Enobong Hannah Branch

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Massachusetts Amherst

Blacks and Whites. Men and Women. Historically, each group has held very different types of jobs. The divide between these jobs was stark-clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In such a rigidly segregated occupational landscape, race and gender radically limited labor opportunities, relegating Black women to the least desira...

Utilizing a comparative and historical perspective, we interrogate claims of progress focusing on low-wage Black and White women workers from 1970 to 2000. We begin by offering a historical perspective on occupational segregation by race and gender, which informs the evaluation of low-wage Black women’s occupational progress. We then situate Black...

Social Science research on science careers tends to focus on gender as the primary mechanism affecting which people enter and succeed in science. Despite the often narrow focus on gender, the demographic composition of many science fields in the US has changed considerably as the US workforce incorporated more women, people of color, and non-US bor...

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic serv...

Southern and non-Southern labor markets entered the period of economic restructuring from different starting points. Industrial and occupational differences across regions were eroded by the growth of the service industry in all regions, the decline in personal services within the South, and the decline of unions and manufacturing jobs outside of t...

Research on flexible work organization shows how contract, contingent, and other forms of nonstandard employment in the U.S. labor market are often associated with economic insecurity. This article investigates change over time in the extent and nature of hourly employment, a standard form of work that has been overshadowed in the recent literature...

National Science Foundation Workshop Report--FWHTF (Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier): Understanding Emerging Technologies, Racial Equity, and the Future of Work is a report of the workshops held to discuss the current state of knowledge, research gaps, and research agenda needed on this topic. Website: http://rbr.cs.umass.edu/htf/

Black women have traditionally occupied a unique position in the American economic structure – at the very bottom. The year 1920 is a unique historical moment to examine how this came to be. Economic prosperity immediately following World War I, the first wave of Black migration, and accelerating industrialization created occupational opportunities...

We critique existing literature on the rise of precarious work because of its inattention to the historical organization of work by race and gender. We use intersectional theory to develop a racial-gender lens on precarious work, asking how do race, gender, and educational attainment shape exposure to insecure work. Historically, Blacks pursued edu...

Training for and pursuing a career in science can be treacherous for women; many more begin than ultimately complete at every stage. Characterizing this as a pipeline problem, however, leads to a focus on individual women instead of structural conditions. The goal of the book is to offer an alternative model that better articulates the ideas of age...

This chapter begins by outlining the extent to which U.S. innovation has been driven by immigration. Next we consider three historical moments that illustrate America’s episodic focus on, rather than long-term commitment to, diversity.

Labor market changes complicate the analysis of black women's status relative to white women because education, occupational attainment, and race–gender are now less predictive of earnings. Low-wage black women's relative status has improved somewhat from 1970 to 2000, contrary to the well-documented decrease in relative status reported for all bla...

Recent scholarship has reintroduced cultural analysis to poverty studies. In this paper, we revisit the “culture of poverty” thesis and its variants comparing it to contemporary cultural analysis. Instead of debating its merits, we assess the value added by cultural analysis to structural theories of poverty. In particular, we evaluate the extent t...

Appropriate labor conveys the notion of a negotiated ideal indicating who has been collectively defined as suited for a particular type of work. Importantly, these negotiations provide a justification for why a group is represented in one occupation as opposed to another. Using domestic service as an example of an occupation based in an informal, f...

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” rel...

In Horton, Allen, Herring, and Thomas' (2000) study of the black working class, a historical picture is painted in which black women are shown to be uniquely disadvantaged as it pertains to economic position more so than either black men or white women, their experiences parallel neither group. The factors that precipitated this pattern are the con...