2020 Section Annual Report for Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Section, Part I

This annual report covers the period of section activity from September 2019 to August 2020 and a fiscal year from January 2020 to December 2020.

Section Governance Provide details of your section’s governance activity during the period between September 2019 and August 2020.

Business Meeting Copy and paste below (or attach separately) the agenda and draft/approved meeting minutes from the section business meeting which include a count of members present and summary of decisions made at this meeting.

We did not take a count of members present for the business meeting. I apologize as I was unaware that was requested until now. We had approximately 40-50 people in attendance for the Zoom session used for the business meeting. However, we used the Business meeting mostly just to announce awards. We also introduced the new section chair and she made a few short remarks. Given the electronic format of the ASA meetings, we had fewer plans and ambitions for the business meeting. The agenda was mostly just the list of awards. The meeting was hosted by the section chair and each award committee chair presented his/her award.

Council Meeting Copy and paste below (or attach separately) the agenda and draft/approved meeting minutes of all council meetings. Minutes must include a list of council members present and a summary of decisions made. Minutes are not a transcript of proceedings but a listing of what discussions took place and official actions taken.

Here is agenda and the chair’s detailed notes for the Council meeting on August

1 Committee Report because of time availability • Emily on book award

Ann’s Treasurer’s Report: Distributed in advance

All other Committee Reports • Sasha on Career Awards • Matthew Mahutga/me on Pager award: o The Devah Pager Award Committee consisted of six members: The size of the committee was terrific—it minimized the labor of each individual member without sacrificing the quality of the reviews. We had 28 submissions this year. Each member read 9-10 papers in a first round (each paper was read by two members) and nominated their top two papers. No two people nominated the same paper in the first round, so each committee member read the six first-place papers in the second round. Out of 18 possible vote points (each member had three points to spread over a first and second

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choice), the winning paper received 8 (all first place votes). The next closest paper received 3. So there was a lot of consensus. The entire committee was pleased with the process and the outcome. o Diversity of committee could’ve been stronger: 4 White men, one White woman, and one Asian woman; a White woman did resign in March ▪ For comparison, book award was 4 women and 3 men; grad student paper award was 5 women 2 men; and initially all award committees were chaired by women ▪ Also, 16 members of underrepresented groups were on committees (excluding White women)– scholars of color (4 African Americans) and sexual minorities; denominator roughly 60

• Siwei/Michelle on grad student paper award • Joscha/Me on Mentoring Lunch: Nothing to report, everything got cancelled. Joscha was interested in setting up remote mentoring, but the committee and I were over-extended. • Ranita Ray/Sarah Halperin/Steve McDonald: Junior faculty mentoring match got cancelled with conference. • Jessica/me on Communications o Our team took over shortly after last year’s annual meeting and continued the previous team’s efforts to increase our presence. o The Facebook profile has largely gone untouched, and would be a welcome area for further development in future years. o The non-ASA hosted section website (http://asaipmsection.org/) has not been updated further and we echo the previous committee’s recommendation to delete it as it mostly duplicates what is on the ASA section’s webpage (http://www.asanet.org/asa- communities/sections/inequality-poverty-and-mobility). An outstanding edit to the ASA section’s webpage is the upload of newsletter copies. o Followed Pfeffer/Michigan Twitter policy established in 2019 o Our Twitter team divided the responsibilities by day of the week, with each team member taking 2-3 days. This allowed for a fairly consistent stream of tweet activity, even during times when one of us was unavailable or overtaxed. o The team included scholars from across different institutions, with different research focuses, and at different career stages. A similar approach would work well in future years. o This past year (Aug 2019-August 2020) our increased twitter activity brought about 852 new followers (more than the 554 new followers added last year) 207,400 impressions (roughly equivalent to last year’s 220,000). o We currently have 2,276 followers (increase of 60% since last year). Per day, we average 2 tweets 250 engagements (clicks, retweets, etc.) and 2 new followers • David Pettinichio and Jessica Ordemann/me on Newsletter: o The IPM newsletter published four issues in 2019/2020. This year, we introduced a new section called Symposium, which featured short essays by IPM section members and other expert contributors. This new format enabled the newsletter team to connect important scholarship to the current events of 2020 including the impacts of the Covid- 10 pandemic on inequality as well as racial injustice and Black Lives Matter. We truly learned a great deal from our collogues and were thrilled by the submissions we received to all parts of the newsletter, including My Two Cents. We’d like to thank our editorial team including Cassandra Engeman and Shengwei Sun for all their hard work

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and to our readers and contributors. We look forward to reading and learning more about our colleagues in issues to come.

Membership Discussion by Chair: • Membership in ASA has declined >20% in past 10 years and most sections have been declining for at least 5 years; we have been fairly fortunate to experience growing/stable membership in that period (see February newsletter) o Fairly solid on diversity relative to ASA; pretty much matching ASA shares; much better than other similar big sections like Sex & Gender or OOW o very slightly below ASA on % African American (6.6% vs 7%) o but one could argue we should outperform ASA given our focus on inequality • ASA will likely see substantial decline in members • July 10 ASA membership list is at 781, which is down from 874 in November 2019 o I don’t know if 10% decline is typical or how much is crisis related o Recall 800 person threshold for sessions • 263 dropped NON-members • 80 dropped MEMBERS • Dropped by several former chairs, career award winners, council members, and people who served on committees this year

• MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE (Rebekah Burroway, chair): tasked with long-term goals for boosting and diversifying membership o Drafted two letters: one for lapsed members to rejoin, and other for recruiting new members. o Considered targeting certain sections for recruitment (Racial and Ethnic Minorities, Latino/a , International Migration, and Global and Transnational Sociology), but it’s pretty difficult to get membership lists (ASA probably would discourage it and its tricky to ask) o Otherwise, the committee has a number of recommendations that could help with recruitment in general and diversity recruitment: ▪ More joint events (I know we have had joint receptions in the past - more of those, along with joint panel sessions if possible) ▪ Build the mentoring programs to encourage building relationships (as opposed to a one-time meet up at ASA) ▪ Better web presence to make the section more outward facing ▪ Create new awards to recognize diversity (e.g., an award for research on populations outside of the US or scholars outside of the US, or an award for research on underrepresented minorities or scholars who identify as underrepresented minorities) ▪ A "welcome wagon" at the reception (i.e., a group of volunteers whose sole job would be to circulate at the section reception and make people feel welcome, since receptions can unfortunately feel clique-ish and overwhelming when you don't know anyone) ▪ Create official sub-sections, like the Sociology of Development has done (they could be tailored around the interests of the above referenced target sections) • The chair volunteered to go into over-time on chairship to work on membership. This is one item I wasn’t able to devote as much time to as I had planned

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o Write all lapsed members – new letters based on recent IPM activities that might be a tad boastful o Have membership committee and council send recruitment letters to anyone they can brainstorm; its okay if person gets multiple requests; we’d have to share membership list in confidence o What else can we/I do?

Awards Provide a list of section awards and awardees conferred in the past year.

The Devah Pager Outstanding Article Award Winner: Laurel Smith-Doerr, Sharla Alegria, Kay Husbands Fealing, Debra Fitzpatrick and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey for: “Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies: An Organizational Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 2019, 125: 534–576.

The Outstanding Book Award Winner: Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachussets-Amherst and Dustin Avent-Holt, Augusta University for Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (2019, Oxford University Press).

Honorable Mention: Jennifer M. Silva, Indiana University for We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heartland (2019, Oxford University Press).

The Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award Co-Winners: Allison Daminger, for: “The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor.” American Sociological Review 2019, 84: 609-633.

Ian Lundberg, for: “Does Opportunity Skip Generations? Reassessing Evidence from Sibling and Cousin Correlations.” Forthcoming in Demography.

The Robert M. Hauser Distinguished Scholar Award William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

The William Julius Wilson Early Career Award Co-Winners: Fabian Pfeffer, University of Michigan Deirdre Bloome, University of Michigan

2020 Finances Provide a narrative on how the 2020 budget matched with actual expenses and income from 2020. Please account for any substantive differences.

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Planned expenses for 2020

1. ASA Reception: $3,000 2. ASA Mentoring lunch: $800 3. ASA Section Council meeting breakfast: $75 4. Awards plaques: $300

Actual expenses for 2020

1. Donation to ASA Minority Fellowship program: $2,750 2. Awards plaques (including shipping to award winners): $206.50

Narrative

2020 was obviously a unique and challenging year. We had planned to spend ~$3000 on a reception in San Francisco co-sponsored by Stanford CPI for the second time and $800 on the annual mentoring lunch. Due to coronavirus, in-person events that are typically the bulk of our expenses—mentoring event, council breakfast, and reception—were canceled. We reallocated $2750 to the ASA Minority Fellowship Program in support of the antiracist and Black Lives Matter movements. This was a proposal by IPM Chair Dave Brady that spurred the majority of other ASA sections to also donate, and IPM is grateful to Dave for his leadership. We identified a low-price plaque company and gave award winners the option to not receive a plaque, so we saved some money on plaques due to awardees declining plaques.

Our account is healthy; our projected starting balance grew from 1/1/2019-2020 and we spent less this year than in years past.

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