In this article, I examine how Syrian refugee men and women shifted their household divisions of labor in their initial years of resettlement in the United States. I combine and extend relational approaches from gender theory and economic sociology to examine how men and women's behaviors shifted, the resources engendered by behavioral shifts, and how they interpreted and compensated for new behaviors and resources. I show that shifts in Syrian household divisions of labor occurred at the intersection of inequalities in social policies, labor-markets and households. Due to limited social assistance, the refugee families needed to earn an income within months of their arrival. The Syrian men entered the labor-market, keeping with a breadwinning expectation for their labor, but could only access menial jobs that limited their time and opportunity learn English. Women, meanwhile, did not enter the labor-market full time, and could attend English classes. By observing this divergence in men and women's language learning, I theorize human capital as a gendered outcome of household divisions of labor.

No abstract

Drawing on data collected from 2008 to 2013 in a low-income Cairo neighborhood, this article examines the impact of a poverty alleviation program, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) that attempted to incentivize poor mothers, through a direct cash transfer, to send their children to school. The program met its goal. The mothers did send their children to school. I argue that only observing this outcome of school access, however, black-boxes the causal pathway of how mothers sent their children to school in the Egyptian context, and how the program mattered. Public schools in Egypt are free on paper but expensive in practice due to an informal system of "private lesson" and "study group" fees imposed by teachers. Mothers had always managed this expense, using scarce gendered household resources, before, during, and after the program. Through ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this article shows that while the cash-transferred to the mothers and labeled for education-enabled the mothers to send their children to school, the program conditions were unnecessary. The mothers did not need to be nudged to send their children to school. This Egyptian case study has implications for the use of behavioral incentives and for the importance of qualitative methods to the study of policy impacts.

How, in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, do workers respond to rapid changes in the labor market? This paper mobilizes existing literature on occupational mobility and job loss to develop a theory of situational human capital in which some workers are better positioned to weather occupational transitions than others depending on the alignment between their skill sets, opportunities, and particular contexts. Previous literature looks at this in the case of “pausing,” when workers, such as women, take time off from work. Relatively less explored but equally consequential are transitions like “pivoting,” in which workers maneuver within their occupations to adjust their practices or platforms in order to keep working, and “shifting,” in which workers change their occupations altogether. Since most government unemployment benefits focus almost exclusively on workers’ pauses, they neglect to support workers as they pivot and shift during periods of labor market instability and disruption. This paper concludes by offering some policy recommendations to fill this gap.

Drawing on data collected from 2008 to 2013 in a low-income Cairo neighborhood, this article examines theimpact of a poverty alleviation program, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) that attempted to incentivizepoor mothers, through a direct cash transfer, to send their children to school. The program met its goal. Themothers did send their children to school. I argue that only observing this outcome of school access, however,black-boxes the causal pathway of how mothers sent their children to school in the Egyptian context, andhow the program mattered. Public schools in Egypt are free on paper but expensive in practice due to aninformal system of “private lesson” and “study group” fees imposed by teachers. Mothers had always managedthis expense, using scarce gendered household resources, before, during, and after the program.Through ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this article shows that while the cash—transferred to themothers and labeled for education—enabled the mothers to send their children to school, the program conditionswere unnecessary. The mothers did not need to be nudged to send their children to school. This Egyptiancase study has implications for the use of behavioral incentives and for the importance of qualitativemethods to the study of policy impacts.