Research from two new issues of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences has recently received significant media attention. Research from an article by issue editors James McCann and Michael Jones-Correa in “Immigrants Inside Politics/Outside Citizenship” was featured in the Nation and on the Leonard Lopate Show in late August. In their article, McCann and Jones-Correa discuss the ways that undocumented immigrants influence politics, despite being unable to vote. Outside of the ballot box, non-citizens are still able to participate in community organizing, sign petitions, and shape the political beliefs of family members who are eligible to vote. As the Nation put it, “Surveys show that children of the undocumented, compared with children of immigrants with legal status, display higher rates of political engagement, which is associated with growing up in a home dealing daily with the social consequences of the border.”

New articles in FiveThirtyEight, New York magazine, and Slate on the persistent gender wage gap profiles the research in the latest RSF issue “A Half Century of Change in the Lives of American Women,” edited by Martha J. Bailey and Thomas A. DiPrete. In their introduction, Bailey and DiPrete outline some of the causes of this longstanding inequality, including the fact that wage growth over the last few decades has been highest for people working long hours, who tend disproportionately to be men. Other articles in the issue address the increase in women entering STEM fields, the disappearance of a “motherhood penalty” for highly educated women, and how women’s participation in the labor force continually both shapes and is shaped by their roles within their families. The issue is currently available in full from RSF.

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