Inequality Final Paper

Law Review Article

University of Michigan-Dearborn

Leila Bazzi

3/20/19

Article Analysis

The title of the article is “The Gender Wage Gap and Domestic Violence”. The author of the article is Anna Aizer. Also, the name of the Law Review in which the source was published is called, American Economic Review. The source is relevant since it was published in the year 2010. Furthermore, this is a dynamic topic that changes with time. Therefore, it is essential to use recent articles to ensure that the latest trends in the gender wage gap and domestic violence are captured. The article has not been updated in the last nine years. As mentioned before, the gender wage gap and domestic violence are sensitive topics that require the most current, up-to-date information. As a result, I would need sources that were published in the last nine years to make the information relevant and feasible.

The authority of the article is excellent. The author of the article is Anna Aizer, a renowned author who has published several articles that relate to issues that affect women in the United States of America and other parts of the world. Importantly, the author is a Ph.D. holder in three different fields; organizational behavior, human psychology, and leadership. The qualifications and experience of the author make the source credible and reliable. Notably, her article is retrieved from one of the most legit and trustable websites, National Center for Biotechnology Information. The website URL ends in “.gov”, meaning this site is exclusively owned and operated by the government.

The government website does not give information that has been verified by different agencies and scholars. Therefore, anyone reading the article should not doubt about biasness or misleading information. In many cases, students are warned about information obtained from Wikipedia and blog sites; this is not the case here. I selected this article due to my natural interest on domestic violence which goes hand-in-hand with my topic, the gender wage gap. I think this article is appropriate for writing a paper based on credible university-level research due to the mere fact that it was found on a site operated by the U.S government. With that being said, the article’s information is credible enough to rely on.

Moreover, the information and claims that the article provides are supported by multiple citations and evidence. For instance, as stated, “disadvantaged women face much higher risks of abuse. Women with annual income below $10,000 report rates of domestic violence five times greater than those with annual income above $30,000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1994).” In this statistic, the author supports the claim by citing and directing the reader to the secondary source she used. Furthermore, there are several examples that the article provides to drive her point home as well as prove the reliability of the source. In a nutshell, I would say that both the author and the publisher are not biased. They use an academic convention language to support their argument to win the trust of the reader.

Summary of the Article

The article discusses the gender wage gap and domestic violence. The author claims that domestic violence mostly affects poor women. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of gender gap wage on domestic violence in the US (Aizer, 2010). According to the author’s hypothesis, “the increase in women’s income produces a corresponding decrease in domestic violence” (Aizer, 2010). However, the vice-versa is not true: the increase in men’s income escalates domestic violence in the United States of America. The study took a qualitative approach where the secondary sources were used to examine the problem at hand. According to the results, the reduction in the gender wage gap has a positive impact on domestic violence (Aizer, 2010). Over the last thirteen years, the number of domestic violence has significantly reduced due to new policies that have enacted to reduce the gender wage gap. The results of the study support the hypothesis formulated by the author.

References

Aizer, A. (2010). The gender wage gap and domestic violence. American Economic Review, 100(4), 1847-59.

Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1994. “Violence Between Intimates.” Selected Findings NCJ- 149259.