PoliBlog

MV Lee Badgett, Director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration and Professor of Economics, was a featured guest in The Economist live debate over single-sex marriage on January 5, 2011.

Economist Debates transform traditional Oxford style of debating into a live, interactive, online forum. According to The Economist, “The format was made famous by the 186-year-old Oxford Union and has been practised by heads of state, prominent intellectuals and galvanising figures from across the cultural spectrum.”

The online debate begins with an assertion, in this case, “This house believes that single-sex marriage should be legal,” which is then defended and assailed by leading academic and professional experts, as well as interested lay readers and participants.  Featured guest commentary, like Badgett’s remarks,  provide necessary context and informed perspective on the subject.  Each side has three chances to persuade readers: opening, rebuttal and closing. The single-sex debate opened January 3 and will close January 10. Ultimately, the debate will be decided by a public vote.

M.V. Lee Badgett is an economics professor and director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She also serves as research director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law. Her most recent book, “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage” (NYU Press, 2009), addresses the core issues in the marriage debates in European countries and America. She drew on that work in her recent testimony in the Perry v Schwarzenegger trial challenging California’s Proposition 8. Her first book was “Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men”.

Joya Misra, professor of Sociology and Public Policy, presented research on work-family policies at three conferences in Madrid, Atlanta, and Dallas this semester. As a leading expert in the field, Misra was the inaugural recipient of the World Bank/Luxembourg Income Study Gender Research Award and, in 2010, was named editor of the premier journal Gender and Society.

In October, Misra took her cross-national policy work to the Juan March Institute Conference in Madrid. With Stephanie Moller and Eiko Strader, Misra presented “The Sources of Inequality Across the Globe” which presented findings from a National Science Foundation-funded project that examined cross-national effects of work-family policies on poverty for women and, particularly, mothers. Misra and collaborators sought to understand why poverty varies so dramatically cross-nationally — especially for single mothers and their children — and how poverty is related to differences in policy contexts including welfare policies for families with children, labor market policies, and work-family policies that might enable (or limit) mothers’ ability to engage in paid employment.

At the American Sociological Association conference in Atlanta in August 2010, Misra’s presentations explored the intersection of policy and gender.”A Cross-national Perspective on Gender, Parenthood, and Employment,” presented by Misra, Michelle Budig, and Irene Boeckmann, extended work which developed a database of Work-Family Policy Indicators for 22 countries.  With additional funding from the National Science Foundation, these researchers continue to examine how work-family policies, economic factors, and larger cultural forces may mediate wage and employment inequalities. With Jennifer Lundquist and Abby Templer, Misra also presented findings related to her UMass Administration-MSP Joint Work-Life Committee study in “Gendered Patterns of Work-Time and Care-Time among Faculty.” Additionally, Misra was the session organizer of “Race, Gender, Class Implications of Transnational Carework” and participated in an Author-Meets-Critics about  Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America (New York University Press, 2008) by Jeanne Flavin while at the conference.

Finally, In Dallas in April, Misra, Budig and Boeckmann presented “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood in a Cross-National Perspective: Relationships with Work-Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes” at the Population Association of America. The research presented here found that “despite the varying socio-political contexts of the countries in our analyses, social policies and norms that support new mothers’ continuous connection to the labor force are most strongly linked to reductions in motherhood wage inequalities.”

For more information on Misra’s research, visit her website.

Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community, a study co-authored by M.V. Lee Badgett, Director of CPPA, and economics graduate student Alyssa Schneebaum in March 2009, was cited in a Newsweek article on whether or not gay rights are civil rights.

The article, titled “Are Gay Rights ‘Civil Rights’?” addresses the similarities between Rosa Parks’s stand against the injustices of “separate but not equal” in the mid-fifties and the more recent violation of gay rights, such as the fights over same-sex marriage and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies employed in the military.

However, some members of the black community argue that there should be no relation between the civil rights and gay rights movements. On the other hand, there are many who believe otherwise: “‘To those that believe in and fought for civil rights, that marched to end discrimination and win equality, you must not become that which you hated,’ [Rev. Jesse Jackson] said” in a call to African-Americans to support gay marriage during the California appeals.

Absorbing the lessons of the civil rights movement and seeking their own political freedoms, the Tennessee-based civil-disobedience group GetEQUAL continues to fight for gay rights.

“Yes, it’s not life or death every day like the civil-rights movement was,” says Michelle Wright, who is African-American and became involved in GetEQUAL after coming out last year. “But it’s still discrimination, and therefore it’s wrong.”

For the full article, visit Newsweek.com.

Badgett is also a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as research director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law. She has authored When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage, Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men, and co-edited Sexual Orientation Discrimination: An International Perspective, among others. Badgett recently directed a successful four-year project funded by the Ford Foundation to encourage more and better data collection on sexual orientation.