Representing the Discipline: Social Problems Compared to ASR and AJS, Social Problems, Volume 4
Class, race, and gender and theorizing welfare states
What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality
Women as agents in welfare state development: A Cross-National Analysis of Family Allowance Adoption
While comparative case studies have examined the importance of women as agents in creating and transforming the welfare state, and cross-national research has confirmed that women's labour force participation appears to both shape and be shaped by welfare policies and spending, little cross-national research has explored the roles of women activists in policy adoption. This research explores the case of the adoption of family allowance policies d…
Envisioning Dependency: Changing Media Depictions of Welfare in the 20th Century
Welfare dependency, or the idea that welfare makes the poor "dependent" on the government and incapable of providing for themselves, has dominated discussions about welfare for decades. Our research documents how media depictions of dependency have changed over time. We examine representations of welfare in popular culture by analyzing randomly sampled magazine articles over eight periods from 1929 through 1996. Despite the dominance of dependenc…
The Intersection of Gender and Race in the Labor Market
This review investigates scholarship on the intersection of race and gender, with a particular focus on the U.S. labor market. We ask the following questions: What assumptions underlie intersectional perspectives in sociology? Is there any evidence to demonstrate that race and gender intersect in the labor market? We begin by discussing the core assumptions within Black and multiracial feminist theories, which represent the most fully articulated…
The globalization of care work: Neoliberal economic restructuring and migration policy
Significant scholarly research has focused on the ‘globalization of care work’, or how care has been distributed and redistributed in an international system where immigrant workers provide care in wealthier countries. We argue that nation-states, through a range of contradictory policies and bilateral agreements, explicitly create and reinforce the redistribution and internationalization of care work. We show how economic restructuring has helpe…
Transforming or Reforming the Discipline? Radical Sociology of the 1970s and 1980s
Earner–Carer Model
The earner–carer model is a fundamentally gender egalitarian welfare state approach, which assumes that men and women equally engage in both caregiving and paid employment (Gornick & Meyers 2003). Welfare state structures always rest on gendered assumptions about men's and women's roles in the family and workplace. Through social policies, such gender ideologies reflect but also reinforce supposed roles of men and women as citizens, workers, and …
Sociology (52 works) · Political science (45 works) · Economics (29 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (23 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Economic growth (16 works) · Welfare (16 works)