Symposium Absract

The Journal’s fifth symposium focused on how women are affected by the operations of economic systems, depending on determinants such as race, class, education, language, and sexual preference. Contributors to the symposium examined a multitude of contexts in which gender biases exacerbate the economic disparity between men and women and proposed theories on how to alleviate these conditions.

Themes included welfare reform, human rights, and health care reform. Presenters posited that welfare reform policy is misguided because it is based on underlying assumptions about eligible participants’ race and gender. Additionally, reform policy equates the absence of welfare with self-sufficiency, thus failing to address the more realistic and sustainable goal of alleviating poverty. Solutions to the "welfare problem" could include providing economic compensation for household labor and childcare, which women perform at a disproportionate rate.

Presenters argued for adequate legal and social protection for Afro-Caribbean domestic workers and mail-order brides by providing them with access to information and legal represenation. These efforts can have heightened efficacy when state actors are held responsible for failures to protect women from violence.

Finally, presenters exposed gender and economic biases in the tax code and in health care reform favoring the traditional, nuclear family. These biases are often unconscious, but can result in unintended negative consequences disproportionately affecting poor women.

Symposium Articles

Naomi R. Cahn, "Internet The Coin of the Realm: Poverty and the Commodification of Gendered Labor"

June Carbone, "Has the Gender Divide Become Unbridgeable? The Implications for Social Equality"

Lisa A. Crooms, "The Mythical, Magical 'Underclass': Constructing Poverty in Race and Gender, Making the Public Private and the Private Public"

Joel F. Handler, "'Ending Welfare As We Know It': The Win/Win Spin or the Stench of Victory"

Linda Kelly, "Marriage For Sale: The Mail-Order Bride Industry and the Changing Value of Marriage"

Hope Lewis, "Universal Mother: Transnational Migration and the Human Rights of Black Women the Americas"

Mary Anne Bobinski and Phyllis Griffin Epps, "Women, Poverty, Access to Health Care, and the Perils of Symbolic Reform"

Patricia A. Cain, "Dependency, Taxes, and Alternative Families"

Marjorie E. Kornhauser, "A Legislator Named Sue: Re-Imagining the Income Tax"

Michael A. Livingston, "Women, Poverty, and the Tax Code: A Tale of Theory and Practice"

G. Kristian Miccio, "Male Violence - State Silence: These and Other Tragedies of the 20th Century"

Laura M. Padilla, "Gendered Shades of Property: A Status Check on Gender, Race & Poverty"

Joan Williams, "Our Economy of Mothers and Others: Women and Economics Revisited"