Course Description
ECO336 “Women in the US Economy”
“Women in the US Economy” is a general education course in the department of economics at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The course has no prerequisites, despite being a 300-level writing-intensive course, and there are many incentives for business students to take the class. It fulfills one of their general education requirements (Minority Cultures or Multiracial Women's Studies), one of their writing-intensive upper-level course requirements, is listed in the college of business and is an economics course (for majors and minors).
The department often offers the course (sometimes twice per semester to as many as 80 students) and, interestingly, nearly 50 percent of the students enrolled in the course are men.
The course has four major areas of focus:
Part I: An introduction
Part II: The Labor Market
Part III: The Household
Part IV: Poverty and Welfare
During each part of the course we first discuss the major issues having to do with that topic. In Part I, I discuss three main issues associated with women and the labor market in the United States. The first issue is the dramatic increase in women’s labor force participation rates. Between 1960 and 2005, women’s labor force participation rate has increased by over 25 percent. This trend began with married women entering the labor market during and after World War II ending with the ever-increasing number of women with very young preschool-aged children entering the labor market soon after birth (or never leaving the labor market). The second issue is the consistency of the wage gap between men and women over time (approximately 0.60 in 1960 to 0.76 in 2005). The third issue in this section is occupational segregation or the evidence that men and women tend to work in different occupations and industries. In Part III, we discuss the division of labor in the household and, particularly, the fact that even though women have entered the labor market and are much more likely to work full time, they continue to do approximately three times more domestic labor than men. In part IV, we focus on the disproportionate likelihood that women and female headed households have of being in poverty.
In each section we follow a discussion of the “issues” with how economic theory attempts to explain each phenomenon. These sections are much more technical in nature. I present mathematical economic models to explain the phenomena in question. This portion of the course lends itself to critical thinking in terms of both measurement issues as well as theory. For example, while we can measure a wage gap between men and women, its size is subject to measurement issues, and its cause is likely due to many factors including differences in schooling and preferences between men and women as well as, possibly, discrimination. Furthermore, prominent scholars disagree about the issue, providing fodder for good classroom discussion.
Lastly, we look at how we have attempted to address these issues with political tools. In this part of each section we debate the pros and cons of such policies as affirmative action and welfare reform. See Appendix A for the course syllabus.