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Recent Scientific Accomplishments Much of Segal’s research focuses on military manpower, and on the demography of the American military. In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Michigan he has documented trends in military enlistment, demonstrated the relationship between propensity to serve and actual enlistment, and shown how these trends and relationship vary by gender and by race and ethnicity (Armed Forces & Society and Military Psychology). Most recently he has studied the declining recruitment trend among African-Americans, and the degree to which this has been offset by increasing Hispanic recruitment. He has also analyzed the effects of military service on subsequent civilian status attainment, and demonstrated that while veterans of World War II benefited from their service relative to their peers who did not serve (a relationship that was especially true for African-American men), this was not true for veterans of the Vietnam War or the current all-volunteer force. Much less is known about the effects of military service on the attainment of women, but recent research shows that for women veterans of the volunteer force, white women incur a cost to service, while minority women do not (Armed Forces & Society). His research in this area has highlighted the methodological issues of the U.S. Census not asking questions about military service of women prior to 1980, despite the fact that large numbers of women served in World War II. Related to this is the fact that the Census under-enumerated male World War II veterans in 1950—the first postwar census. More generally, he has shown that many federal and academic survey programs continue the conscription-era practice of defining military personnel as an institutionalized population rather than the labor force (Race, Gender, and Class). Segal summarizes a decade of his work on the demography of the military in his 2004 Population Reference Bureau Population Bulletin entitled “America’s Military Population?co-authored with Mady Segal. During the last decade, Segal and his colleagues in the Center for Research on Military Organization have received three contracts from the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, each in excess of one million dollars, to study Social and Cultural Dynamics of American Military Organization (1995-2000), Social Structures Affecting Army Performance (2000-2004), and Social Structure, Social Systems, and Social Networks (2004-2008). Segal has been focusing increasingly on the demography of the military and its ramifications on civilian labor force statistics. Since the uniformed military is the largest single employer in the country, particularly for male African-American high school graduates, this has led to errors in estimating Black-White differential in unemployment and in earnings in the civilian sector. While several authors have suggested that the gap between black male earnings and white male earnings has been affected by low income black men being differentially removed from labor force statistics because of increased incarceration rates, Segal new work concentrates on an offsetting affect. Since the volunteer army was adopted, black men make up an increasing fraction of the armed services. Since soldiers must be high school graduates and display competency of standardized tests, Segal argues that the increase in black men in the military has lowered (not raised) the average ability of the black civilian labor force, relative to white men. His preliminary results show that part of the increasing wage gap of black vs. white men over the 1980s was due to the differential change in the composition of the white and black civilian labor force. | ||||||||
Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743