Joya Misra
(Ph.D. Emory University 1994)
Sociology
(413) 545-5969
misra@soc.umass.edu
Joya Misra is a professor jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and Center for Public Policy and Administration. Her research explores how policies can both mediate and reinforce inequalities by class, gender and race/ethnicity. Her early research focused on welfare state policies from a historical perspective, explaining their creation and how gender, class and race/ethnicity have shaped the kinds of policies that emerged. More recently, she has more explicitly linked the policies themselves to various outcomes, trying to understand the effects of family policies for different populations (primarily by class and gender). Professor Misra is currently working with Stephanie Moller on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, that uses multilevel modeling to examine the social policies --employment, welfare, and work-family--that best mediate the incidence and the depth of poverty for childless women and mothers, both partnered and unpartnered, across a range of countries. She is also continuing work with Michelle Budig and Irene Boeckmann on a series of papers, funded by the National Science Foundation, that use multilevel modeling to examine how work-family policies help shape outcomes such as wages and employment among women and mothers. Misra and Budig's Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper “How Care Work Shapes Earnings in a Cross-National Perspective” was recently chosen as the winner of the first World Bank/LIS Gender Research Award. The two researchers are also finalists for this year's Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research. Misra's other recent work examines how, through policies, immigrant women workers are drawn to wealthier countries to meet increasing care needs. This project demonstrates how neoliberal welfare state restructuring and immigration policy have created greater inequalities through reinforcing the globalization of care. In 2010 Professor Misra was selected to receive the Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Mentoring Award.
Areas of Interest: Political Economy and Political Sociology, Race/Gender/Class, Welfare States, Methods and Statistics
Current Grants:
2011-15. Sociology for Women in Society. Editorship of Gender & Society
2010-12. NSF. Collaborative Research: Work-Family Policy and Poverty
Recent Grants:
2010-11. CSBS. Work-Family Policy and Poverty
2009-10. NSF. Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child Custody and Judicial Constructions of Parenthood. Co-PI: Kristy Thomas
2009-10. Andrew Mellon Foundation. M3 Team Grant: CSBS & CPPA Administration Grants Workshop
2009-10. CSBS Small Grant Program for Instructional Improvement. Teaching Writing in Substantive Sociological Courses: Best Practices
2008-10. NSF. Family Policies and the Wage Penalty: A Cross-National and Multi-Level Approach. PI: Michelle Budig
2008-09. Provost's Office. Joint MSP-UMass Administration Work-Life Project. With Jennifer Lundquist
2008. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Wage Penalties Associated with Working in the Care Sector: A Cross-National Analysis. With Michelle Budig
2006-08. NSF. The Cross-National Effects of Work-Family Policies. NSF. Co-PI: Michelle Budig
Pending Grants:
National Gender Pay Inequality Dynamics. NSF.
Cross-National Impacts of Work-Family Policy and Health Spending on Poverty. NIH.
Selected Publications:
"Work-Family Policy Consequences of Employment and Wages of Mothers." Community, Work, and Family 14(2):139-57, 2011. With Michelle Budig and Irene Boeckmann.
"Cross-National Patterns in Individual and Household Employment and Work Hours by Gender and Parenthood." Research in the Sociology of Work 22(1):169-207, 2011. With Michelle Budig and Irene Boeckmann.
"The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work." Academe 97(1):22-2, 2011. With Jennifer Lundquist, Elissa Dahlberg Holmes and Stephanie Agiomavritis. “
“Care Work Employment and Earnings in a Cross-National Perspective.” International Labour Review 149(4):441-60, 2010. With Michelle Budig.
"The Effect of Family Policy on Women's Employment Rates: Historical Evidence from France and the Netherlands." In Method and Substance in Macro-Comparative Analysis, Lane Kenworthy and Alexander Hicks. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008.
"Work-Family Policies and Poverty for Partnered and Single Women in Europe and North America." Gender and Society 21:804-27, 2007.
"Neoliberalism, Globalization, and the International Division of Care." In Wages of Empire: Women's Poverty, Globalization, and State Transformations, Amalia Cabezas, Ellen Reese and Marguerite Waller (pp. 113-26). Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2007.
"Reconciliation Policies and the Effects of Motherhood on Employment, Earnings and Poverty." Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 9:135-55, 2007.
Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. With Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas Anderton and Michael Burawoy (co-editors).
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