A sociological study of the effects of race, gender, and class – and combinations thereof – have on wage difference and economic restructuring. You won’t want to read this unless you have an interest or background in particularly sociological methodologies of economic inequality and public policy. In this sense, it is a groundbreaking study of the material conditions of intersectionality. For me, quantitative analysis and pages of graphs and tables scrambled my mind, but the central arguments are crystal clear: recent structural trends affect different groups in vastly different and often overlooked ways. Her focus is explicitly the US, with firm case studies of postindustrial Dallas, industrial Detroit, immigrant Miami and high-tech St. Louis. She finds that these cities differ more in terms of group-specific patterns of inequality, rather than overall levels of inequality. For example, wage earnings by gender may be relatively equal in one city, but this may mean that wage equality by race may be very low. Statistics may show a small wage gap between women and men in one city, but wage inequality among women may be higher as a result. Looking at different configurations of class, gender, and race is therefore vital.
Elisabeth Murray 