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1. Moms Can Be Computing Leaders, Too!; Why we need computing community learning centers designed and lead by mothers

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3626253.3635353  

   Ordóñez, Patricia (March 2024, ACM)

   Women in underserved communities of computing such as women of color, women in poverty, elderly women, women with disabilities, and mothers who prioritize their families over their careers have little to no access to training or career development in a technical field due to lack of childcare, limited availability, lack of education, lack of employment history, transportation, and financial cost of training. Women from these groups often suffer from trauma or imposter syndrome lacking the confidence to believe they are capable of working with technology. Yet, in 2022, women are 91% of the households with children in public housing, which is more than 232 thousand households. Children from these households have very little possibility of social mobility from the bottom to the top quintile. There is a dearth of computer training opportunities for these women. A community computing learning center that is inclusive of and tailored to all mothers and their children would help to fill the void in the US technical workforce and break the cycle of poverty that exists in many low-income communities. Universities can play a critical role in the participatory design of these centers so that they can dually serve as an equity-enabling computer education research center for its faculty and students. Women led the computing revolution in the past and can lead the culturally responsive computing education movement of the future. 

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2. Explaining Income Disparities in Young Children’s Development: The Role of Community Contexts and Family Processes

   Coley, R. L. (January 2019, Early childhood research quarterly)

   null (Ed.)

   Growing economic disparities and the increased sorting of families into economically segregated communities have heightened the need to clearly delineate pathways through which family income promotes children’s development. Combining hypotheses from investment and stress theories, we developed and tested a multi-context and cross-domain conceptual model assessing how community and family contexts mediate links between family income and children’s cognitive and behavioral skills at kindergarten entry. We drew data on family income, parenting processes, and child functioning from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study– Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; N ≈ 10,650), following children from infancy through age 5. We used Geographic Information Systems technology to create and validate community measures using administrative data from the Economic Census, Decennial Census, National Center of Education Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigations, and Environmental Protection Agency, which were then linked to each child in the ECLS-B. Using structural equation modeling, our analyses revealed three primary lessons. First, lower-income children have limited access to community educational and cultural resources and heightened exposure to community stressors including concentrated disadvantage and violent crime. Second, these community features are associated with parenting processes, such that parent-child interactions tend to be less stimulating and supportive and more punitive in communities with fewer resources and heightened stressors. And third, community and family contexts together mediate connections between family income and children’s cognitive and behavioral functioning. Results, albeit showing small effect sizes, provide a more complex, multi-contextual view than prior research, delineating the role of both resources and stressors at community and family levels in explaining income disparities in young children’s developmental success. 

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3. Shodagor women cooperate across domains of work and childcare to solve an adaptive problem

   https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0433  

   Starkweather, K. E.; Reynolds, A. Z.; Zohora, F.; Alam, N. (January 2023, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)

   Across human societies, women's economic production and their contributions to childcare are critical in supporting reproductive fitness for themselves, their spouses and children. Yet, the necessity of performing both work and childcare tasks presents women with an adaptive problem in which they must determine how best to allocate their time and energy between these tasks. Women often use cooperative relationships with alloparents to solve this problem, but whether or not women cooperate across different domains (e.g. work and childcare) to access alloparents remains relatively under-explored. Using social network data collected with Shodagor households in Bangladesh, we show that women who need childcare help in order to work draw on cooperative work partners as potential alloparents, and that all women rely heavily on kin, but not reciprocal cooperation for childcare help. These results indicate that Shodagor women strategize to create work and childcare relationships in ways that help solve the adaptive problem they face. We discuss the implications of our results and the example provided by Shodagor women for a broader understanding of women's cooperative relationships, including the importance of socio-ecological circumstances and gendered divisions of labour in shaping women's cooperative strategies.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives’. 

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4. Disparities in Educational Access in the Time of COVID: Evidence From a Nationally Representative Panel of American Families

   https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211041350  

   Haderlein, Shira_K; Saavedra, Anna_Rosefsky; Polikoff, Morgan_S; Silver, Daniel; Rapaport, Amie; Garland, Marshall (August 2021, AERA Open)

   We use data collected between April 2020 and March 2021 from the Understanding America Survey, a nationally representative internet panel of approximately 1,450 households with school-age children, to document the access of American households to K–12 education during the COVID-19 crisis. We also explore disparities by parent race/ethnicity, income, urbanicity, partisanship, and grade level (i.e., elementary school vs. middle/high school). Results shed light on the vectors of inequality that occurred throughout the pandemic in access to technology, instruction, services (e.g., free and reduced-price meals), and in-person learning opportunities. Our work highlights the equity implications of the pandemic and suggests the importance of encouraging widespread in-person learning opportunities and attendance by the beginning of the 2021–2022 school year for addressing COVID-19’s educational effects. 

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5. Characterizing equitable access to grocery stores during disasters using location-based data

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23532-y  

   Esmalian, Amir; Coleman, Natalie; Yuan, Faxi; Xiao, Xin; Mostafavi, Ali (December 2022, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract Natural hazards cause disruptions in access to critical facilities, such as grocery stores, impeding residents’ ability to prepare for and cope with hardships during the disaster and recovery; however, disrupted access to critical facilities is not equal for all residents of a community. In this study, we examine disparate access to grocery stores in the context of the 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris County, Texas. We utilized high-resolution location-based datasets in implementing spatial network analysis and dynamic clustering techniques to uncover the overall disparate access to grocery stores for socially vulnerable populations during different phases of the disaster. Three access indicators are examined using network-centric measures: number of unique stores visited, average trip time to stores, and average distance to stores. These access indicators help us capture three dimensions of access: redundancy , rapidity , and proximity . The findings show the insufficiency of focusing merely on the distributional factors, such as location in a food desert and number of facilities, to capture the disparities in access, especially during the preparation and impact/short-term recovery periods. Furthermore, the characterization of access by considering combinations of access indicators reveals that flooding disproportionally affects socially vulnerable populations. High-income areas have better access during the preparation period as they are able to visit a greater number of stores and commute farther distances to obtain supplies. The conclusions of this study have important implications for urban development (facility distribution), emergency management, and resource allocation by identifying areas most vulnerable to disproportionate access impacts using more equity-focused and data-driven approaches. 

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