Abstract
In The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage, sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino intervenes in the current gender wage gap debate by shedding some much-needed light on the work experiences of children and youth in the United States. Drawing on a multitude of data, including the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the World Values Survey datasets, in-depth interviews, original surveys, and experimental study, Besen-Cassino provides fresh insights into questions around the emergence of the gender gap, everyday experiences of youth in the workforce, and long-term effects of early work experiences.
Besen-Cassino contends that the vast majority of sociological work on the gender gap focuses on adults and offers explanations such as differential human capital, occupational segregation, and the different value of work for men and women; but these explanations fall short when we take the case of youth workers, since they do not have child-care responsibilities or different credentials and work experiences. Given this, Besen-Cassino argues, the youth workforce provides a “natural laboratory” for exploring the gender wage gap. The author thoroughly engages with the reigning perspectives on the wage gap, arguing that some of them may have lost cachet given that women have outperformed men in educational attainment. This part of the book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate students looking to find an overview of, and intelligent engagement with, the topic.
Besen-Cassino’s analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that children and youth start working as early as 12 and that between the ages of 12 and 13 there is some equality in wages. However, the gap increases with time even when young men and women work the same number of hours. She contends that the types of jobs young people hold mostly explain this, although there are some exceptions. For example, both girls and boys take on freelance work before they can legally enter the workforce, and despite this, the wage gap persists at ages 13 and 14. Young women tend to mostly participate in freelance work such as babysitting, while young men enter employee-type jobs such as fast food and retail. Besen-Cassino then draws on her in-depth interviews and narratives to shed some light on the processes and mechanisms through which their inroads into different workforces unfold. This was the most exciting part of the book for me, replete with some incredibly important insights.
Besen-Cassino finds that young girls get channeled into freelance gendered work like babysitting. They are thought to be “naturals” at this type of work. Young women then perform tremendous amounts of physical as well as emotional labor while managing babies and children, all the while managing their own emotions, as they are penalized for demonstrating anger or frustration. While this will not come as a surprise to women or those who have been engaging with feminist literature, it is a sophisticated analysis of how these processes begin to unfold early on and how they have larger labor market ramifications. The author also finds that young black women are not rewarded for “niceness” or “politeness” in their babysitting jobs, like white women are, but rather are treated with suspicion. Again, while not surprising, this once again demonstrates the very narrow range of emotions black girls and women are allowed to experience, and manifest, without penalty. Given that tennis champion Serena Williams is fresh on our minds, reading this was all the more infuriating.
Young girls find babysitting jobs through their networks and are hence unable to ask for raises or even for reimbursement when they spend money on the children they babysit. Thus, while informal networks allow women to access babysitting jobs, they also hold them back as women have to negotiate care work and money. In fact, Besen-Cassino finds that young women are told how much the babysitting job will pay them, while young men are asked how much they will work for. I also enjoyed Besen-Cassino’s interviews with young men. She found that the men were made to perform different babysitting duties than the women (e.g., they were more likely to play sports), and parents were suspicious when men brought over cookies or were “nice” to their children. This also demonstrates the narrow scope of masculinity, which left me wishing for more of a gender analysis here. This type of data definitely lends itself to some sophisticated theorizing as we think about parenting, the second shift, the crisis of masculinity, and so forth. Since most of these jobs come through personal networks, socio-economically marginalized young women babysit for other socio-economically marginalized families. In sum, Besen-Cassino’s data shed some important light on the emotional cost of jobs like babysitting that we may otherwise think of as benevolent.
Just as some young men participated in the informal work sector, like babysitting, some young women also participated in the formal sector, like retail. Besen-Cassino highlights the dark underbelly of retail work. Women retail workers, for example, are seen as consumers and are hence pressured to buy the products they sell. They’re also not taken seriously by employers for this very reason even though young men and women express similar motivations for entering retail work. Women have to embody the brand they work for. Black women have the hardest time finding retail work and are mostly relegated to babysitting work. This is evident as large-scale data show that white middle-class girls make up a large portion of retail employees. Besen-Cassino argues that this means young black women cannot contribute to their family or pay for college. This is true, but there is also a cost of working through college.
Working in retail, however, had some devastating long-term effects for women, Besen-Cassino found. The more hours women worked in retail, the worse they fared in later life. This was not the case for men, who made gains in later life due to early employment, and this was not the case for restaurant workers, either. The author does not offer any concrete explanations for this but contends that perhaps retail work socialized women to be particular types of employees. Most significant, I thought, was her finding that young women who worked in retail ended up with body image issues and refrained from reporting workplace sexual harassment and bullying. The young women offered the explanation that this was their temporary job and therefore they didn’t want to bother with complaints. This also explains how women are socialized early into accepting everyday harassment. The emotional cost of early retail work has serious implications, considering that work is an integral part of U.S. teenage life.
Besen-Cassino’s data are impressive. Many mixed-methods studies lose out on the thickness of storytelling as they attempt to interlace a range of data. Besen-Cassino, however, does a fantastic job of telling a coherent story while drawing on different types of data. NLS data, for example, suited her particular questions as they allowed her to examine youths’ formal and informal labor-market participation (something not accessible in other data sets). The author also conducted original surveys and an experimental study to measure biases among employers. While the surveys and experimental study certainly shed some useful light on gender-based discrimination, they were less well integrated in the book, and understandably so given the wide range of data.
Besen-Cassino makes significant and much-needed contributions to recent debates on the gender wage gap and showcases some important findings, including the fact that all boys benefit from working as teenagers but not all girls do. The book could perhaps have benefited from some more nuanced discussions of the data. I found that sometimes Besen-Cassino was more engaged with the existing literature than with providing illuminating approaches to understanding the findings she had uncovered. However, perhaps that is the price to pay for such an impressive range of data. The book is a wonderful addition to the literature on the gender wage-gap and on youth and labor.